Glass Opera Needlessly Cluttered at The Met

Anthony Ross Costanzo in the title role of Akhnaten (from the PBS Web page for the Great Performances at the Met broadcast)

This month the PBS series Great Performances at the Met continued with the video document of Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten. The premiere took place on April 5, but my first opportunity to capture and save the video in my xfinity cloud space came yesterday afternoon. Today was my very first experience this opera thus took place today, since, to the best of my knowledge, I have yet to listen to an audio account of even excerpts from the score.

Glass himself called this the third is what amounted to a trilogy of biographical operas, the preceding two operas being (in order of appearance) Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha. Personally, I find the adjective “biographical” a bit of a stretch. Einstein on the Beach was very much a joint creation by Glass and Robert Wilson in which there is very little, if any, suggestion of narrative. Albert Einstein puts an appearance, but as a violinist, rather than a physicist or a mathematician. Furthermore, while “on the beach” refers to Nevil Shute’s novel about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, nuclear war was not even suggested by Einstein on the Beach. Satyagraha is decidedly more narrative in nature, but what emerges is an image of Mahatma Ghandi refracted through three other historical figures, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr. Akhnaten is the only opera in which the “signature” character is a presence across the entire libretto.

The staging at the Metropolitan Opera was by Phelim McDermott, created originally for co-production by the English National Opera and the Los Angeles Opera. The title role was conceived for a countertenor and sung by Anthony Roth Costanzo at the premiere. He returned to revive his performance at the Met. Zachary James, who created the role of Akhnaten’s father, Amenhotep III, was also a member of the Met cast. The role of Nefertiti, Akhnaten’s wife, was taken by J’nai Bridges in which I believe she was making her Met debut. The conductor was Karen Kamensek, also making her Met debut.

I still have fond memories of the video document of McDermott’s staging of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 588 opera Così fan tutte (so do all women) for the Met. I cast my lot with those calling it the “Coney Island Così” with only the most positive connotations. It is not easy to do justice to Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto, whose conclusion seems to have been left ambiguous deliberately. McDermott settled on a perfectly sound approach to resolving the complications of the plot, and he never interfered with the expressive role played by Mozart’s music along the way.

In Akhnaten, on the other hand, McDermott elected to create and inhabit a universe almost blatantly at odds with where Glass seemed to be taking the music. While the austerity of Glass’ gift for working with “repetitive structures” without giving in to mind-numbing monotony could not have provided a better setting for the austere rituals that emerge from the libretto (written by Glass with an impressive array of partners: Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel, Richard Riddell and Jerome Robbins), McDermott chose to embellish those rituals with everything but the kitchen sink. (By “everything” I include what amounted to a Greek chorus of jugglers.)

This contrasts sharply with the opera’s two predecessors. Wilson’s designs for Einstein were large in scale, but they never conflicted with the sparse materials that formed Glass’ score. The libretto for Satyagraha, on the other hand, drew upon the original Sanskrit of that portion of the Mahabharata known as the “Bhagavad Gita” and amounts to preparing the mind to enter a battle that will be long and bloody. However, the music never departs from the serenity that captures Ghandi’s modest passivity. On the other hand, McDermott took a libretto that dispassionately examined the concept of monotheism and turned it into rock-star-style sensationalism.

There are wags that would claim that, after listening to several hours of Glass, the ears need a rest. I have never felt that way. Nevertheless, my eyes definitely needed a rest from McDermott’s never-ending excesses!