This Time They Cheered

By Michael Walsh

In 1976 a sassy new music called minimalism burst out of the lofts of Manhattan's SoHo district and marched smartly uptown to the Metropolitan Opera House. Part rock, part raga, part dreamscape and part photo-realism, the minimalist ethos was distilled by composer Philip Glass and theater artist Robert Wilson in a 4 1/2-hour operatic extravaganza called Einstein on the Beach. The sung text consisted solely of numbers and the syllables do, re, mi, etc., while the music was built from a series of simple phrases, insistently repeated. The effect was either riveting or maddening, depending on one's point of view. But few could deny that a powerful new movement had been born.

Glass went on to add Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984) to Einstein to form a trilogy of music dramas. Last week in West Germany, Stuttgart's State Theater held what amounted to a minimalist retrospective by staging all three as a complete cycle for the first time. For Glass, for Stuttgart and for new music, the cycle made for three extraordinary evenings in the theater. It was also, in a curious way, a farewell to a style that has changed the face of modern opera.

It may seem premature to write minimalism's obituary. After all, the prolific Glass has created several more music-theater pieces since Akhnaten, most recently The Hydrogen Jukebox, a collaboration with poet Allen Ginsburg. Among other exponents of minimalism, composer John Adams (Nixon in China) is busily at work on his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, which is scheduled for a Brussels premiere next year. Yet neither composer is still writing in the rigorously theoretical, disdainfully austere style of his early years.

In any case, the real test of a movement is not how long it lasts but what it leaves behind. The Glass trilogy, especially its masterpiece Satyagraha, will survive in memory and repertoire. As heard on successive nights at Stuttgart, it is an overwhelming experience, a kind of modern Ring cycle whose components make their effect both individually and collectively.

Each of the three operas, brilliantly staged by German director and designer Achim Freyer, offers a penetrating portrait of a man whose life changed the ways in which humanity looks at the world: Einstein, the scientist and amateur musician; Gandhi, the inspirational political leader (Satyagraha was the term for his nonviolent resistance movement); and Akhnaten, the putatively monotheistic Pharaoh. Each work is linked musically as well, with motifs from Einstein popping up in the later operas.

Freyer's is a largely bleak view of the operas' worlds. The evil courtiers who overthrow Akhnaten are costumed as devils and bestial thugs; Gandhi's followers, beaten by police near the opera's close, look like refugees from Night of the Living Dead. Yet there are stage pictures of surpassing beauty too, as when Akhnaten's domestic life is represented by a giant suspended wheel in which sit, friezelike, the Pharaoh and his six identical daughters. Almost unfailingly, Freyer has found an image to match the mood of the music, and it is in such audio-visual synthesis that true opera lies.

Six years ago, at the Akhnaten premiere, half the audience booed vociferously. This time all three operas were greeted with prolonged ovations. The spectators were cheering Glass, Freyer and the performers, of course, particularly Paul Esswood's radiant Akhnaten and Leo Goeke's heroic Gandhi. But even more, they were cheering the triumph of a style that, only a few years ago, was bitterly controversial. And perhaps bidding it goodbye as well.