Opera NewsSixteen years ago, Philip Glass made his first appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House. On two consecutive Sundays in November 1976, the Byrd-Hoffman Foundation rented the hall and presented the American premiere of Glass' first opera, Einstein on the Beach. Afterward, the composer, deeply in debt, returned to driving a cab.
This month, Glass makes his second appearance at the Met, although under more auspicious circumstances. On October 12, the Met presents the world premiere of The Voyage, commissioned in celebration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' journey to America. The Voyage, some might say, marks the American opera establishment's belated recognition of a composer who has garnered immense popular acclaim. "I don't doubt that the world of traditional opera will eventually be dragged - probably screaming - into the twentieth century," Glass wrote in 1987, "Of course, by then it will be the twenty-first century."
During a recent interview in his East Village brownstone, Glass spoke with the confidence of a seasoned professional whose mind already has turned to future projects. Although he admits that writing an opera for the Met was a unique challenge, he insists he did not tailor The Voyage to the tastes of the Met's reputedly conservative audience.
"I was invited to do the piece I wanted to do. I had the complete support of the board, the music department and the technical department. The six performances were set ahead of time. So the best thing I could do for the Met audience was to write the piece I really wanted to write. This is opera number nine for me - I've written ten and eleven since then. At fifty-four, with the experience I have behind me, I felt entitled to do what I wanted. I thought if I could do a piece I liked, I could lead the audience rather than follow it."
Glass always knew exactly what kind of opera he wanted to write. In 1986 he approached the Met with the idea for a work inspired by the Columbus quincentenary, even providing a three-page scenario. He then chose as his librettist the playwright David Henry Hwang, his collaborator on the music-theater piece 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988).
Glass also had specific ideas concerning the libretto's content and scope. The Voyage would view Columbus as symbolic of a larger theme - that of the irresistible human urge toward exploration. "I didn't want to do a historical Columbus," Glass said, "If you want to know about Columbus, you can go to the library. The opera house isn't a good place to deal with reality. What we can do is make it a workshop where allegory and fiction and poetry are brought to a level of the investigation of the human condition."
Glass' scenario for The Voyage, to which Hwang adhered closely, asks one basic question: "Why do we leave what is familiar and comfortable to go to what is unfamiliar and unknown?" Glass adds, "I don't know what the fundamental impulse is, but we've been doing it since the beginning of the separate evolution of humanity."
The Voyage attempts to retrace that immense chronological range. After a prologue, in which the Scientist muses on mankind's endless search for knowledge, we are transported back to the Ice Age, when a spaceship of explorers crashes on Earth - and, it is implied, leads the natives toward higher evolution. Act II shows Columbus at sea, consumed with doubt, interacting with a mystical Isabella. Act III takes us to the year 2092, when Earthlings, now possesing proof of those Ice Age visitors, set off to the stars in search of the source of knowledge. Only in the epilogue does Columbus, on his deathbed, reappear to consider the meaning of discovery. At the end, his bed rises up towards the stars.
But The Voyage's typescript libretto amounts to only fifteen pages, for well over two and a half hours of music. "I've learned a lot about librettos," he says, laughing mischievously. "I'm now something of a `minimalist' when it comes to librettos. What makes opera so wonderful is that what we're conveying isn't done only through words. The visual material, the musical setting, the staging, all those things are part of what puts the story over. In a house the size of the Met, to get into the dialectics of discovery would have been a big mistake. I wanted a piece that could tell a story in broad strokes and with a powerful emotional punch."
Glass may not have tailored The Voyage to the Met's audience, but he did design it to take advantage of the Met's resources - its large orchestra and chorus, its sophisticated technical facilities, and the sheer size of its hall. "The end of Act I is the biggest moment, musically and dramatically. I wanted to remove any doubt about the scale of this opera. I didn't want you to wait until Act III to get to the finale, or until Act II to hear the chorus really open up. I wanted the sound of Act I to be in your ears all through the intermission. So my strategy was to end Act I with a thumping finale that would leave you breathless. Act II can become the introspective act, because I've earned the time."
Aside from the scale of The Voyage, how might its music explore territory new to Glass? Not inclined to answer in specific terms, the composer speaks only about "the complexity of the contrapunctual writing" and the fact that "the opera is more dissonant, but that grows out the chromaticism." A more detailed answer may be found by listening to the Met's work tape, which consists of voices and synthesized instrumental parts, and by examining the score.
Immediately in the prologue, one is struck by The Voyage's dark, brooding tone. As a wordless female chorus soars high above, rapid scales rumble in the lower strings, building to an expanse of Sibelian starkness and sweep. Much of what is new in The Voyage is apparent in this opening scene. The harmonic language is a far cry from the diatonics of The making of the Representative for Planet 8: here, a slithering chromaticism lends an increasingly dissonant tinge to the steadfastly tonal context. The augmented triad pervades The Voyage and accounts for much of its surprisingly rich harmonic coloring. Not only is the opera unified around a volatile E-minor/major mixture, but Glass cleverly delays the resolution of his ambiguous augmented triad until the epilogue.
Along with an expanded harmonic palette comes a new intricacy of counterpoint. Glass' unhappy period of study in the 1960s with Nadia Boulanger seems to have paid off, for he knows how to craft deceptively simple, crystal-clear counterpoint that can thicken slowly in texture as a scene progresses toward its climactic point.
