From metoperafamily.org:

Gerard Mortier, New York City Opera’s general-manager and artistic-director designate, announced today that the company has commissioned Philip Glass to compose a new opera based on the life of Walt Disney. The opera, titled The Perfect American, is scheduled to open the City Opera’s 2012-13 season, and will honor Philip Glass’s seventy-fifth birthday.

Based on Peter Stephan Jungk’s novel Der König von Amerika, in which a fictional Austrian cartoonist recounts the unseemly final months of Walt Disney’s life, The Perfect American will be staged in a production by the Improbable theater company, which took part in the Metropolitan Opera’s recent presentation of Glass’s earlier opera Satyagraha. The Perfect American will be Glass’s twenty-fourth opera.

“The story of the last days of Walt Disney, American icon and creator of perhaps the most pervasive fantasy world on our planet, is surprisingly gripping and at times disturbing,” Glass said in a statement issued today by City Opera. “But, on the face of it, how could it be anything else? The pulse of his life has to be the pulse of our own American culture. And, like other aspects of life here, it is unimaginable, alarming, and truly frightening. I am looking forward to beginning these collaborations with Gerard Mortier at the New York City Opera.”

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