MUSIC : A ‘Voyage’ Into Uncharted Waters : Philip Glass and crew--David Henry Hwang and David Pountney--venture into new territory at the Met

When the curtain rises on the world premiere of Philip Glass’ “The Voyage” at the Metropolitan Opera House Monday night, three men will sight land after a long artistic journey. Commissioned to mark the Columbus quincentennial, the opera is the fruit of a collaboration among Glass, librettist David Henry Hwang and stage director David Pountney that began six years ago.

The result, a lavishly produced work reputed to be one of the more expensive ever mounted at the Met, features baritone Timothy Noble singing the role of Columbus, mezzo-soprano Tatiana Troyanos as Queen Isabella and Bruce Ferden conducting. And if past performance is a reliable indicator, the English-language opera by the composer of “Einstein on the Beach” and “Satyagraha” promises to be unconventional, challenging and almost certainly not dull.

“It’s an allegorical opera in which Columbus plays a part in the overall allegory of discovery,” Glass said during a recent interview in his East Village brownstone. “It’s really about the creative process in a way, isn’t it? Because what the creative process shares (with exploration) is the ability to leave the familiar and venture into the unknown.”

Indeed, though the opera receives its premiere on Columbus Day, “The Voyage” is no ordinary chronicle of the explorer’s quest. Columbus himself appears only in Act II, which is devoted to his arduous voyage, and in an epilogue. The opera as a whole explores the pleasures and terrors of exploration itself, as seen through Columbus and through imagined travelers of the past and future. In Act I, space voyagers from a far-off galaxy hurtle in their ship toward Earth at the end of the Ice Age, crash-landing among an unknown people. In Act III, set in the year 2092, astronauts from Earth embark in search of those original Ice-Age visitors, knowing they will not fulfill their quest for generations.

And while the epilogue, set around Columbus’ deathbed, does catalogue the explorer’s now-familiar depredations in the New World, the opera as a whole is concerned less with biography and more with the larger issue of exploration, with the spaceship a sort of celestial Santa Maria, carrying its passengers to uncharted worlds.

“By approaching this whole subject in this way, we’re able to ‘elevate’ the subject of Columbus from a didactic history lesson, which I never would have done, or even a politically correct analysis, which of course is just a big yawn,” Glass says. “It would simply be no fun to go to the Met and see an opera about Columbus beating up the Indians. If they want to do that in Hollywood, they can do what they want, but it isn’t good enough for the theater. The opera house is where poetry can come alive. It’s not about history.”

For the composer, a fascination with the cosmos has been a recurring theme in such works as “Einstein,” “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8,” based on the Doris Lessing novel, and “1,000 Airplanes on the Roof,” a music-theater piece done in collaboration with Hwang.

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“I think science fiction is a kind of popular mythology,” Glass says. “When I talk about a spaceship coming into the solar system and landing, everybody knows that story. So I can then bend that idea to the allegorical purposes of the opera.”

Glass’ journey into this work began in 1986, when he approached the Met with an outline of “The Voyage.” Two years later, the organization responded with a $325,000 commission, reportedly the largest it ever paid for a new work. For the 55-year-old Glass, who began his career in tiny downtown performance spaces, the commission is a true badge of legitimacy. But as he hastens to point out, that opulent sum included the fees for his various “subcontractors”: librettist and copyists, agents and attorneys.

“By the time you pay out everything and divide it by four years, I’m not living on the streets, but it’s not a lot of money,” Glass says. “But then again, that wasn’t the motivation to begin with.”

Shortly after the commission, Hwang, the Tony-winning author of “M. Butterfly,” entered the project for his maiden foray into the seldom-practiced art of libretto writing. “I really felt that my function in this collaboration was to work to facilitate the composer’s vision,” Hwang said. “Obviously, that involves bringing some of myself to it and trying to sketch out some themes that tie the triptych together, as well as fleshing out the characters.” But even fleshed out, the text is deliberately bare-bones. Hwang’s spare, poetic text evokes the isolation of the explorer, whether in outer space or on the open sea.

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To introduce the triptych, Glass and Hwang begin the opera with a prologue featuring a scientist reminiscent of the physicist Stephen Hawking. From his wheelchair, he sings of the power of an explorer’s fervor to transcend the limitations of the body. “Here’s someone who’s unable to take any physical voyages, but certainly takes the most extensive voyages in spite of that,” Hwang says.

