By Josef Woodard | Published August 2025
Working diligently in his own expressive margin zone, the impossible-to-categorize Anthony Braxton’s sweeping Trillium Opera Complex — birthed in the ’80s — has reached a new apex with the release of a powerful live and studio recording of his epic, four-hour Trillium X (PMP; 453:37). Although this is the sixth opera in his ongoing cycle, the precise and persuasive realization of Trillium X by the Prague Music Performance Orchestra (PMP), conducted by longtime Braxton ally Roland Dahinden, marks a triumphant moment.
In time for Braxton’s 80th birthday, a special eight-CD box includes both the 2023 world premiere in Prague and a studio recording made in Darmstadt, Germany. The document is the finest manifestation yet of Braxton’s operatic adventure, a decade after he finished writing the opera in 2014.
Scale matters here. Braxton follows the example of his vast canvas-making heroes Richard Wagner, of the four-opera Ring Cycle fame, and Stockhausen, whose bigger-is-better Licht opera series clocked in at 29 hours. For audiences, committing to the full experience of X can be transformative. With the right mind frame, the listener’s sum experience of Braxton’s epic becomes a time- and mind-expanding hypnotic realm, writ large.
Musically, X operates in a postmodern language in between tonality and atonality, in a style loosely inspired by serialist Alban Berg, whose operas Wozzeck and Lulu were part of Braxton’s obsession with opera around age 40. In X, the uniformly impressive and committed singers often deliver their serpentine texts in a kind of singspiel speech-song format. The general ambience of intellectual and cerebral intensity is periodically punctuated by comic relief dollops of common or bizarre speech: “if this is a sheep, I’m George Washington,” “wassup, babe!?” and “in the future, everyone will love the bagpipe industry … I’m open to radiance, but first things first.”
Insider winks also appear, as with the well-placed phrase “X marks the spot,” “all things considered, I think the director did a great job” and “what we have here is a case of idiomatic certainty.” Braxton’s underrated sense of humor is intact and slyly deployed throughout X.
As a narrative structure, X follows a twisting and decidedly non-linear path, with witty asides folded into an elaborate libretto. The “storyline” shapeshifts from a pirate ship at sea, led by captain Helen (expertly sung by Eva Esterkova), to a clash with robot malefactors subverting the financial complex (foreshadowing AI cyber misdeeds?). Act III conveys a triple wedding between bank robbers, and IV slips sideways from the White House warmaking forces to an orgy site. Various meltdowns ensue along the way.
In some ways, the opera’s scheme of blending surreal sci-fi textures, free associative flow, metaphysical language and surprise pop-cultural punchlines evokes such parallels as Robert Heinlein’s classic proto-AI-referential novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Robert Ashley’s wildly experimental and language-playful operas Perfect Lives and Now Eleanor’s Idea. But Braxton’s signature imprint, as music maker and renegade thinker, is never far from the surface.
Jazz, as such, sneaks in from the wings, with a brief saxophonic improv burst early in Act II, the insertion of pianist Hildegard Kleeb performing an extant Braxton composition and, in the “Three Sisters” third act, a sudden appearance of a fleeting, slightly tipsy big band segment. This last recalls the deconstructed big-band adventurism of Braxton’s Creative Orchestra Music project dating back to the 1970s. In another cross-reference, a woozy variation on the “Wedding March” from Lohengrin, closing Act III, tips a tipsy hat to Wagner.
X’s sprawling sensory landscape reaches an oddly graceful endpoint, as an atonal wash of sound eases into a brooding cyclical theme for low strings, passed to a solo clarinet fading into the cosmic sunset. The 21-note theme loops back to the opera’s introduction, akin to the last-to-first sentence framing James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
X is a dream-logical world unto itself, a place to get lost in for a handful of hours, like Wagner, but strictly according to Braxton-ian rules of order and exploration.
