My second exposure to the music of Philip Glass was through the Chelsea Hotel: Pianist Bruce Levingston (who lived in Sid and Nancy’s old room) hosted a celebration of his music way back in 2006. Ethan Hawke (another former Chelsea Hotel resident) and Michael Stipe recited selections from Glass’s and Allen Ginsburg’s Hydrogen Jukebox, and Glass himself showed up to play a selection from Einstein at the Beach. After such a special show, I couldn’t help but become a huge fan. (My first exposure was like a lot of peoples’, through Koyanisquatsi, the trippy Native American-inspired meditation on the disorienting fast pace of modern life that earned the Glass piece a place in the cannon of teenage stoner films—right up there with The Wall and The Song Remains the Same. I saw this film more than once, certainly, at the midnight movie at the Vogue, which was the repertory theatre in Louisville when I was growing up in the 70s, and it made an indelible impression.)
But Akhnaten (now in a revival of the 2019 production at MET) is just spectacular, and it’s my new current favorite Glass opera. The final opera of the Glass’ Portraits Series, which also includes Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, Akhnaten tells the story of the titular Egyptian king who introduced the cult of monotheism, in the form of sun worship, to ancient Egypt, displacing the traditional polytheistic religion and its powerful priesthood.
The sets of the production are minimal: industrial-looking scaffolding, staircases, and the like, which, when you think about it, is entirely appropriate, as the Opera is all about stripping things down, employing Occam’s razor to shear away beards of the superfluous gods. Much of the time, strikingly, the backdrop is nothing more than a huge sun disk. As for the costumes, though there are many Egyptian influences—such as animal head headdresses to represent the old gods of the hieroglyphs that will soon be swept away—Akhnaten’s coronation gown looks more Elizabethan than anything else; one of the priests of the old religion looks like a Voodoo Hungan or witch doctor, complete with a tophat crowned with a skull; the ancient “scientists” who remove the old king’s organs scurry around him like some kind of bright-eyed sci-fi insects; and (in a stroke of sartorial genius) the chorus of jugglers wear dun-colored full body leotards to represent the mud of the Nile cracked and dried by the sun.
All of which brings me to the Music. Where to start? It’s Monumental—like the subject itself. A man behind me remarked that listening to Glass’s music is like going into a trance. Of course I’ve heard remarks like this before—that his music is mesmerizing, hypnotic—so much so that they’ve become clichéd. But whatever trance it produces doesn’t dull the awareness, and certainly doesn’t put you down for the count: it relaxes and invigorates at the same time. I’ve also heard it said that Glass’s music is repetitive. But for me it’s not so much repetitive as kind of circular, like turning a crank on a hurdy gurdy, it just keeps recycling over and over, a kind of carnival sound punctuated with revelations and distinct moments of illumination. It creates tension and drama. It cycles you down to the depths only to exalt you in a cosmic event, an exploding supernova—and it does it again and again. Glass’s music has a timeless quality, it transcends time, recreating the moment over and over so it can’t slip away. It could be music for robots, with sections of it extended almost indefinitely. And I don’t say that disparagingly, but only because robots would presumably have a superior capacity for endurance; on long space flights, say, you wouldn’t want 3-minute songs. Instead of 3 hours long, Akhnaten could be 300 hours long, or 3000 years longs. Glass’s music gives us a glimpse of eternity. Like the eternal cycle of the sun through the heavens, this music is not meant to end.
One of my favorite scenes is the Funeral/Coronation that opens the opera. The play curtain rises upon the old gods in their animal headdresses overseeing the removal of the dead king’s organs by the ancient scientists, as the king’s ghost intones: “Open are the double doors of the horizon. . . Take this king to the sky, that he not die among men. . .” Then, young Akhnaten, played by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, descends naked to be ritually clothed by the priests in his elaborate regal raiment. The priests and the chorus of jugglers praise the newly crowned king as he ascends the ladder and finally sings. The whole extended sequence is exquisitely moving, and I sat in rapt attention throughout.
Unfortunately, my concentration was broken at that point when a man passed out a few rows in front of us. Not that it was his fault, of course, but he was in the middle of a row, and so a dozen or more people filed out and stood in the row milling around directly in my line of sight, not knowing what to do. It disturbed the trance of the aforementioned man behind me as well, but at least he knew what to do, as it turned out he was a doctor. He checked on the sick man, and then ordered a wheelchair to be fetched. But it took the staff several minutes to find a wheelchair, and by that time we had missed the whole rest of the act. Even the sick man had recovered by this point, and didn’t want to leave, but the doctor (reportedly) prevailed upon him get checked out at the hospital.
But my favorite scene is the Hymn in Act II, when Akhnaten, against a backdrop of the sun disc—which morphs from yellow to grey to a very striking blue—praises the sun god in song, and then, as a chorus sings Psalm 104, ascends toward the gigantic, blood red sun. This whole scene is visually stunning, but it also gives Anthony Roth Costoanzo a chance to shine as well, especially as (whereas the rest of the opera is sung in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Hebrew) he sings his part in English:
All the beasts are satisfied with their pasture.
Trees and plants are verdant.
Birds fly from their nests, wings spread.
Flocks skip with their feet.
All that fly and alight
Live when thou hast arisen.
(from: Winton Thomas’s English Translation)
Since this was the premier, the master himself came out for curtain call at the end. I had run into Glass once before, coming off the elevator at the Chelsea Hotel, long ago. While I don’t know if he’s ever lived at the Chelsea himself, he’s been associated with a lot of the people who lived here. I’ve mentioned Ginsburg, and Glass also composed a song cycle for Leonard Cohen, based on the latter’s poetry collection, Book of Longing. Glass is 85 now, and looking much smaller than I remember him, but still apparently getting around fine, which is a good thing for all of us, for surely he’s got plenty of music left in him to compose.
[Akhnaten runs from May 19 through June 10 at the MET. ]
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