Although the action of The Voyage is often more psychological than physical, its libretto is of a linear, narrative variety. So its individual scenes demand a new concern with dramatic pacing, whether accomplished by gradual unfolding of melodic patterns or by sudden contrast and change. In addition, the acts as a whole progress towards moment of pageantry: the confrontation of the spaceship Commander and the Ice Age Earthlings that ends Act I, Columbus' sighting of land at the close of Act II, the parade of dignitaries bidding farewell to the spaceship in Act III.
Glass turns his chorus of eighty into active participants, and he maximizes the dramatic impact of his orchestra (which, although enlarged by a battery of exotic percussion, is surprisingly traditional and entirely acoustic). In all, he shows that he is master, not prisoner, of an idiom that in his weaker works has been much too predictable. When he fill the orchestral parts with slinky, Arabian melodic arabesques or imitates chantlike medieval organum in the chorus, he appears to delight in having broken free from self-imposed routine.
What may most impress listeners is The Voyage's expressive impact. Columbus and Isabella, for instance, interact with a sensuous passion unprecedented in Glass' output. "I feel there's an emotionalism to The Voyage that I wouldn't say is lacking in Philip's work - a lot of Satyagraha is extremely emotional - but I think Philip has taken his signature techniques and advanced them so they serve the purpose of a linear text more precisely," declares Hwang. "They seem to have momentum and drive, as if they're progressing to a certain point, in the same way you expect a text of different characters to come together and reach some sort of apotheosis."
Still, much about The Voyage remains in line with Glass' previous operas. His raw material continues to consist of cellular motifs, either scalar or arpeggiated patterns that enlarge and shrink subtly during the course of repetition. Underpinning these are rotating harmonic cycles, granitic pedal points and a solid, unrelenting rhythmic pulse. Also consistent with Glass' past is the nature of the vocal writing. When he sets the English language, he favors plain, unadorned declamation. "There's no virtuoso singing of a traditional kind," he admits. "I'm not even tempted to write it. To me, that draws attention away from something more essential. Opera is about voice and singing, but I don't think technical virtuosity is the most interesting thing."
That is not to say Glass' lines are easy to sing. Although they look simple, the long, lyrical phrases are difficult to sustain. "A lot of the problem is that ingers have to maintain this tessitura, often just one or two or three notes in the upper part of the voice, and it takes a firm vocal technique - it takes stamina," says Bruce Ferden, who will conduct The Voyage at the Met. Douglas Perry, who sang Gandhi in Satyagraha and sings the First Mate in The Voyage, says Glass "tends to write at the uppermost part of the range, especially for sopranos and tenors. It's like singing a difficult Bach aria - you really have to work to get that into your voice."
And the rewards, according to Glass' detractors, can be slim. As in so much of Wagner, the continuous orchestral fabric retains primacy in The Voyage. The vocal parts can seem almost incidental to the complexities unfolding around them. "The vocal language grows out of the musical surroundings," Glass explains, adding an astonishing admission: "In many cases the orchestral treatment is written first. From that I can find many vocal responses to the musical setting."
When Glass sets wordless vocalise, such as the Commander's ecstatic solo at the end of Act I, his vocal lines become far less constrained, both melodically and rhythmically. When he is tied down to English, his prosody can seem rhythmically stiff and foursquare. Glass, after all, didn't set a narrative English text in grand opera until Planet 8, and he concedes he is still finding his way. "English is hard to master, and I don't think I got it right the first time. But I think I've gotten better at it. Setting English in a colloquial way is something I'm very concerned with."
He still may have progress to make on that front, but the harmonic and contrapunctual advances of The Voyage already have had a lasting impact on his style. Glass' tenth opera - White Raven, a collaboration with Robert Wilson - is now complete in piano-vocal score; it too revels in a newly chromatic, dissonant language and contrapunctual complexity. Otherwise, White Raven is far more introspective than The Voyage, shunning grandiosity in favor of a gentler, elegiac lyricism.
Beyond White Raven is number eleven, a chamber opera in French based on Jean Cocteau's Orphée. "I was interested in using film as the basis for opera. I did the adaptation myself, although I accepted Cocteau's scenario fairly much intact. It's for a chamber orchestra of twelve players. The four main characters are just as in the movie." Orphée will receive its U.S. premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Boston next May, moving to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theater the following October.
Glass, who seems unable to sit still, is eager to look ahead. "Let's talk about new operas, the ones I want to do! I suppose the very next thing I do is two one-acters, one based on a story by Kafka called The Penal Colony, the other based on a David Hwang piece called The House of the Sleeping Beauties. These are what I call pocket operas. The Penal Colony has one singer, the other has two, adn I'm thinking of an orchestra that consists of a string quartet. I've been talking to John Coetzee, who wrote Waiting for the Barbarians, which he has agreed to do as an opera. I have another project with Doris Lessing, called The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4, and 5. And I have a project with David Freeman called The Flower of Youth, based on the Gilgamesh legend." Even at Glass' rapid rate of composition, that is enough to bring him close to the twenty-first century. For now, our time to talk has run out. Gracious but hurried, Glass guides me to the front door. He has, he explains, composing he must return to. There is work to be done - on opera number twelve.
Mr. Schwarz, a free-lance music journalist, is a frequent contributor to
the New York Times, Stagebill, Pulse! and other publications.
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