Seattle Opera Goes With Glass Over Wagner

Forsaking Richard Wagner’s classic “Der Ring des Niebelungen,” the Seattle Opera has gone to the opposite extreme with a production of the minimalist “Satyagraha” by Philip Glass.

Neither the company’s general director, Speight Jenkins, nor Glass expects any backlash from Wagnerians who have made annual pilgrimages from around the world to annual productions of the Ring since 1975.

Only in Bayreuth, Germany, where Wagner built an opera house to stage his four-part musical epic in 1876, has the Ring been performed more regularly in modern times.

Performances began last Saturday and continue on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. “Satyagraha” opens the Seattle company’s 25th season, Jenkins said in an interview.

“I’ve gotten worlds of calls (saying) ‘We want the Ring back,’ but no calls saying, ‘We love the Ring, we hate this show, we want the Ring back,”’ he said.

Why “Satyagraha,” an opera in Sanskrit?

“We want to prove that opera is not just producing old works in new and exciting ways,” Jenkins said.

“It illustrates the importance of one good man,” he said. “It illustrates the importance of (the duty of) all of us to improve the life we have around us.”

The 19th-Century maestro’s lavish rendition of a Nordic myth shows the corrosive force of greed and the redemptive power of love.

The 20th-Century composer’s musical portrays Mahatma Gandhi’s years in South Africa as the root of passive resistance and nonviolent activism.

Both represent major historical developments in opera, Jenkins said.

Unlike Wagner’s lavish, complex, often explosive scores, Glass relies on small, often quiet and slowly changing themes to create a spellbinding effect.

While Wagner was working in what was then a popular, well-established medium, Glass has been instrumental in reviving opera as an outlet for late 20th-Century composers, Jenkins said.

“He is working on his fifth opera, and all those operas (completed to date) are playing to full houses,” he said. “Philip Glass operas always sell well.”

Even now, with Glass and other contemporary composers enjoying renewed popularity, opera companies hesitate to mount repeat productions of their work. “The problem with writing (opera) in the middle part of the 20th Century was that a lot of the composers were writing for other composers and not for their audiences, and they admitted it,” Jenkins explained.

Glass is one of the leading lights in modern music. Besides his own small group, the well-traveled Philip Glass Ensemble, he has written for theater, dance and film, including the sound tracks for “Koyaanisqatsi,” “Mishima” and the recently released “Powaqqatsi.”

“Satyagraha,” the second and most widely performed of his operas, was first performed by the Netherlands Opera in 1980. It was a sellout again at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York and the Lyric Opera of Chicago last year.

The Seattle performance features tenor Douglas Perry, who has had the lead in every performance to date and in a CBS Masterworks recording; Claudia Cummings, another “Satyagraha” veteran of stage and studio as Gandhi’s secretary, and Bruce Ferden, music director of the Spokane Symphony, who conducted the orchestra in the world premiere in Rotterdam.

Glass, who like Gandhi is a vegetarian, said he had long been inspired by the leader of the independence movement in India and visited there several times before the opera was commissioned by Hans De Roo of the Netherlands Opera.

“In 1977 the Gandhi film didn’t exist yet, so it was kind of a longshot in a way. Gandhi wasn’t in the news, South Africa wasn’t in the news . . . but it was something I believed could hold the stage,” he said.

The title combines the words “satya,” meaning truth or love, and “graha,” meaning power or force.

The Sanskrit libretto is based loosely on the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu religious text that was Ghandi’s lifelong inspiration, rather than on the action, which is performed in mime.

Instead of translating the words into English, “supertitles” projected onto the stage merely summarize the action.

“Oddly enough, this actually makes the whole thing easier,” Glass said. “Instead of going to the opera house and trying to understand what the people are singing, you know right away that you’re not going to understand it . . . and then you see the opera the way I wanted you to.

“I wasn’t interested in the text, really, but the people had to sing something,” he said. “I wanted the operatic experience to be completely about the images and music and very little about the text.

“I thought I could relate the story of Gandhi without recourse or the need of any text.”

Besides offering a contemporary theme and musical style for the audience, Glass’ productions cost less--especially compared with an extravaganza such as the Ring.

Jenkins said it would cost about $700,000 to mount “Satyagraha,” with ticket sales expected to cover about $450,000. The Boeing Co. has contributed $50,000 and $200,000 remains to be raised, he said.