Working

in

the

fourth

dimension:

William

Kentridge's

latest

opera

arrives

at

Glynbourne

The artist William Kentridge has long described his practice as "essentially one of drawing" and his approach to directing an opera is no different. But if putting brush to paper is about working in two dimensions, staging an opera, he reckons, is about working in four. The first three are the "extraordinary canvas" that is the stage. The fourth is "the passage of time".

This summer he directs Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex, a five-act opera first performed in Mantua in 1607, that ends with Apollo promising Orpheus both immortal life and Eurydice's eternal presence "in the sun and stars". It is a tantalising prospect.

"So, we make this four-dimensional drawing," Kentridge explains. "And the structure of this drawing is given by the music and the libretto of the opera. This combination of music, text and spectacle acknowledges and celebrates the form and the excess ofsensory experience that opera always involves. It is about there being too much to see and experience that is important."

In other words, you can forget realism. Opera, as he envisages it, is about sensory overload, the perfect synthesis of music, drama and visuals for which Richard Wagner coined the word Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.