thirteen ways

Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece, in the New York Review of Books, about the Met Opera’s powerful production of Philip Glass’ extraordinary Satyagraha is a finely judged, exquisitely written evocation of four amazing hours of musical theater. 

I was there, and have struggled with how to write or even talk about what I saw and heard. At the time I wrote dozens of emails trying to graphically depict the stage movements of the final scene, and to somehow evoke the profound calm and beauty of the marriage of text, music and stage drama. In talking to people I would wave my arms about vigorously, trying to bring across the way that the on-stage puppets seemed to magically form out of everyday objects (particularly in the first scene of the first act), while singing the simple melodic patterns that are the musical foundation of the work.

When my father said that he would listen to the Met broadcast in Australia, I even tried to convince him not to listen to it all. “The power is in the visual elements and how they work WITH the music. Just listen to the first 20 minutes and last 20 minutes!”

Reading Mendelsohn’s essay was like reliving the experience all over again, which made me realize that rather than writing an awkward, naive blog entry, overusing words like “profound,” “spiritual,” “moving,” “powerful” (some of which I have already used!), and showing how little I actually understood of the experience, I would simply tell everyone I knew to read this article!

Maybe I will eventually write more about the performance, but in the meantime, here are some superficial notes from the afternoon:

As I waited alone in the queue for Satyagraha standing room tickets, having been ditched by my date for the arvo, I found myself in line next to two of the best companions a person could have for their first Philip Glass opera experience: LB, a singer/composer and member of Glass’ ensemble; and AF, a soprano on the cusp of an amazing career. They were fabulous company for the afternoon, especially after the show, when we walked into the warm spring air - back to reality - as nervous wrecks.

After the first intermission, all three of us made beelines for Orchestra seats. As I settled in my seat, I looked over to see that an older lady sitting across the aisle was standing and pointing so that an usher could throw me back to standing room, ashamed. I resisted the temptation to forcefully remind the lady that the opera she was currently attending dealt a great deal with issues of respect and tolerance… (All’s well that ends well, and I ended up with one of the best seats in the house after a lovely couple who left during the second intermission gave me their Dress Circle tickets.)

Mendelsohn ends his essay by evoking the final minutes of the opera:

That sense was, if anything, only heightened in the last scene, in which all of the elements of both the text and the production cohere beautifully. After the New Castle marchers have been removed by the soldiers, Act III (”King”) concludes with Gandhi alone, downstage. Upstage, throughout the latter part of the act, a black man playing Martin Luther King Jr. has been standing atop a lofty podium, silently and in slow motion pantomiming King’s famous gestures as he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. (He’s facing away from the audience, as if addressing a crowd in the far distance.) This vision of Gandhi communing with his latter-day avatar is beautifully conveyed by the Bhagavad Gita text that Gandhi sings at this moment: “The Lord said, I have passed through many a birth and many have you. I know them all but you do not.” These and the other sacral lines are sung to a single musical figure—a quite beautiful ascending scale, of eight notes, in the Phrygian mode, repeated thirty times and yet never quite the same from repetition to repetition. (Once again in this piece, repetition is gripping rather than boring.)

As this goes on, the flats obscuring the back of the stage float away, revealing an expanse of improbably blue, celestial sky; the clouds that had scudded thickly across it while King was giving his speech suddenly evaporate, leaving a clear space. (Another suggestive image.) One white, rather fluffy cloud remains, and slowly, unexpectedly, this cloud starts to morph into an image of a group of Gandhi’s followers. (This is exactly per Glass’s stage direction: “Gandhi, standing down stage, turns, looking toward platform where King reappears and a moment later Satyagraha army appears behind him, up in the starry, night sky.”) Seated in serried rows like people posing for one of those Victorian group photos, the image is characterized by a stiffness meant, perhaps, to remind you of this specific moment in history to which Gandhi did, after all, belong.

And then something wonderful happened. Raising their forearms in a formal yet warm gesture—of greeting? of farewell? I couldn’t make it out—they waved right at you as you sat in the audience. At that moment I burst into tears. Perhaps because it seemed so much like a gesture of benediction, I felt as if something real had actually happened in the auditorium—that I had been blessed, maybe. Made out of insignificant things and yet achieving a large effect that exceeded, finally, the boundaries of the theater, this marvelous work made you feel that it haddone something. And what is that, if not drama?

I was a mess as well. As I sat sobbing uncontrollably I looked over to the bloke next to me who was checking his watch. Perhaps that would have been me five years ago; perhaps it will be me in another five years. But here and now I was moved to a degree that I very rarely have by a work of art.