At the beginning of the 1970s, few would have guessed that Philip Glass would have been the one among the minimalists to emerge into broad popularity and indeed to near-repertory status. However, he was the one who saw how to take the minimalist style, basically an experiment at first, and project it onto the large-scale canvas of opera. Satyagraha, completed in 1979, was the second of Glass' Portrait Trilogy of operas about world-changing figures (Einstein on the Beach was the first, and Akhnaten the third). The opera ...
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At the beginning of the 1970s, few would have guessed that Philip Glass would have been the one among the minimalists to emerge into broad popularity and indeed to near-repertory status. However, he was the one who saw how to take the minimalist style, basically an experiment at first, and project it onto the large-scale canvas of opera. Satyagraha, completed in 1979, was the second of Glass' Portrait Trilogy of operas about world-changing figures (Einstein on the Beach was the first, and Akhnaten the third). The opera presents the early life of Mahatma Gandhi (as Mohandas K. Gandhi, in South Africa), depicted in passages from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita text, sung in Sanskrit with translation in subtitles live and in the booklet here, and with additional references to the poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The strokes are necessarily broad, and the work has been called more a pageant than a true opera. Yet what strikes one in this 2011 Metropolitan Opera production...
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