Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Each of the three operas, 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...
Other role models she has met and admired in the course of her travels include Corazon Aquino, Indira Gandhi and Thatcher. "It's been an interest for me to see how women handle power, authority, people, decisions. We are different in how we approach things. A man can sit around a bar and shake liar's dice and discuss problems. The woman doesn't do that. Decision making, I think, is a bit more formal...
...tough rhetoric, U.S.-India trade has grown briskly since 1987, after then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi launched a program to open up the country to greater foreign investment. His successor, V.P. Singh, has promised to continue the process. Trade between the U.S. and India reached $5.8 billion last year, an increase of 45% from...