--- title: Mortal Mouse description: Composer Philip Glass takes on the last days of Walt Disney canonical: https://time.com/archive/6643071/mortal-mouse/ author: Lisa Abend article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2013-02-04T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-31T13:48:57.447Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Mortal Mouse og:description: Composer Philip Glass takes on the last days of Walt Disney og:url: https://time.com/archive/6643071/mortal-mouse/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Mortal Mouse twitter:description: Composer Philip Glass takes on the last days of Walt Disney twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Mortal Mouse > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Lisa Abend](https://time.com/author/lisa-abend/) Feb 4, 2013 5:00 AM UTC by [Lisa Abend](https://time.com/author/lisa-abend/) Feb 4, 2013 5:00 AM UTC As the curtain rises on the perfect American, a man clings, twisted and cowering, to the bars of his hospital bed. Music pulses, and an owl descends–a mere cartoon, but terrifying nonetheless–while a team of artists, almost menacing in their obsequiousness, sketch sets of circles that arrange themselves into a familiar mouselike form. The drawings function as a reveal of sorts: the man in the bed is Walt Disney, and he is dying. “Go away!” he cries. “I drift between knowing what is real and not real.” This is not the Uncle Walt of your childhood. The kindly, avuncular man who introduced The Wonderful World of Disney each Sunday night is still wearing that ever-so-slightly lopsided mustache and a carefully cut suit, but he is now in the grip of existential panic. Crippled with anxiety about his legacy and fighting desperately against his impending death, this is a Disney who, after a lifetime spent creating illusions, finds himself no longer able to stave off reality. That tension, and the tragedy that lies at the heart of America’s self-made mythology, helps explain why Philip Glass, America’s most famous living composer, has written an opera about him. Based on Peter Stephan Jungk’s 2004 historical novel of the same name, The Perfect American premiered at Madrid’s Teatro Real on Jan. 22 and will move to London in June and possibly Los Angeles after that. Teatro Real’s artistic director, Gerard Mortier, says he knew as soon as he read Jungk’s book about the last days of Disney that he wanted Glass to write an opera about it. “Animation is based on the repetition of images,” Mortier says. “Glass’s music is all about the repetition of notes. And his work, like Disney’s, represents a distinctly American way of seeing the world.” Still, it is not the most obvious pairing. Compared with the mainstream appeal of Disney’s cartoons and movies, Glass’s minimalist music is decidedly avant-garde. His best-known work–he has written more than 20 operas and 10 symphonies–is a five-hour plot-free opera about Einstein. Another piece, about Gandhi’s early years, is performed in Sanskrit. Glass’s latest reimagining of an iconic man’s life uses vignettes to depict a Disney who, however great his influence on American culture, was also a union breaker who discriminated against African Americans and women. Yet Glass, who has long supported leftist causes, including Occupy Wall Street, speaks gently of Disney’s unenlightened ideas. “It was a different time. People were more conservative then,” he says. “You have to consider the context.” Political differences aside, there’s no doubt that Glass identifies with his lead character. Both men’s work, after all, sits at the juncture of art and entertainment. Disney included Stravinsky in his soundtrack to Fantasia; Glass has collaborated with David Bowie and Linda Ronstadt, written scores for mainstream films like The Truman Show and still does commercial work, including the tune for a Best Buy ad that aired during last year’s Super Bowl. “The unique thing about American culture is that high and popular culture are closely related,” says Glass. “Disney understood that.” In the scene that ends The Perfect American’s first act, Disney talks to an animatronic Abraham Lincoln, presumably liberated from every kid’s least favorite Disneyland ride. A childhood hero of Disney’s, Abe was immortalized in the theme park in 1965, the year before Disney died of cancer at age 65\. “In spite of every obstacle, we made something of ourselves. We changed the world,” he sings to the 16th President, and it is easy to imagine Glass, whose father was an auto mechanic turned radio-repair-shop owner, saying the same. For weeks before The Perfect American premiered, Glass would show up for rehearsals in Madrid, his mass of still-dark curls tucked under a black knit cap, and sit quietly at the front of the orchestra, occasionally sending a note to the percussionist. But if his physical presence was