Word: gita
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Philip Glass's Satyagraha is not your standard opera. For one thing, it is sung in Sanskrit. For another, it dramatizes Mohandas Gandhi's struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. The libretto is drawn entirely from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text that served as the moral authority for Gandhi's nonviolent resistance movement-called Satyagraha, after the Sanskrit words for truth and firmness. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the opera, given its American premiere at Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y., last week, is the music itself. Melodically sensuous, harmonically...
Satyagraha is certainly appealing, indeed beautiful. The score glows with a spiritual luminosity rarely encountered in this secular, anxious age, and its inner peace harmonizes with the tenets of the Bhagavad-Gita being sung and the goals of Gandhi's revolution acted out onstage. The opera's three acts (seven scenes) trace the beginnings of the Satyagraha movement during Gandhi's 21 years in South Africa: the founding of the Tolstoy Farm commune, the increasing resistance to discrimination against Indians, the climactic Newcastle march of 1913 in which Gandhi led striking miners in protest against restrictive racial...