Around 10 pm on 1 December 2011 – one of the first blisteringly cold nights of the season, and some two weeks after the police had ‘cleared’ Zuccotti Park – several hundred people associated with Occupy Wall Street began to gather in front of a barricade erected alongside the Columbus Avenue entrance to the Lincoln Center.Footnote 1 They were there for a protest inspired by Philip Glass’s Satyagraha (1980), whose depiction of Mohandas Gandhi’s early struggles against British colonial rule in South Africa was then unfolding on the other end of the plaza at the Met.Footnote 2 ‘It’s a real life play’, one man screamed across the fences. ‘The opera is your life. Your life is the opera. Satyagraha!’ ‘Opera’ and ‘real life’ would soon find themselves increasingly enmeshed. Sometime after 10:30 pm, the composer left the hall and joined the protesters, reciting a short excerpt from his libretto, which the crowd then chanted back to him, in the Occupy movement’s established ‘human megaphone’ technique. The audience began to file out around 11 pm (the din, by this point, was astonishing) and, despite police efforts to keep forcefully the two crowds separate – not so much to protect the Met patrons, it seemed, but more remarkably to prevent them from joining the protesters – many of the opera’s attendees did undo and jump the fences, swelling the mass to perhaps twice its initial size. Some (including, to much acclaim, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson) gave impromptu speeches; others were greeted with hugs.
‘There was a sense that [the] opera was not really finished giving its message until the outside action was expressed’, noted one participant.Footnote 3 Seen in these terms, the protest may seem less to have resembled the demonstrations that would be organised on the same block three years later to denounce performances of The Death of Klinghoffer, and more the mythic outpourings of revolutionary sympathy that allegedly gripped European opera audiences in the 1830s and 1840s. As Alex Ross (himself briefly detained by the police) observed the following day, the crowd’s anger ‘was directed not at [Satyagraha] itself but at a certain disparity between its lofty moral message and the machinery of corporate arts funding’.Footnote 4
That the ‘message’ of Glass’s opera was consonant with the aims of Occupy Wall Street – and, relatedly, innocent of the normal ‘machinery’ of operatic spectacle – is an assumption shared by both Satyagraha’s rowdy liberators and its most distinguished critics. Daniel Mendelsohn, in an uncharacteristically gushing review of the Met production, suggested that ‘What Satyagraha aims at, in both its text and its music, is a kind of meditative state of spiritual elevation that allows us to think clearly about Gandhi’s goodness and its effects, rather than to get wrapped up in his “drama”.’Footnote 5 In this, he echoed Tim Page’s New Grove essay, which similarly claimed that Satyagraha is ‘vastly different from traditional music drama’, ‘designed on a moral, indeed religious, plane, and as such is closer to ritual than entertainment, to mystery play than standard opera’.Footnote 6 Glass’s achievement may seem all the more remarkable give that he had originally been commissioned (by the City of Rotterdam) to write a ‘real opera’ that capitalised on the para-institutional success of Einstein on the Beach.Footnote 7 Yet the facts of Satyagraha’s commission and its subsequent canonisation might also prompt us to listen a bit more closely to Glass’s setting of the very text he intoned on that cold night in 2011: ‘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.’
