Word: akhnaten
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...rented house on two successive Sundays, crystallized New York's nascent minimalist movement and then went back to driving a taxi until the zeitgeist caught up with him and collaborator Robert Wilson a few years later. Since then, Glass has scored with such operas as Satyagraha (his masterpiece) and Akhnaten. But with the Met's imprimatur on The Voyage, Glass's long journey from obscure avant- gardist to mainstream cultural icon has been culminated...
...seem premature to write minimalism's obituary. After all, the prolific Glass has created several more music-theater pieces since Akhnaten, most recently The Hydrogen Jukebox, a collaboration with poet Allen Ginsburg. Among other exponents of minimalism, composer John Adams (Nixon in China) is busily at work on his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, which is scheduled for a Brussels premiere next year. Yet neither composer is still writing in the rigorously theoretical, disdainfully austere style of his early years...
...brilliantly staged by German director and designer Achim Freyer, offers a penetrating portrait of a man whose life changed the ways in which humanity looks at the world: Einstein, the scientist and amateur musician; Gandhi, the inspirational political leader (Satyagraha was the term for his nonviolent resistance movement); and Akhnaten, the putatively monotheistic Pharaoh. Each work is linked musically as well, with motifs from Einstein popping up in the later operas...
Freyer's is a largely bleak view of the operas' worlds. The evil courtiers who overthrow Akhnaten are costumed as devils and bestial thugs; Gandhi's followers, beaten by police near the opera's close, look like refugees from Night of the Living Dead. Yet there are stage pictures of surpassing beauty too, as when Akhnaten's domestic life is represented by a giant suspended wheel in which sit, friezelike, the Pharaoh and his six identical daughters. Almost unfailingly, Freyer has found an image to match the mood of the music, and it is in such audio-visual synthesis that...
...years ago, at the Akhnaten premiere, half the audience booed vociferously. This time all three operas were greeted with prolonged ovations. The spectators were cheering Glass, Freyer and the performers, of course, particularly Paul Esswood's radiant Akhnaten and Leo Goeke's heroic Gandhi. But even more, they were cheering the triumph of a style that, only a few years ago, was bitterly controversial. And perhaps bidding it goodbye as well...