According to a superb commentary in the New York Review of Books, Satyragraha is the middle opera in a trilogy about “saintly men”: Einstein (Einstein on the Beach), Gandhi (Satyagraha), and Akhenaten, the father of Tutankhamun, and the pharaoh who attempted to introduce monotheistic religion to Egypt (Akhnaten). I love the music of Akhnaten and so had high hopes for Satyragraha. These hopes were only partly realized.
The structure of the opera is highly unusual. The libretto is in Sanskrit. The libretto consists of passages from the Bhaghavad Gita. These passages are not words that the characters would utter if they came to life, but rather phrases of the holy text that are appropriate to the action taking place on stage. And according to the Met’s web site, “Satyagraha features minimal subtitles. ... Glass did not wish the text to be understood -- just to be heard -- and to allow the actions on stage to speak for themselves.” There were some subtitles, but they were few and far between, so for long stretches we listened to language that we did not understand, without the aid of translation. Theoretically, that made no difference. In practice, I wondered whether this opera might work as an oratorio, without staging.
Our cast:
Miss Schlesen: Rachelle Durkin
M. K. Gandhi: Richard Croft
Mr. Kallenbach: Kim Josephson
Parsi Rustomji: Alfred Walker
Conductor: Dante Anzolini
Production: Phelim McDermott
All three acts of the opera took place in front of a semicircular wall made of corrugated steel, with doors along the bottom that opened and closed, and a “picture window” in which a different figure sat or stood (silently) for each act: Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr.
In Act 1, we saw the young Gandhi as he arrived in South Africa, dressed in a lawyer’s suit. Upstage, two gigantic “puppets” were formed before our eyes; one appeared to be made of tenuously connected bits of paper and the other from woven baskets. The puppets reenacted the battle between the Kuruvas and the Pandavas.
In Act 2 we saw a line of oddly-dressed men in prominent plaids and clashing colors getting their shoes shined by other men dressed as menials, while upstage several large puppets wandered to and fro. These puppets seemed to be constructed of a papier-mache-like substance and featured grotesque expressions. In the second scene, long rolls of printed newspaper were unrolled across the stage, then wadded together, and the very large wad was grasped by a woman who was hoisted (along with her wad) to the top of the corrugated steel backdrop. In the third scene, the chorus displayed and then burned their registration cards.
The music of Acts 1 and 2 was not as compelling as the music of Akhnaten, but it was rather interesting in its own right. Things sort of fell apart in Act 3. The second and larger part of Act 3 was a long monologue by Gandhi, in Sanskrit, without subtitles, while up in the “picture window” an actor mimed the gestures of Martin Luther King Jr. addressing a (presumably) large crowd. With essentially no action, and no understanding of the words, and no significant variation in the music, Act 3 went by as a big “Huh?”
The whole affair came off as a bit better than a gamma. I will attend the encore, in the hope that a second experience will make more of an impression on me—and also as some sort of preparation for San Francisco’s upcoming production of Nixon in China, another opera in which no one falls in love, no one dies, and there is no inter-character conflict.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment