Glass took an unusual approach to this opera: He stripped all audio from the movie and treated it like a silent film, setting the words of the screenplay to music and replacing Georges Auric’s beautiful original score with his own. And, as in the Bluebeard myth, you can’t help wondering what might be hidden behind a door in the Beast’s chateau.

It’s human conflict at the heart of the story, though, with elements of “Cinderella” in the form of Beauty’s two awful sisters, who treat her like a servant, and of King Lear in that it’s Beauty who truly loves their father. OP’s staging: the original 1946 Cocteau film, above Hadleigh Adams and Vanessa Becerra, above Nicole Paiement at the podium | Credit: Cory Weaver Human arms extend and retract wall sconces, candles are lit with no human intervention, stone statues have living eyes, a pearl necklace held by the wrong person turns to a rope of hair, tears become diamonds. Cocteau’s black-and-white film features memorable performances from Josette Day as Beauty and Jean Marais as the Beast, as well as magical special effects. This year, at the request of Glass himself, it’s the great fairy tale La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast). Opera Parallèle has made a project of staging the trio, starting with Orphée in 2011 and continuing in 2017 with Les Enfants Terribles. Between 19, Glass created three operas based on films of the French auteur Jean Cocteau. Somerset Maugham play and on William Wyler’s film of the same name.īut Philip Glass got there first. Paul Moravec and Terry Teachout’s The Letter is based on a W. Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell’s Silent Night originated with the film Joyeux No ël, and the composer’s forthcoming The Hours comes from the film and novel of the same name (and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.

Hadleigh Adams as the Beast in Opera Parallèle’s La Belle et la B ête | Credit: Cory Weaverįilm-to-opera adaptations, or book-to-film-to-opera adaptations, have become common over the last 20 years or so.

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