“Three Tales” by Steve Reich is one of the most beautiful pieces of contemporary music written in the last two decades. It’s among Reich’s best works as well.
I generally don’t like operas and yet “Three Tales” is classified as a video opera — the visual accompanyment was created by Reich’s wife Beryl Korot. The piece is wonderful though, both in tone and timbre. And the complete lack of arias sung by pompous baritones and tenors certainly helps.
The opera is divided in three movements, each detailing a scientific event of the 20th century. The first part deals with the Hindenburg Zeppelin and the second about the American nuclear test on the Bikini atoll during the fifties.
The last movement is my favourite, an analysis of cloning, genes and the fusing of man and machine. You can have a different opinion than Reich on the matter (I certainly do), voiced by rabbi Steinsaltz and evident by the fact the previous acts of the opera end in disaster. But the movement itself is magnificent. This is largely due to the fact that the music follows the characteristic voice melody of the people Reich and Korot interviewed — inluding key scientists like Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks. But there’s something else, a sense of constant tension, of danger even. Nico Muhly, a composer and protégé of Philip Glass, explains the feeling than I’ll be able to:
Listen to how outrageous the choral harmonies are on the slow chords behind the active snare drum anxiety in the foreground: “Here we are, under the tree again!”
[…]
As is his wont, Steve Reich ends it in this weird modified six-four inversion, so you get the simultaneous feeling of resolution and suspense. This is a very effective technique for creating precisely the emotional ambiguities that works like Three Tales rely on.
*= Richard Dawkins says the following in “Three Tales”, which corroborates with my views on cloning and genetic engineering:
“Once upon a time there was carbon based life, and it gave over to silicon based life.
I don’t view the prospect, with equanimity maybe I’m just sentimental.”Richard Dawkins, “Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality”, Three Tales Libretto, 2003