Walls of Glass

Walls of Glass is an opera project by Thomas Nguyen with a libretto by Lancelot Hamelin. This opera portrays two couples of New York intellectuals and artists who take part in a neuroscientific experiment blending dreams and politics, echoing the dreams collected in Charlotte Beradt’s book The Third Reich of Dreams. But, this experiment will soon disrupt the lives of its participants… Indeed, dreams gathered under Nazism begin to resonate in uncanny ways with the rise to power of a “post-truth” cult rooted in dreams.

The libretto is conceived as a contemporary reflection, at a time of new technologies and fake news, on Charlotte Beradt’s book The Third Reich of Dreams. Between 1933 and 1939, this young journalist and activist collected accounts of dreams and nightmares in Berlin and compiled them into a book: The Third Reich of Dreams. These dream narratives bear indirect witness to the rise of Nazism and to the presence of the unconscious within political life.

To compose the score of the opera Walls of Glass, Thomas Nguyen seeks to question from one extreme to another the impact of music on our unconscious: in a positive way; or in a negative way, when music becomes a tool of manipulation, propaganda and anguish. The score could be based on fairly simple compositional principles: calm, soothing atmosphere, static sound structures, melodic lines, regular tempi, binary rhythms and polyrhythms, harmonic distortions, accumulation of repetitive formulas. And also, on more complex principles inspired by research carried out on synesthesia: correspondence between musical notes-scales-modes, colours, tastes and smells. This compositional approach will be based on existing writings, including those of the composer Olivier Messiaen and of the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. A recurring refrain will run through the opera, like a sort of repetitive music box, a music of dreams acting upon the unconscious. Certain variations of this melody could be generated by AI, creating an illusion, a disturbance, a deception in what is being heard.

The Opera is a place of exploration and transformation, of transgression and the crossing disciplines. Walls of Glass is therefore conceived as a subjective sound and visual experience, which intensely stimulates the unconscious through its emotional and philosophical content.