unimposing, his reputation was not. “You know that scene in Night at the Museum when the anthropologist who’s been studying Native Americans all her life gets to meet Sacagawea?” asks Christopher Purves, the baritone who plays Disney. “Having Glass in the room with you is like that.” Before Glass, nearly all serious 20th century music was atonal. “Almost single-handedly, Philip made tonality acceptable again for composers,” says Dennis Russell Davies, director of the Linz Opera in Austria who is also the musical director for The Perfect American. And for all the mesmerizing, elegaic qualities of Glass’s music, there is firm structure and careful intonation behind it. In The Perfect American, as in his other works, passages in two notes repeat over and over. In Mozart or Haydn, those notes would be the classical equivalent of background music. But Glass brings them to the fore. Says Mortier: “He takes these key elements of Western music and makes you see them anew.” Glass writes every note himself and has assistants transpose them to a computer. (“The door of technology is a heavy one for me to open,” he says wryly.) Still, he understands why the Disney in The Perfect American claims the work created by his army of artists as his own. “Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons understood that art can be mass-produced,” he says. “But Disney beat them to it. He was a visionary about that.” By the end of Disney’s life, even visionary status failed to console him as he watched his name become bigger, as he sings in the opera, than that of Henry Ford, George Westinghouse and poor Howard Johnson. In The Perfect American, Disney rages against the end, squeezing promises from his family to have him cryogenically preserved (a real-life rumor that his relatives have denied) and awakened in a future when there is no threat of death. Even his most enduring creations offer pale solace, with Disney observing that few people will remember him, while everyone will remember Mickey and Donald. Unlike this operatic Disney, Glass admits to no jealousy of his creations. Despite turning 76 on Jan. 31, he is still hard at work. In addition to completing this opera and writing another that will premiere in Linz in April, he found time while he was in Madrid to finish three piano études that had been dogging him for years. But the composer recognizes that he wouldn’t have been able to do the Disney opera earlier in his life. In part that’s because it has only been in the past decade or so that anyone would dare take on the company’s powerful executives. (“They asked to see the libretto, and we said no,” says Glass. “I’ve done my Disney movie–that was Kundun. So they won’t give me another? I don’t care.”) Yet it’s also only now that he thinks he understands what Disney the man, not the corporation, feared so much. “I wouldn’t have known how to do this opera when I was 40,” he says. “Eternity travels up to you at the speed of light. Doing the Disney one now, at my age, has made me much more sympathetic to his attitudes.” In the opera, a rotating scrim upon which animations are projected seemingly as they are drawn conjures Disney’s work without ever using his iconographic mice and ducks–ingenious staging that also deftly skirts copyright infringement. The music, in turn, is pure Glass. Yet in a few instances, like a party where the guests sing a “Happy Birthday” that sounds nothing like the famous song but is still somehow resonant and anthemic, he makes reference to more traditional American genres. And to American artists. At the start of the second act, Warhol strides across the stage in a purple velvet suit seeking to paint Disney’s portrait. In truth, the two men never met; Warhol’s inclusion is the work of novelist Jungk’s imagination. But Glass found himself envisioning Warhol’s primary colors to write music about Disney and says he was struck by the similarities in the two creators. A self-made man who merged high and low culture in his work, Warhol realized the American Dream by forging a uniquely American style of art. The same is true of Disney, who was as much a bully as he was a genius. “What makes this opera interesting,” the composer says, “is that it shows the best of American character–and some of the worst.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6643071/mortal-mouse/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6643071/mortal-mouse/"},"headline":"Mortal Mouse","datePublished":"2013-02-04T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-31T13:48:57.447Z","description":"Composer Philip Glass takes on the last days of Walt Disney","url":"https://time.com/archive/6643071/mortal-mouse/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Lisa Abend","url":"https://time.com/author/lisa-abend/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6643071/mortal-mouse/","name":"Mortal Mouse"}}]}] ```