Perilous Journey

By Michael Walsh

TITLE: THE VOYAGE

COMPOSER: PHILIP GLASS

LIBRETTIST: DAVID HENRY HWANG

WHERE: THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

THE BOTTOM LINE: Glass and crew set sail through uncharted waters but never quite reach the promised land.

MUCH OF THE WESTERN HEMIsphere may be skeptical about the benefits of the European discovery of America, but the Metropolitan Opera commemorated the 500th anniversary of that event last week anyway -- with the world premiere of The Voyage by Philip Glass. The opera takes no stand on whether the dead white male Columbus was a genocidal maniac or the civilizing harbinger of Christianity; instead it strikes out for the noble horizon of all human striving, daring and accomplishment. Despite the technological resources at its disposal, it never quite gets there.

By now the story of Glass's 1976 debut at the Met with Einstein on the Beach has become the stuff of legend: how he sold out the rented house on two successive Sundays, crystallized New York's nascent minimalist movement and then went back to driving a taxi until the zeitgeist caught up with him and collaborator Robert Wilson a few years later. Since then, Glass has scored with such operas as Satyagraha (his masterpiece) and Akhnaten. But with the Met's imprimatur on The Voyage, Glass's long journey from obscure avant- gardist to mainstream cultural icon has been culminated.

% His new operatic dreadnought -- playwright David Henry Hwang, choreographer Quinny Sacks, set designer Robert Israel and director David Pountney are also aboard -- manages to embrace not only the explorer's first trip to the New World but also the electric dreams of Stephen Hawking, the arrival of aliens on Earth during the Ice Age, and humanity's conquest of space. Characters sing suspended in outer space, sets soar through the air like rocket ships, and the hydraulic stage heaves like waves in a storm, propelling the extraterrestrials and Columbus' crew alike toward their unknown destinations. With a commissioning fee to Glass of $325,000 (about half of which went for expenses), The Voyage already ranks as one of the Met's most extravagant epics.

The sheer size of the production, however, often overwhelms Hwang's elliptical text ("Goodbye to prizes and politics/ Goodbye to the warm part of my heart"), and the vast inner space of the Met renders the words nearly unintelligible (surtitles, anyone?). Although some of the coups de theatre are striking -- the wheelchair-bound Scientist intones the prologue while floating beyond the rings of Saturn -- too many of Pountney's and Israel's images seem to have washed ashore from Wilson's incomplete magnum opus, the CIVIL warS.

The ultimate success of any new opera, though, depends on the composer. Glass's stubborn refusal to "develop" his uncompromising idiom has exasperated some, who point to the more flexible, eclectic style of John Adams (Nixon in China) as a way out of the minimalist box. Glass's chug-chug style remains instantly recognizable, but his music has colored and deepened over the years. The Voyage lowers, thunders and rages -- it begins with the same six-note figure that opens Wagner's Die Walkure -- vividly reflecting Hawking's visions of terror and wonder and Columbus' dark and stormy night of the soul.

A strong cast, headed by bass-baritone Timothy Noble as Columbus and soprano Patricia Schuman as the Commander, handles Glass's ostinatos and melismata with aplomb, and the Met orchestra gets its fingers around the cross-rhythms under the expert guidance of Bruce Ferden. If in the end the opera, like its hero, doesn't land where it was headed, sometimes it is indeed better to travel than to arrive.