When Messiaen was composing his great opera Saint François d’Assise, he was warned that the angels wouldn’t be as airy and mystical as he was imagining them, even if accompanied by colorful lights and smoke machines on the stage.
Indeed, Messiaen’s angels might only be imagined when listening to a recording of the opera on a rainy night with your eyes shut. Then your imagination might achieve sufficient distance to see these angels as they appear in Dante: terrifying figures enraptured by a high vision of love.
But on stage, they are too terrestrial, and often not too slender: dumpy representatives that mock the high inspiration that conceived them.
Sometimes the staging aspires toward the heavens:
And sometimes not:
The idealistic Chinese author, Lu Xun, makes a similar observation in his short story “Village Opera.”
“The wheezes,” he writes, “made me realize that this opera was not for me.”
The character in this story “said goodbye to Chinese opera that night, never to think about it again” until he read a Japanese book that made the following observation:
“Chinese opera is full of gongs unformulated in my mind.”
The imagination asks for what reality cannot give.
This is why a novel has more imaginative force than the movie version, and why an animation of Sleeping Beauty has more imaginative power than a live-action depiction.
Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.