In the body of the work, Hwang unites the three voyages with recurrent images common to any journey into the unknown. Foremost among them is the tension that inevitably arises when two cultures meet, a recurring theme in the playwright’s own work. In a striking scene at the end of Act I, the spaceship’s commander sings of her anxieties and prejudices as she prepares to meet the “natives” of Ice-Age Earth: “Yes, I suppose that love and that hate / Mingle like blood between the sheets / When two worlds meet.” The natives themselves then echo the same lines.

“For me,” Hwang says, “it’s an exploration of what constitutes ‘The Other’ and that the idea of ‘The Other’ is always present and always relative to oneself.”

Once Hwang completed the libretto, Glass set to work on the score. For the composer, the challenge of “The Voyage” was to find a distinct musical idiom appropriate to the new work. “I was writing for the Met orchestra, which is the best opera orchestra you’re going to find,” Glass says. “So I was unfettered in a certain way. First of all, the work is more ambitious orchestrally. Second of all, I was writing for bigger voices.”

The result, by all accounts, continues the composer’s evolution away from his minimalist style of the 1960s and ‘70s, in which small rhythmic units are repeated and subtly varied over a long stretch of time, to the lusher, more melodic writing that has marked his later works. Baritone Timothy Noble recalls being pleasantly surprised when he heard the music for the first time.

“I was very leery of new pieces, because they are so angular vocally,” he says. “They have these huge, terrible leaps and skips from the bottom part of the voice to the top part, and I just really wasn’t interested in doing something like that. (Last year) they sent me some snippets of what he was writing and I thought it was beautiful. There’s really nice vocal writing in this, so I went ahead with it.”

Despite its melodic character, the score still retains some of the hallucinatory repetition associated with Glass’ earlier work, Noble says. To illustrate, he sings into the telephone a passage from Act II, a repeated, undulating scale that rises and falls in accompaniment to Columbus’ sea journey. “It’s like being on the ocean,” he says.

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With the score and libretto underway, Pountney, the director of productions at the English National Opera, joined Glass and Hwang on their creative voyage. For the director, whose radical, modernized productions of classic operas have branded him the enfant terrible of the European stage, “The Voyage” offered the chance to ply uncharted waters.

“The most natural thing in the world is to be doing a new piece,” Pountney says. “The only reason why all these rehashes of old pieces turn into sort of scandals, is after you go on repeating an old piece for a certain length of time, there comes almost a need to radicalize its interpretation. There isn’t that need with a new piece . . . so one can approach it and simply respond to the work as it is. If you do ‘Carmen,’ you can’t avoid (its) history. It’s there like a huge, full wastepaper basket.”

Especially liberating, Pountney says, is the directorial freedom that Glass’ music affords. “The music does not in any way attempt to imitate or describe what the action is, unlike a score of Puccini, where every little cough of a character is composed,” he says. “So you can really paint a much more free-flowing picture that is associated with the text but isn’t slavishly following it.”

With the aid of scenic designer Robert Israel and costume designer Dunya Ramicova, Pountney painted a sweeping picture on the Met stage, marshaling the company’s extensive technical resources. With nine different sets and more than 500 costumes, the production is lavish even by the standards of a house accustomed to mounting blockbusters. While the Met declines to reveal the production cost for the opera, sources estimate the price tag to run about $1.5 million, about a half-million dollars more than last season’s world premiere production, John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles.”

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When the curtain rises Monday, the discrete strands of music, text and staging will at last be interwoven. Hwang’s spare libretto, with its poetic language and gentle humor, will be set off by Pountney’s staging on sets that run the gamut from a baroque, if slightly out-of-kilter, Spanish court to avant-garde images of cornfields and the Statue of Liberty in the futuristic third act. But ultimately, Glass, maintains, it is the score that truly holds the work together.

“In the designs, there’s a different look to each act and I have a different story to each act,” he says. “It seems that the music in fact should be the through-line.” To that end, Glass interspersed an augmented triad--an unsettling chord that begs to be resolved--throughout the score, finally resolving it at the end of the opera.

And it is on his score, Glass says, that “The Voyage” will stand or fall. “No matter if I talk about collaboration, the opera house is the composer’s world,” he says. “If the music doesn’t make its case, there’s no work there, no matter how good everything else is.”

How audiences and critics will gauge the success of this collaborative voyage remains to be seen. As Glass and his crew near land, the composer, who in the past has steadfastly maintained his indifference to reviews, is philosophical. “There’s a level of accomplishment that brings with it a reward which is so tangible that you almost say, ‘Well, I don’t care anymore,’ ” says Glass. “Of course we do care. But this can never be taken away from us. And hopefully it will be shared by other people.”

Land, ho.