IRMA - An Opera

“For those that love the genre, this is a tour de force.” Option (USA)

The general score of IRMA comes from treated fragments of a Victorian novel, A Human Document, by W.H.Mallock. ln that I originally bought this book for threepence in 1966, IRMA is thus, authentically, a threepenny opera. IRMA was composed in 1969, completed in fact on the day a man first walked on the moon. It was first published in a small French avant-garde review (QU; ed. Henri Chopin) in 1970. The score exists as an autonomous artwork and is in the Altmenn Museum in Vaduz, Leichtenstein. In a more recent screenprint version it has been internationally exhibited and will be featured in a forthcoming show, Art as Word and Music, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1989. The score takes the form of a large sheet with prose directions (each a treated fragment of the novel) for the libretto, the mise en scene and the sound vocabulary of the piece, together with instructions, performance suggestions and a group of melodies. It is to be thought of as the surviving elements of a lost work whose performance tradition is unknown. Realisation of the opera involves the ordering and piecing together of these fragments to a performable work; as an archa!ologist might reconstruct a possible coherent pot from scattered shards.