Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  Dennis had barely gotten through the score when he told me he knew Hans de Roo in Holland and wanted to conduct the premiere there himself. As it turned out, Dennis was about to have a great success in Bayreuth with Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and was then offered the post of general music director at the State Opera House in Stuttgart, so he had to give up the Dutch premiere of Satyagraha, which would be taken over by Bruce Ferden. But Dennis promised to present the German premiere in Stuttgart, which was to be a completely new production under the direction of Achim Freyer, the German painter and opera director. After I let Achim know of my plans for a trilogy, he also undertook the Akhnaten opera and eventually a new Einstein on the Beach. The trilogy would be presented in 1986 with all the operas—Einstein, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten—presented on three successive nights, beginning with Achim’s complete and remarkable re-visioning of Einstein.

  This really was only the beginning, but a most impressive one, of Dennis’s involvement in my music output. Over the next three decades he would commission operas, concertos, and symphonies from me. The symphony commissions alone accounted for nine out of ten symphonies and number eleven is already in the planning stage. Though, of course, there is a lot of orchestral music in large-scale operas, the fact is that I didn’t even begin my first symphony—the Low Symphony—until I was fifty-four. That surely must make me one of the all-time late starters among symphony composers. After years of writing for theater and opera, it was a real jolt for me to drop all of the extramusical content and make the language of music and the structure unfolding in time the sole content.

  At one point I asked, “Dennis, why are you commissioning all these symphonies?”

  “I’m not going to let you be one of those opera composers who never wrote a symphony,” he replied.

  THE PREMIERE OF SATYAGRAHA WAS IN ROTTERDAM. At the first rehearsal, the first hour of playing the music was so distressing that Bruce Ferden, an excellent conductor, stopped everything. “Anyone who would like to leave is welcome to leave,” he said. About fifteen of the forty string players stood up and walked out. When Bruce started up again, the piece suddenly began to sound very good.

  At the dress rehearsal I was sitting with Bob Israel, the production designer. Bob and I had gone with Constance DeJong, the librettist, to south India to the Kathakali Kalamandalam, and Bob had dressed up Krishna and Arjuna in typical Kathakali costumes. When the piece begins, Gandhi is seen walking upstage, and then behind him, these two characters come out in their chariots.

  I leaned over and said to Bob, “What if people laugh?”

  He just looked at me, kind of surprised, and didn’t say anything. But no one ever laughed.

  The reception of the piece on opening night depends on whom you talk to. I thought the audience liked it; it was pretty much all applause. But, as with Einstein, it made some people extremely angry. The new head of the Netherlands Opera, the successor to Hans de Roo, assured the public that Satyagraha would never be played in Holland again. He thought I had done something bad, that I had somehow sinned against music. There were some people in the press who didn’t like it, and some professional musicians definitely didn’t like it. If they were angry about Einstein, they were doubly angry about this. So not only did I get them mad about Einstein, I got them mad about something that was completely different from Einstein. They were going to be mad at me no matter what I did. But luckily I have a wonderful gene—the I-don’t-care-what-you-think gene. I have that big-time. I actually didn’t care then, and to this day I still don’t care.

  For some people, it was a tremendous disappointment. They really wanted something else, but I knew what I had done. “Did you really think I was going to write The Son of Einstein? Or The Return of Einstein?” I said. “Why would I do that?”

  What Einstein had demonstrated was a style of rhythmic composition that I had been developing for ten years, and which was not carried over into Satyagraha. I was looking for a way of radicalizing the music again, and sometimes that can mean doing something that people already know. Recently I wrote “Partita for Solo Violin,” which could be mistaken for something written a hundred years ago. What I’m interested in are my own abilities to think of things, to express, to use a musical language, to make it listenable. I had always felt there was a public that would like this music, and over time, the audiences, so small in the beginning, have only gotten larger.

  WHILE LOOKING FOR THE THIRD PART of this trilogy of operas, I was thinking about the three estates: science, politics, and religion. I had been stuck in the twentieth century with Einstein and Gandhi, and now I began looking for a subject in the ancient world. I knew about the pharaoh Akhnaten from Velikovsky’s work Oedipus and Akhnaten and, in fact, in my first pass at a libretto, I was going to do a double opera: Oedipus would be upstage and Akhnaten would be downstage, and I would do the two operas at once.

  But when I began researching Akhnaten, he became much more interesting than Oedipus. We think of the ancient world as Greece, but the ancient world was really Egypt. The Greeks were the heirs to the Egyptian culture. The more I got involved with the story, the less interest I had in Oedipus. What I was interested in was social change through nonviolence in the three estates, so to look at Oedipus as a psychological casualty didn’t help my argument very much. Finally, I was rereading Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I had read originally at the University of Chicago, and it convinced me that Akhnaten was the person I was looking for.

