Philip Glass' Rescore of Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête" Performed Live to the Film in Santa Barbara This Wednesday

One of the most celebrated and unique works in Philip Glass’ recent career, his live interpretation of Jean Cocteau’s masterpieceLa Belle et la Bête is also his most deeply personal and romantic. For this production, Glass removed the film’s soundtrack and replaced it with his own musical score played live by the Philip Glass Ensemble. The dialogue is also performed live by the vocalists who are synchronized with the actors in the film. This mythical, lush and sweeping love story is a tale for the ages.

Oh wow. I would LOVE to see/hear this! Although Beauty and the Beast isn't my absolute favorite fairy tale of all time, and I pick and choose my opera viewing rather carefully, I'd go to this performance in a heartbeat. Cocteau's film is one of my absolute favorites ever (I have, I think four? five? slightly different presentations of it... and I can't get rid of a single one) and seeing/hearing the different score and vocal track, inspired by the film and made for the film, to match mood, action and dialogue and meant to be heard ONLY as you see the film (ie it's not supposed to be a separate work) and to hear it being played and sung LIVE? Well, that's just.. goose bump worthy.

From The Independent:

“No one had ever done this before: take a talking film, turn off the soundtrack, and create a new one from start to finish,” said Michael Riesman, who has been part of the project since its inception in 1995. He will conduct the Philip Glass Ensemble in a live performance of the score — accompanied by the film, of course — this Wednesday at the Granada Theatre. 

The film is the 1946 classic La belle et la bête, directed by Jean Cocteau — a genius whose work Glass found continually inspiring. As Riesman noted in a recent interview, the composer turned one Cocteau screenplay into a more conventional opera and another into a ballet/opera. For this one, he decided to overlay new music onto the ethereal imagery. 

“It was quite a complicated process,” Riesman recalled. “[After we received the first draft of the score] we found there were lots of problems. The bed of music was okay, but the vocal parts weren’t close enough [to the actors’ dialogue] to be convincing. I thought we needed to at least do as good a job as a badly dubbed film. The right person’s mouth had to be moving!
“Sometimes we shifted the vocal line; in other cases, we threw it back to Philip, who would totally rewrite the section. This went on for weeks. We were already in rehearsals, so it was pretty scary. Fresh pages were coming in daily.” 

However hurried, the results were magnificent. In the New York Times, Allan Kozinn praised the way Glass’s music reflected the film’s “visual and atmospheric touches.” 

Here's a brief video explaining this new production (fresh cast, I believe), premiering this coming Wednesday at The Granada Theater:

Although Philip Glass will not be appearing with The Philip Glass Ensemble for this event in Santa Barbara at The Granada Theater, (at the University of Santa Barbara) Michael Riesman, who has led over one hundred live performances of the score to the film since 1995, will be conducting.

For more information and tickets, please see HERE.

The Disappointed Beautys You Didn't Know About

Greta Garbo is famously reported, on seeing Jean Cocteau's film La Belle et La Bete as saying: "Give me back my Beast!"* (echoing many a woman's response to the transformation).

Well it turns out Cocteau MEANT for the audience to be disappointed!

Josette Day & Jean Marais
behind the scenes ofLa Belle et La Bete (1946)

From an essay by Cocteau included in one of the DVD packages:

“My story would concern itself mainly with the unconscious obstinacy with which women pursue the same type of man, and expose the naivete of the old fairy tales that would have us believe that this type reaches its ideal in conventional good looks. My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage and a future that I summed up in that last sentence of all fairy tales: ‘And they had many children.’”

As one commenter on a review wrote:

If this was Cocteau’s intent, his ending should be judged a success. I certainly felt Belle’s letdown.

I'm going to have to go watch it again (for the 52nd time) with this in mind...

Note: There's a really interesting article/review discussing the ending (how let down we are and why) HERE. Although it's all interesting (of course!) the ending is discussed in the second half.

In a related bit of news, a video interview was posted yesterday (August 19) by Stitch Kingdom, taken during D23's tribute to Glen Keane, (Disney veteran and the supervising animator for Disney's Beauty & the Beast) and some trivia emerged that will fascinate fairy tale folks.

While we know Disney referenced Cocteau's version quite a bit while in development, there's one thing the films had in common that likely the animators (and viewers) didn't know at the time (especially as Cocteau's essay referencing his intent with the ending, wasn't widely available then): it's just come to light that at least one key creative knew that viewers - and Belle - would most likely be disappointed with the transformation. There was even a plan to reference that.

Disney meets Cocteau by ~TaijaVigilia

When questioned on the popular rumor that The Beast's name was really Prince Adam, Mr. Keane, while not outright denying it, said this:

‘I never referred to him as anything but Beast,’ he answered. ‘To me he’s always been Beast. I always just believed that Belle called him Beast from the moment that he transformed… so whatever his name was before is not important because he was called Beast after that.’ Keane also went on to add, ‘matter of fact, when he changed into the prince, I knew everybody was going to be disappointed by that, because they fall in love with the beast.’ 

Keane also told us about his plans for keeping the memory of Beast alive even after the transformation. ‘We recorded a line when we were actually recording Robby Benson and Paige O’Hara as they were at that scene where they’re dancing,’ he told us. ‘I wanted there to be this moment where as she’s now dancing with her handsome prince, something’s missing, and she just says, “do you think you can grow a beard?” So we recorded that — we should’ve put it in there — I’m still hoping someday we still put it in there.’

Heh. Wouldn't that be awesome?

You can see the full interview from Stitch Kingdom HERE.

*By the way, critics agree this is likely true and not just an urban legend.