Philip Glass’s place in musical history is secure. His sprawling, churning, monumentally obsessive works of the nineteen-seventies—“Music with Changing Parts,” “Music in Twelve Parts,” “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha”—have fascinated several generations of listeners, demonstrating mesmeric properties that are as palpable as they are inexplicable. Twice in recent months, I’ve been gripped by the almost occult power of early Glass. Most memorably, I had my first live encounter with “Einstein,” his epic 1976 collaboration with Robert Wilson, which, twenty years after its last revival, is being prepared for a yearlong international tour. Three preview performances took place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in mid-January; the official première will be in Montpellier, France, in March.
Accounts of earlier stagings of “Einstein” primed me for transcendence; more than a few friends had told me that the work had changed their lives. For the first hour or so, though, I worried that the phenomenon might have faded. Each element of Glass and Wilson’s pop-absurdist fantasy on Einstein-ian themes came recognizably to life: the cool recitation of numbers, the frantic mathematical gesturing, the purring Gertrude Stein-like texts (“These are the days my friends / It could get some wind for the sailboat”), the locomotive inching across the stage, the violin-playing Einstein, the iconic beams of light, and, underneath it all, those moto-perpetuo arpeggios and churchlike drones. Yet I felt a bit detached, as if watching a reënactment of a lost culture. Then, during “Dance 1,” as the music fell into a furiously pulsing polymetrical scheme and Lucinda Childs’s dancers darted about like limber androids, the bliss kicked in. It was a feeling of abstract intellectual delight, a pure interplay of musical and physical motion.
What is going on here, beyond primal pleasures of sight and sound? The musicologist Robert Fink, in his book “Repeating Ourselves,” relates the insistent repetitions of Glass and his onetime ally Steve Reich to the strategies of modern advertising. A 1957 report noted that shoppers in a supermarket move around in a “hypnoidal trance,” their consumer longings stoked by slogans that have been endlessly drilled into their heads. As Fink points out, one of the most famous scenes in “Einstein” is a monologue beginning with the lines “I was in this prematurely air-conditioned supermarket,” in which a speaker rattles on about a display of bathing caps with “Fourth of July plumes on them.” The performer—originally Childs, now Kate Moran—delivers the anecdote several dozen times, and by the end the audience can recite along. Here, though, no transaction is taking place; indeed, the speaker specifies that instead of buying a cap she was “reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding the beach.” The ecstatic meaninglessness of such repetitions, Fink suggests, is an oblique protest against the machinery of consumption. “Einstein” shows how great art can be assembled from junk fragments of an anti-artistic society. It makes us happy because it creates a private wonderland, a beach of the mind.
No less remarkable than this “Einstein” was the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of “Satyagraha,” in November and December. As pointed as “Einstein” is obscure, “Satyagraha” shows episodes from Mohandas Gandhi’s campaigns of nonviolent resistance in South Africa, the title meaning “truth force” in Sanskrit. The production, by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, of the Improbable theatre company, immaculately splits the difference between the historical and the visionary, intermingling scenes of Gandhi in action with vividly imagined motifs out of the Bhagavad Gita, from which the sung text is drawn. This is Glass’s most formidable score, with minimalist processes acquiring symphonic heft: the “Protest” scene of Act II is driven by a grandly plunging, minor-mode theme, recalling the opening of Mahler’s First Symphony. Richard Croft gave an indelible performance as Gandhi, his fine-grained tenor at once fragile and commanding—limitless power within a slender frame.
The contradictions inherent in presenting a Gandhi opera at one of the world’s most richly endowed performing-arts institutions, even as protests against income inequality erupted downtown, inspired a notable demonstration on the last night of the run. A group allied with Occupy Wall Street gathered at the edge of Lincoln Center Plaza, berating the police, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the right-wing billionaire David H. Koch, a Lincoln Center donor. When “Satyagraha” ended and operagoers left the Met, some defied a police barricade and joined the protest. Glass did as well, and he addressed the crowd, making use of the “human microphone” of call and response. All he did was to utter the final lines of his opera: “When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.” He said those words twice more, mingled for a little while, got into a cab, and went home. As in the greatest moments of his music, Glass delivered a message of awe-inspiring simplicity.
Glass turned seventy-five on January 31st, and Carnegie Hall marked the occasion by presenting the first American performance of his Ninth Symphony, with the American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. The world première took place on New Year’s Day, in Linz, Austria, where Davies, one of Glass’s most determined advocates, leads the Bruckner Orchestra Linz. (Orange Mountain Music, the composer’s label, has already issued a recording through iTunes.) Like many symphonists before him, Glass felt a twinge of unease as he approached the allegedly cursed No. 9—where Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorák, Bruckner, Mahler, and Vaughan Williams, among others, faltered—and so he took the precaution of writing a Tenth around the same time.
Yes, the formerly outlandish composer of “Einstein” is now a prolific creator of symphonies, concertos, quartets, and operas in a more conventional vein, not to mention a heap of film scores. There are some gems in Glass’s later output—the Études for piano, the Fifth String Quartet, the recent “Songs and Poems” for solo cello—as well as a fair number of middling, self-derivative pieces, which make heavy use of a few set formulas: minor-mode sequences chugging toward a dominant chord; bouncy syncopations over a thudding beat; “world music” episodes decorated with exotic percussion. His radical politics notwithstanding, Glass too often becomes one more commodity in the cultural supermarket.
The new symphony, a three-movement piece lasting fifty minutes, digs a little deeper. The “Protest” theme from “Satyagraha” is echoed at the beginning, setting a sombre mood worthy of a Ninth. The structure is unpredictable, with the plaintive middle movement enclosing a tumultuous dance and the outer movements fading into ghostly codas suggestive of the wasteland endings of Shostakovich’s Fourth and Fifteenth Symphonies. The harmony is, in places, arrestingly thick and hazy, the layering of motifs engagingly contrapuntal. Yet the formulas remain. When the tom-toms picked up again in the finale, I mentally checked out: the gesture had been made too many times before, not just in the past three decades but in the past thirty minutes.
Further birthday celebrations will offer loftier achievements. In late February, a four-day festival at the Park Avenue Armory will present “Music in Twelve Parts,” Glass’s instrumental tour-de-force, alongside works of younger artists the composer admires, such as Tania León, Vijay Iyer, and Nico Muhly. (Glass is legendary for assisting colleagues behind the scenes.) The “Einstein” tour arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September. There will be more symphonies, more concertos, an opera about the life of Walt Disney. Perhaps Glass will finally produce a late-period masterpiece to rival “Einstein” and “Satyagraha”—or perhaps he will finish more quietly. Either way, his industry brings to mind the lines of Wallace Stevens: “One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. / One beats and beats for that which one believes.” ♦