In Satyagraha, these lines from the Bhagavad Gita are sung (in Sanskrit) by Gandhi at the very conclusion of the opera. It is the evening after the heroic 1913 New Castle March, and the great man is alone on stage. His vocal line, famously, consists of nothing but a slowly and unceasingly ascending Phrygian scale, repeated some thirty times. (The scale begins on the E above middle C, and falls comfortably and unostentatiously within the range of the lyric tenors who always sing the role.) ‘Thirty times’ glimmers like a talisman in writing on Gandhi’s ‘Evening Song’, but the aria’s repetitions are, if anything, more thoroughgoing. On the one hand, a Phrygian scale itself consists of two symmetrical segments: a semitone followed by a sequence of whole tones, then again, and as such an icon of tension supplanted by purity, in flight. On the other hand, Gandhi’s scales are themselves organised into ten larger units of three iterations each. (Every larger unit is framed by an extended, pregnant vocal silence, during which the orchestra shifts reflectively from triple metre into common time.) Underneath these concentric cycles – pain, clarity; singing, thought – a more quickly flowing accompaniment builds and climaxes not unlike a conventional chaconne, through cycles twice the length of the vocal units: first strings alone; then a gentle, arpeggiated woodwind countermelody; then a newly forceful bass line; then a higher countermelody; and finally the full, enriched ensemble.Footnote 8 The vocal cycles may grow indistinct and lull you, but the orchestral background expands outwards, gaining strength. At the Met, this musical process had a strong visual counterpart in the figure of an actor portraying Martin Luther King, Jr: elevated on a podium far above Gandhi, but facing away from him and the audience, his arms moved slowly up and down. It was a gesture familiar from footage of King’s speeches, but at this tempo suggested images of swimmers and birds. Before the final cycles, King turned to gaze through time upon Gandhi, and us.
It is easy to read the aria’s musical and gestural repetitions as painting – in a manner unusual for minimalism – the meaning of its sacred text, which describes a cycle of reincarnations progressing mystically towards a final goal. It is also tempting to associate the opera’s intensifying iterations of the same material with the echoes and amplifications produced by the ‘human megaphone’ on the other end of the Lincoln Center. According to Mendelsohn,
Not least because it is about an Indian, one whose modus operandi was, you could say, to keep repeating small and ostensibly modest acts – nothing violent, nothing ‘dramatic’ – in the service of a great and good goal, Glass’s Gandhi opera, Satyagraha, may well be the most effectively achieved of his three musical portraits for the stage; in it, form and content are perfectly aligned.Footnote 9
Yet to describe Satyagraha as a work in which Glass’s long-standing technical preoccupations and his liberal politics meet in perfect symmetry is to ignore all the more complex questions posed by minimalism as a style – to refuse to think about all the other things that repetition might do, and mean.Footnote 10 Alternately, one might consider Gandhi’s ‘Evening Song’ alongside Steve Reich’s Come Out (1966) or even Luciano Berio’s O King (1968), pieces in which marginalised, politically urgent voices gain power and aesthetic interest at precisely the moment they lose coherence as individual speech. It seems worth noting too that Gandhi’s aria is equally compelling in widely disseminated transcriptions for organ and piano. Satyagraha’s culminant and most beautiful scene is also its shortest and most marketable excerpt.
For me, Gandhi’s final aria might most productively be described as a self-conscious and somewhat resigned rewriting of Isolde’s Liebestod. (These transcendent, repetitive last act showstoppers share quite a few dramaturgical features and musical techniques. Gandhi’s melody is even based on an instrumental motive concealed in the opera’s first act.)Footnote 11 By suggesting this, I aim not to reinforce Satyagraha’s status as a masterpiece but rather to restore its status as an opera, and as a document of a quite specific moment in the history of the form. Satyagraha in many regards initiated the genre of American ‘neo-grand opera’ that would rise to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, and it also marks the point at which Glass’s earlier musical and dramatic experimentalism would cede to the more conventional style of his later works.Footnote 12 (The fact that his and Adams’s historical spectacles occasionally incite nineteenth-century-style protests and calls for censorship in a way that more properly avant-garde works never do may suggest that we are dealing with a phenomenon even more thoroughly ‘neo’ than we thought.) But if Gandhi’s Wagnerian peroration lays claim to an earlier operatic legacy, it does so by retreating behind those boundaries separating opera from real life. That, perhaps, is what the repetitions tell us. Glass is not the first composer to be attracted to ‘Eastern’ philosophy; Satyagraha is not the first music drama to be praised for drawing ‘closer to ritual than entertainment’; Occupy Wall Street will not be the last revolution to find itself shortchanged by the false promises of art.
