ABSTRACT
The straightforward synchronization processes that have led to a ventriloquial relationship between the live singing voice and the movie characters in La Belle et la Bête are followed by more complex body–voice de-synchronization procedures used in Writing to Vermeer. 1 Applying “new” voices and music to ready-made existing images (in the case of Glass’s piece to the moving images of Cocteau’s film) is a procedure that plays an important role in Writing to Vermeer, too. In this postopera, the images that are being operatized are the paintings of Johannes Vermeer (1632–75). They get their fictional textual, sonorous, musical, and vocal dimensions when the situations that Vermeer painted are re-enacted, envoiced, and multiplied on stage. 2 The silent world of baroque painting becomes a Vermeerian multimedia singing tableau vivant—the site of a projected written text, female singing voices, triplicate singing/dancing figures, and music in which video, dance, and opera have been put together in dynamic co-existence, framed by the simulation of female figures and the situations represented in Vermeer’s paintings.
