Perfect Lives

Perfect Lives (1984)

An opera for television

Set in the American Midwest, Perfect Lives is “about” bank robbery, cocktail lounges, geriatric love, adolescent elopement, the changing of the light at sundown, et al. One of the definitive text-sound compositions of the late 20th century, it has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s".

Date of release
1984-02-16
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (2)
Runtime
2h 55m
Genres
TV Movie, Music
Director
John Sanborn

Casting

Interesting facts

Perfect Lives is a 1983 television opera in seven episodes by American composer Robert Ashley, directed by John Sanborn. It was released on DVD in 2005, and a book of the libretto as well as an audio recording on cassette (1983) and CD in the U.S.

Background and themes

Among many varying descriptions of the work, Ashley once described Perfect Lives as a "comic opera about reincarnation". Ashley's biographer, Kyle Gann, meanwhile, has stated that it can be called a "performance novel", "if opera raises too many expectations". Perfect Lives has been described as consisting of "digressions about the US landscape and American lives, performed in American vernacular language".

The first and last episodes, "The Park" and "The Backyard", were originally presented on Ashley's 1978 album Private Parts, albeit in a more stripped down form and with accompanying tabla playing.

According to Ashley via Gann, its structure is based on the Bardo Thodol (the Tibetan Book of the Dead), although he intended to model it on Midwestern evangelism as well. The work's further extensions are Atalanta (Acts of God) and Now Eleanor's Idea (the opera followed by the tetralogy, the latter including Improvement, eL/Aficionado, Now Eleanor's Idea and Foreign Experiences), and they are also based on American religions.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended