Word: satyagraha
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Glass went on to add Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984) to Einstein to form a trilogy of music dramas. Last week in West Germany, Stuttgart's State Theater held what amounted to a minimalist retrospective by staging all three as a complete cycle for the first time. For Glass, for Stuttgart and for new music, the cycle made for three extraordinary evenings in the theater. It was also, in a curious way, a farewell to a style that has changed the face of modern opera...
...always someone in the audience who has never heard Beethoven's Fifth. "For the first-time viewer, you've got to have Bohemes and Toscas and Carmens," says Ardis Krainik, general manager of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, whose company this season had an unexpected hit with Glass's Satyagraha. "Those are the things they need to bring them back again." But is sheer repetition of a handful of staples the way to cultivate new audiences...
...tung and Chou En-lai among its cast of characters. Although it is sure to provoke strong emotions and conflicting opinions, Nixon in China, currently on display at the Houston Grand Opera, is the most important new opera since Philip Glass gave voice to Mohandas Gandhi in Satyagraha seven years...
...Harvey Lichtenstein, is the movement's Sol Hurok. When Lichtenstein courageously produced Wilson's The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in 1969, few thought Wilson's glacially paced musings would be the stuff of box-office success. But when Glass's opera about the early life of Gandhi, Satyagraha, unexpectedly sold out in the fall of 1981, it was time to think again...
Glass's next operatic opportunity came in 1978, with a $25,000 commission from the city of Rotterdam for Satyagraha. Glass decided the work would be sung in Sanskrit, a mellifluous, vowel-rich language, to a text drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita. As his subject he chose Mohandas Gandhi's early years in South Africa, during which Gandhi developed his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. If the elemental Einstein was Glass's breakthrough, the gentle, serene Satyagraha was the first major work of his mature style. By poignantly transforming a flute line from the second scene into Gandhi's eloquent apostrophe...