The Wall is one of the giants in the 'Pink Floyd' discography (personally, my favorite is Wish You Were Here, but hey, that’s just me). The Floyd songs that play on the radio are most often tracks from this album.
It was adapted into a movie three years after its release, and now it’s getting adapted again, but this time, into…wait for it…an OPERA.
Technically speaking, it was already a “rock opera”, which means that the songs all relate to a common theme or story, and are often released as a conceptual album. And evidently, rock opera and opera are similar in that music is the driving force behind telling the story. The Wall has been telling its story musically since 1979, it just hadn’t made it to the stage in quite this form until now.
According to Jim Farber, the composer for this project, Julien Bilodeau, “rip[ped] all the rock out of The Wall.” This is something that Roger Waters, in an interview with Rolling Stone, said he was fine with–he “did not want to have anything to do with” the production of the music because after listening to a sample, he was impressed and moved by the work done, which is more than can be said for the movie adaptation.
This opera adaptation is certainly intriguing because “rock” is definitely the category that I would place 'Pink Floyd' in. The clip below is some of the music from the opera and it is unrecognizable though compelling (and haunting and dark).
Something that I hadn’t realized is that Roger Waters is himself a fan of opera, and he has written his own before, so it’s intriguing to me that he did not adapt this himself. He was reluctant to the idea of The Wall getting developed into an opera at first, though, and was only convinced once he had heard what Bilodeau had crafted, so I suppose that clears that up.
Its world premier was March 11th, and thus far it appears to have been receiving mixed reviews. Regardless, its relevance is unfortunately glaringly obvious here in the States, though I hate to compare the troubling plans of ignorance with music I respect. In any case, I am happy to see that 'Pink Floyd' is still appreciated, though it is perhaps worrisome that the need for cautions against alienating oneself is still present.
Waters had something beautiful to say about alienation in the Rolling Stone interview. In response to a question about when his own alienation went away, he said:
“As we reject Trumpism and stop building walls and lobbing bombs over them at brown people, we discover the transcendental nature of love, whether it's a romantic love for a woman or a man or for somebody else, or an experience of an attachment to empathy that is so powerful that normally we only experience in a romantic arena. It's the coup de foudre, it's lightning struck by the thunderbolt, and if we're lucky, it opens us up to the idea that we can feel empathy for all others.”
With that being said, the opera comes to the U.S. at the Cincinnati Opera in 2018. Tickets aren’t available yet, but there is an option to get email updates about it (though I have a feeling they will be quite pricey).