  Akhnaten was an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh whose name, wherever it appeared, had been eradicated from all public records. We didn’t even know he existed until the city he founded, Akhetaten (near present-day Amârna), was excavated in the nineteenth century. Then in 1922, when the tomb of Tutankhamun was uncovered, references to his father, Akhnaten, were found. There was a very big missing part of their history that the Egyptians, who had been so traumatized by the ideas of Akhnaten, had exorcised in a kind of a forced amnesia. Akhnaten had overthrown the traditional religion of Egypt in favor of a new monotheistic religion that he expected everyone to follow, and he was punished for that. He was pharaoh for seventeen years, but his punishment was to be erased from the record of kings for eternity.

  It’s hard for us now, I think, to appreciate how radical the idea of a monotheistic religion must have been. However, even today in indigenous societies around us, there are still multiple deities connected with the sun, the moon, and the forces of nature. This idea has historically preceded the development of an individual godhead. Some might ask, “Did the Egyptians really believe in their gods, or is it just poetry?” I don’t think it was poetry, and I think when Akhnaten dethroned all those gods, he was acting like a murderer, and the Egyptians of his day couldn’t tolerate it. Basically, it destroyed his reign, and he himself was dethroned and forgotten for thousands of years. Thinking back on it, it seems improbable that one man could change the whole society, which at that point had been governed by a polytheistic religion for two or three thousand years. In fact, he didn’t succeed, though some credit him with the origin of monotheism. Freud’s idea was that Moses was one of the priests of Akhnaten and that the Aten religion went underground and later formed the basis of Judaism, an idea that still presents some factual challenges.

  The texts used in Akhnaten were found by my associate writer, Shalom Goldman, a scholar of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and ancient Egyptian. The singers sing in those languages, plus Akkadian and a fifth language, which is always the language of the local audience, be it English, German, or another. I gave myself the benefit of a narrator, thereby allowing the story to be more easily understood by the audience. I used the original ancient languages for two reasons: first, because I liked the way the words could be sung, and second, because I wanted the overall experience of the opera to come through movement, music, and image. However, “The Hymn to the Sun” in Act 2, scene 4, is singled out as an exception. Here, Akhnaten sings in the language of the audience for the first and only time, and
at that moment they suddenly understand everything he is singing.

  This aria is followed by an offstage chorus singing Psalm 104, in the original Hebrew. This Hebrew text has striking similarities to “The Hymn to the Sun.” In the productions we used projections of the English or German translations on the walls of the stage, which I had also done for the Sanskrit text sung in Satyagraha.

  The sound of the music in Akhnaten developed in a way that was unexpected. It was commissioned by the Stuttgart Opera, but unbeknownst to us, they had scheduled a renovation of the opera house for the year we would work. Dennis Davies called me and said, “We don’t have the opera house, but we’re going to do the opera—don’t worry.”

  “Where are we going to do it?”

  “In the Playhouse. But you have to come over and look at the Playhouse, because it’s not very big.”

  I went to Stuttgart and we asked to see the Playhouse. When we got inside, we discovered that the orchestra pit was tiny.

  “What do you want to do?” Dennis asked.

  Every once in a while, I have a really good idea, and I don’t know where they come from.

  “Get rid of the violins,” I said.

  Without the violins, half the orchestra was gone. What was left was a very different orchestra in which the highest string instrument was the viola. The violas became the firsts, the cellos became the seconds, and the double basses became the cellos. Now the orchestration was very dark and rich. Once I had established that texture, it became the sound of the prelude. To lighten it up, I added two drummers, one on either side of the stage, because I thought, It’s kind of dark, I’d better add some juice. With the drummers in place, and the addition of the chorus and soloists, the sound of Akhnaten was complete.

  If the theater hadn’t been making that renovation, I would have had a full orchestra complete with violins, and Akhnaten would not have achieved its unique sound. Finally, the part of Akhnaten would be sung by a countertenor, a high male voice. His first note doesn’t come until the third scene of the first act, and when he finally opens his mouth and the audience hears him, out comes the sound of a mezzo-soprano. I wanted the audience to think, at that moment, Oh my god, who can this be?

  THE TRILOGY OF EINSTEIN/SATYAGRAHA/AKHNATEN was completed by 1984, and finally performed in 1986 twice as a complete cycle by the Stuttgart Opera. My life as an opera composer had really begun by the early 1980s, and opera composing remained thereafter a regular part of my work. During those years I undertook another practice which was meant to protect and even facilitate the life of these new works. Once an opera was completed, I arranged for it to have two different productions in the same year. I had noticed that generally it is difficult, if not impossible, to judge the quality of a new opera apart from its initial production. In fact, they are not at all the same. A mediocre opera can have a brilliant production and the reverse is equally true. It’s for that reason that it might take decades for the quality of an opera to be fairly understood. My solution was to have two productions of a new work done more or less at the same time, or at least in the same season. I didn’t expect that the same people would see them both. But, at the least, it would double the chances of having a successful “first night” and might provide a better vantage point from which to judge the work.

