We have already written about Harry Partch on these pages. A very personal artist, between the historical and contemporary 20th century (1901-1974), able of conceiving and building his own instrumentation which is not based on equal temperament. For this reason Partch has always been isolated, but nevertheless he was always present to himself and aware of his being a composer (remember that during the great depression he wandered like a homeless and yet was able to publish a little magazine entitled Bitter Music). Partch has always carried out his challenge to current aesthetics, whatever it was.

With his music, not tonal, not atonal, but rather completely external to this dualism, (developing that purely American attitude that we already find in Ives and others), Harry Partch reaches levels of great power, as in this last work from 1965 -66, performed only once while he was still alive.

Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual Of Dream And Delusion, for 25 instruments (never played all together), 4 singers and 6 actors/dancers/mimes, combines a Japanese drama in the first act with an African farce in the second, realizing that concept of total theater that integrates music, dance, scenic art and ritual that has always been important for the author.

The opera does not have a real libretto, in the narrative sense of European opera. All the action is danced and/or mimed.
In Partch’s words, the first act is essentially an exit from the eternal cycle of birth and death represented by the pilgrimage of a warrior in search of a sacred place in which to serve penance for a murder, while the murdered appears in the drama as ghost, first to relive and make his killer relive the torment of the murder, finally finding reconciliation with death in the words “Pray for me!”.
The second act is instead a reconciliation with life that passes through the dispute, born from a misunderstanding, between a deaf hobo and an old woman looking for her lost son. In the end, the two are dragged in front of a confused, deaf and almost blind judge who, misunderstanding himself, mistakes them for husband and wife and orders them to return home, while the choir sings an ironic hymn in unison (“How could we go forward without justice?”) and the dispute dissolves into the absurdity of the situation.
The opera ends with the same invocation as the finale of the first act (“Pray for me, again”), launched from off stage.

Look at the original video here