The Improbable theater company's
production of Philip Glass's
"Satyagraha," which opened at the Metropolitan
Opera on Friday night, represents the kind of work the Met should be
doing. It is an important revival of a major recent piece. It is a significant
work of theater. And it provides an all too rare demonstration of the fact that
new opera can indeed be a contemporary art.
Not that this should be the Met's
only fare, and it is certainly not for everybody. To some lovers of traditional
opera, "Satyagraha," with its repeating musical patterns as steady
and unremarkable as the passage of time itself, might resemble "Chinese
water torture" (as one audience member said on Friday). But if the work
has a hope of reaching those listeners, it is through the high musical
standards of this production. Rather than putting the piece in a new-music
ghetto, the Met has cast it with some fine singers -- Richard Croft, Earle
Patriarco and especially Maria Zifchak -- and placed it in the capable hands of
the conductor Dante Anzolini, who made a memorable Met debut. Orchestras
usually hate playing Glass, whose music is difficult (the rhythms have small
tricky variants that require constant attention) and physically demanding (all
those repetitions are grueling). The Met orchestra sometimes sounded as if it
were fighting Anzolini, but he prevailed by keeping the lyricism and finding
the line in the music.
"Satyagraha" is a
watershed piece in Glass's oeuvre. Written in 1980, it represents the first
time the composer stepped beyond the bounds of his own ensemble and took on the
conventional forces of classical music. The score still retains exhilaration of
an artist presented with a new set of tools. After Glass found this voice, he
sometimes set it on autopilot; many of his later works lack the consistent
level of inspiration of this one.
Glass's music also accords
beautifully with the theme of the opera. "Satyagraha" is about the
years in which Mohandas K.
Gandhi, then living in South Africa,
developed his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. The topic is epic enough for
opera, but it is depicted with the musical equivalent of nonviolence: a quiet
constancy without overt climax. The orchestra consists only of strings and
winds, stripped of the bombast of brass and percussion. It gently worries at
ideas, subtle but insistent, coalescing into entirely new thoughts without the
listener always being cognizant of how it got there: an eloquent echo of Gandhi's
own process. Many new operas involve simply applying some kind of musical
language to a story; one of the refreshing things about "Satyagraha"
is that the music actually means something.
Music is, in fact, a major vehicle
of meaning in a work that has only tenuous links to the conventional idea of a
story. Anyone who wants to understand the Gandhi part of the narrative has to
do some extra reading in the intermissions. The libretto is drawn entirely from
the ancient Bhagavad-Gita, and sung in Sanskrit, and its words, meditative and
philosophical, do not add up to anything as prosaic as a plotline.
It is perhaps an extra challenge
for the singers that they are given little conventional sense of character to
work with. Glass's vocal writing adds another challenge, requiring long,
sustained passages of singing and, for the soprano, high writing that sits in
awkward parts of the voice (a Glass hallmark). Rachelle Durkin did her best as
Miss Schlesen, Gandhi's secretary; Alfred Walker was disappointingly pale in
his first long solo passage; and Patriarco was a stout pillar in the beautiful
vocal ensembles that were some of the work's highlights. Zifchak and Ellie Dehn
(in her Met debut) twined dark mezzo and high soprano voices in a moving
musical arch around the final act. And Croft gave himself utterly to Gandhi,
investing the role with a fitting, radiant simplicity.
It is left to the directors to
figure out how to bring the story across to the audience. The beauty of the
Improbable production, conceived by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (and
already premiered last season at English National Opera), is that its imagery
is so greatly bound up with the music. The chorus comes together to form larger
entities -- monsters, animals, surfaces for slide projections -- then drifts
apart, like Glass's notes. In the final act, singers crossed the stage with
rolls of packing tape, unrolling them at all different heights, until the whole
space was filled with dozens of shimmering bands, vibrating like the music
around them; this whole construct was eventually crumpled into a small ball,
showing visuals as ephemeral the passing notes.
The whole evening was a towering
work of non-event: to some, boring; to many, including this listener, it was a
profound and beautiful work of theater. The final act is a masterpiece of the
power of simplicity. At the very end, while Croft embarked on a pure, ascending
line, sung over and over, and the figure of Martin Luther
King Jr., taking up Gandhi's ideas, mimed his own great speech
behind him, the back of the stage was filled with a pure blue sky, then clouded
with an image of angels, marring the moment with an image of kitsch, presenting
the hope of redemption as sugary illusion. Was this new beginning only a
deception? Not on Friday, when the production was greeted with rapturous and
genuine applause.