Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities (2013) is an opera by Christopher Cerrone, composer and librettist, inspired by Calvino's Le Città Invisibili, published in 1972.

The experience is unusual. The stage is the historic Union Station in Los Angeles. There is no separation between the instrumentalists, dancers, singers, and the audience: everyone wanders around the station, and the audience can listen to the music from anywhere, equipped with wireless headphones (the main sponsor is Sennheiser). And I must say that setting what, even if only superficially, is a travel story in a place dedicated to travel is a wonderful idea.

Because the opera tells, precisely, Marco Polo's tale to Kublai Khan. His travels and the fabulous cities he saw: some real, others figment of the imagination. A city of desire, of signs, and of memory.

The music is simple, almost minimalist, with that typical American tone that, thanks to repetition, cancels out tonal drama to become almost drone music (but you can also hear the clear influence of Escalator Over The Hill). You can listen to a portion of it in the player below, but the best way to get an idea is to go to the dedicated page where you can watch high-resolution videos, shot in Union Station, with very good audio.

Notes from the author's website:

The music of Invisible Cities is the result of my first collision with Calvino’s extraordinary novel. For years I had been unable to bridge categories of music, thinking that a work could be either lyrical or conceptually rigorous, but not both. Calvino’s novel, however, is both a tightly structured mathematical work, yet also opens with the gorgeous line:

“In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.”

After reading that sentence—so pregnant with meaning, lyricism, mood—I immediately began composing. I imagined the sound of a unearthly resonant and gong-like prepared piano, the ringing of bells, and wind players gently blowing air through their instruments. All of this would support a lyrical and deep voiced Kublai Khan who is slow moving and sings with gravitas. I imagined there would be two women, two high sopranos, who always sing together in harmony: they would be the musical personification of the cities that pervade the novel. And of course, our Italian explorer would be a tenor, light and quick moving, melismatic, and deft.

As with Calvino, there are many formally derived components to my opera. The orchestra is split into two (left and right) halves which alternate melodies to create the whole. The left part is associated Marco Polo, the right is associated with Kublai Khan. And the opera is structured as formally as the novel, always alternating Polo and the Khan’s conversations with Polo’s stories of le città.

To borrow a term from of one of Calvino’s favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, Invisible Cities is a garden of forking paths. As the work progresses, you might find yourself wandering back to the same place in Union Station again and again only to find new things happening each time. In the same way, the same few musical ideas of Invisible Cities are revisited again and again, just from vastly different perspectives. As we grow and evolve, the same objects in our lives can acquire such different meanings. That above else governs what Invisible Cities is about: how our memories change as we get older, how our map of the world gets larger, and how our past is always being changed by our ever-shifting present.

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