I caught the new Met pro­duc­tion of Satya­graha this past Tues­day. There’s been reviews of this every­where (except, curi­ously, at The Rest is Noise — won­der what’s going to be in my New Yorker this week … ). I’m going to skip dis­cus­sion and review of the sub­ject, his­tory of the work, etc., because that’s easy to find elsewhere.

What I want to con­vey is my thoughts about the per­for­mance and pro­duc­tion. It’s superbly staged for the most part. What hap­pens on stage both is appro­pri­ate to the music and also adds impor­tant nar­ra­tive con­text to what is essen­tially a non-narrative drama. The pup­pet design and stage craft by Improb­a­ble is excel­lent, the only draw­back being that one wants more of it. Paul Croft as Gandhi com­manded the stage with the beauty and dig­nity of his voice. The singing was excel­lent over­all, includ­ing the cho­rus, some­thing which I think is impor­tant to point out with Glass. Most opera-goers seem to miss this aspect of his work; his vocal writ­ing is one of his great strengths. Glass not only writes idiomat­i­cally for the voice but con­sis­tently brings out great beauty of line and tim­bre. He may be a rad­i­cal in a world that end­lessly retreads the same mediocre operas, but his aes­thetic is ded­i­cated to beauty, which must be part of his gen­eral appeal. If a com­poser wishes to suc­cess­fully express ideas and drama in vocal music, the nec­es­sary first step is to write music that the ear wants more of.

As I wrote above, this is a non-narrative work. Not as ground-breaking in struc­ture as Ein­stein on the Beach, it places the par­tic­u­lar events of Gandhi’s life it cov­ers out of chrono­log­i­cal order. It intends to impress with mean­ing, essence and per­haps wis­dom, and it does so through set pieces. Glass’ style is apt for this approach, as it con­cen­trates on the illu­sion of the sta­tic moment, even as time flows and car­ries the music, and us, along. The one rough moment for the pro­duc­tion is the first part of the sec­ond act. Here, the opera itself leaves Gandhi as sub­ject and places him as object in the drama, and the struc­ture suf­fers. The pro­duc­tion team can­not quite solve this prob­lem — the stag­ing turns fussy and busy, with too many things going on in too many direc­tions. Once Gandhi takes cen­ter stage again, this prob­lem solves itself. More pro­duc­tions will hope­fully solve this problem.

The Met is ded­i­cated to the his­tory of opera, and that his­tory has a liv­ing com­po­nent. There’s still an appalling paucity of works less than 100 years old pre­sented there, but at least Glass it not a new­comer to the house. One of the fea­tures of the liv­ing, con­tem­po­rary his­tory of opera is that it is being made in the cul­tural con­text of non-linear nar­ra­tive arts: I saw the revival of Last Year at Marien­bad at Film Forum, and if the film has lost its sur­prise and provo­ca­tion for me, it just means that it’s past ripen­ing for more attempts at non-linear and non-narrative drama to take place on the opera stage. If it’s hap­pen­ing at all at the Met, and if the plea­sure of charm­ing 89 year old lady next to me is any indi­ca­tion, audi­ences are inter­ested in more.

Update: I for­got pre­vi­ously to point out the excel­lent con­duct­ing by Dante Anzolini, who main­tained focus and con­cen­tra­tion on a dif­fi­cult, idio­syn­cratic score, and built a line over the long time spans to pow­er­ful cli­maxes. He also man­aged the dif­fi­cult moments of coor­di­nat­ing cross rhythms between cho­rus and orches­tra­tion with excep­tional skill.