  Still, surprising things could happen. Satyagraha had two good productions in 1980—one directed by David Pountney and conducted by Bruce Ferden in Rotterdam, the other directed by Achim Freyer in Stuttgart, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Not many people saw both, but I did and it was an important learning experience for me. I began to understand how the variables of a production—design, direction, casting, and performance—could so decisively impact a work. But knowing more didn’t automatically lead to greater success. Akhnaten, for example, was a big roller-coaster ride, first with the production directed by David Freeman and designed by Bob Israel that was well received in Houston, generally dismissed as a failure in New York, but hailed as a huge success in London. Akhnaten, in the memory of English operagoers, was a big success. In the memory of New York operagoers, it was a complete disaster. On the other hand, the Achim Freyer production in Stuttgart was a success from the first night and stayed that way thereafter.

  This is what I know about new operas: the only safeguard for the composer is to have several productions. Of course, the score—and that includes the libretto—has to be strong. Then the matters of directing, designing, casting, performing, and conducting come into play. With these many variables, the results can vary tremendously. However, if the work survives, say, its first decade (and most operas will never get that far), we might begin to form an idea of the quality and stature of the work in its third or fourth production. If we think through the process carefully, that is exactly what has always happened in the history of opera. Take Carmen or Madame Butterfly, or even Porgy and Bess, all of which had very shaky beginnings. And yet, all three have had thousands of productions since. What has happened is the following: at some point, when the productions have reached a very, very high number, the work itself has separated from all the productions and has taken on an independence of its own. It has now achieved a kind of platonic reality, as if it now can exist all by itself. Of course, that is an illusion as well, but an illusion that has become consensual and, therefore generally shared. I doubt whether any composer has lived long enough to have seen that happen to his or her work, with the possible exception of Verdi, who did live a very long time and happened to be, besides, an outstanding genius composer.

  DURING THE YEARS WORKING ON SATYAGRAHA and Akhnaten, I had begun reading Doris Lessing’s work, starting with her first novel The Grass Is Singing and continuing with The Golden Notebook. After that I read the entire five-volume Children of Violence series, ending with The Four-Gated City. When the Canopus in Argos: Archives series, which has been erroneously labeled as her science fiction novels, began coming out, I read them practically as she was writing them. These new books immediately struck me, and right away I began thinking of work that I could make with them. In one way they were close to the work on social and personal transformation that had occupied me with the first opera trilogy. Especially in The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, I found the characters both more fragile and, ultimately, more resilient. I knew I had to meet this remarkable writer.

  As it turned out, John Rockwell, a well-known writer and critic in the cultural world, knew Mrs. Lessing’s work and how to reach her, and he made the first contact through Bob Gottlieb, her editor at Knopf. I then wrote to her directly and asked if I could meet her. I didn’t say anything about an opera, just that I was a composer. She agreed to meet and suggested I let her know when next I would be in London.

  “I’ll be there next week,” I immediately replied.

  This was during the time that Ida was in the nursing home in Baltimore. Recently she had been in and out of a coma. We had no idea how long she would last, but I took a chance and flew to London. The morning after I arrived, she passed away, and I called Mrs. Lessing and told her I wouldn’t be able to meet her for lunch as planned. However, she thought that since I had a few hours left in London, we should go ahead and meet anyway.

  Doris was then in her midsixties, a woman with gray hair gathered in a bun. She had bright eyes and was lively in her movements. She did not have a matronly appearance, but more the look and dignity of an academic or an intellectual, which she decidedly was. There was nothing sharp or mean about her. She could easily be anyone’s favorite slightly elderly aunt or cousin. From our first moments together, we slipped quickly into an easy, firm friendship.

  “I’m glad we could meet, but why have your plans changed?”

  “A death in my family. I’ll be taking a plane late this afternoon.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  “Oh. . . . Did you know her very well?”

  I was completely stunned by her ques
tion. We spent the next several hours, until I left for the airport, talking about my mother. She was a good listener and, though she was younger than Ida by ten years or more, I already thought of her as a woman of my mother’s generation.

  On later visits we eventually got around to talking about doing an opera based on The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Doris had a house in West Hampstead where she lived with her son Peter, a man about ten years younger than me. From then on, when I came to London, I would stay with her. Her home was full of books and paintings. Some might call it bohemian. For me it was always just comfortable. I knew she had lots of friends in London, but I hardly knew them.

  One of our favorite things was to take a cab to nearby Hampstead Heath and walk around the flower gardens. We often had lunch in the little restaurant there, or sometimes in one of the Indian restaurants near her house. We spent our time talking about books, theater, opera, politics—everything and nothing. When I was visiting her shortly after she was given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, she told me she had no idea it had even happened and was coming home one afternoon to find her street filled with press and police. She thought there had been a robbery of some kind in the neighborhood and was taken completely by surprise to find out they were all there to see her.

  During the 1980s and ’90s, when Doris was in New York, she would spend part of her visit with Bob Gottlieb and his family and part at my home with my family. On one visit, she arrived with a sprained ankle and only got around with great difficulty. During her stay with me I was in the midst of rehearsals and recording and had to leave the house each morning. Doris was sleeping on a couch in our downstairs living room and said she would be fine there all day, but she would be happy to have a few books to read. I knew Doris was famous for being a speed reader who always knew everything that everybody else was writing, so I left her a stack of at least ten to twelve books—all young American fiction writers.