Date: 1983 Total Running Time: 210:00 (Seven half-hour episodes)
Commissioned for television by The Kitchen in 1978, Perfect Lives is a collaborative work designed by Robert Ashley to present new music to the public through the medium of television. Written for three solo voices and solo piano synchronized with prerecorded orchestral beds, Perfect Lives features the keyboard inventions of "Blue" Gene Tyranny and the singing of Jill Kroesen and David Van Tieghem in a visual treatment created by television innovator John Sanborn.
At its center is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980's update of the mythology of small town America. Perfect Lives is a labyrinth populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians, "R," the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, "The World's Greatest Piano Player." They have come to a small town in the Midwest to entertain at The Perfect Lives Lounge. As Robert Ashley describes in the opera synopsis, "they fall in with two locals to commit the perfect crime, a metaphor for something philosophical: in this case, to remove a sizable amount of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let 'the whole world know that it is missing.'" The eloping couple, Gwyn and Ed, the old people at the home, the sheriff Will and his wife Ida finally unravel the mystery, while Isolde, watches the celebration of the changing of the light at sundown from the doorway of her mother's hous. These are some of the characters who journey through the seven episodes of the opera. Derived from a colloquial idiom, Perfect Lives transforms familiar material into an elaborate metaphor for the rebirth of the human soul. It has been called a comic opera about reincarnation.
"The collaborative aspect of the work," says Ashley, "follows principles I have used for many years in search of a new operatic style. The collaborators are given almost absolute freedom to develop characterizations from the textual and musical materials I provide. The musical and visual materials are coordinated through Templates, a term I have come to use to describe the subjective assignment of emotional values and moods to visual forms and corresponding musical structures. Within the rules defined by the 'templates' the collaborators in all aspects of the work are free to interpret, improvise, invent and superimpose characteristics of their own artistic styles onto the texture of the work. In essence, the collaborators become characters in the opera at a deeper level than the illusionistic characters who appear on stage."
Référence: http://www.panix.com/~kitchen/MovieCatalog/Titles/PerfectLives.html