Melody Stages a Comeback

By Michael Walsh

In an opera about Gandhi, Philip Glass makes Sanskrit sing

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 simple and rhythmically hypnotic, Satyagraha rejects the dominant musical style of the postwar era, twelve-tone serialism. Yet it does so gently, even serenely: the composer has practiced what Gandhi preached.

The fissure that has opened between composers of serious music and the mass audience has been one of the artistic tragedies of the 20th century, with both sides to blame. As new music became more intellectually rigorous--until the point of a work was not how it sounded but how it was "organized"--audiences searching for emotional satisfaction turned away, seeking solace in earlier periods. The counterrevolution against the Schoenberg-Webern-Boulez triumvirate is now well advanced, however, with a variety of conservatives, neoconservatives (including apostates from serialism such as George Rochberg) and so-called minimalists all striving to make new music vital again. Glass generally is lumped with Composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley in the minimalist camp because of his simple melodies and his dependence on repetition instead of traditional motivic development. An admirer of punk and New Wave music, Glass is unabashed about his aims: "We've had 70 years of pieces since Schoenberg that no one understands," he says, "so there's nothing really wrong with a little contemporary music being appealing."

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 policies. While each scene is self-contained, the effect is cumulative and powerful.

The opera charts new directions for Glass. His earlier works (including Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour collaboration with Avant-Gardist Robert Wilson that packed the Metropolitan Opera House twice in 1976) used amplified instruments and contained elements of rock. Satyagraha still owes much, harmonically, to rock--it begins with one of the most fundamental of chord progressions --but it uses a 51-piece orchestra of expertly scored strings and woodwinds, discreetly accompanied by an electronic organ. Further, Glass has developed more complex musical structures: Satyagraha is supported by an insistent rhythmic underpinning, continuously transformed and extended by shifting accents. Yet for all its nonstop activity, the music is flexible enough to respond to changing dramatic situations. In the final scene of the second act, for example, a lyrical idea (sometimes reduced to a single chord) alternates with a stirring chorus, as the Indians burn their racial registration cards and Gandhi prays quietly.

Tenor Douglas Perry sang the role of Gandhi with strength and sweetness. As Miss Schlesen, Gandhi's European secretary, Soprano Claudia Cummings conveyed a purity of tone and an assured dramatic presence. The Artpark Opera Chorus mastered the score's tricky rhythms, and Conductor Christopher Keene gauged the music's effects effortlessly, drawing sensitive, refined playing from members of the Buffalo Philharmonic. Director Hans Nieuwenhuis staged the stylized action subtly, with effective use of slow motion during the protest scenes.

Glass, 44, was there to savor his triumph. Although Einstein proved a succes d'estime, it was a costly one; after 32 performances in seven countries, the venture lost $90,000, and Glass went back to his old job, driving a cab in New York. But now he appears to have a real success.

Satyagraha was commissioned by the city of Rotterdam and was premiered there by the Netherlands Opera last year; this fall it plays the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Recently, the Baltimore-born Glass received a threeyear, $90,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to support his music.

And the Stuttgart Opera has commissioned a new work, Akhenaton, for a 1983 production. If Philip Glass can make Sanskrit sing, what will he do with ancient Egyptian? --By Michael Walsh

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