Seeing the Big Spin

CHICAGO--Galileo’s life and work had the character of intricate, intertwined dance. The great 17th century astronomer, mathematician and inventor understood that movement was the way of nature. He demonstrated the dance of the heavens, proving once and for all that the Earth revolved around the sun. And he delicately danced around Vatican politics as he attempted to subvert an Earth-centric scriptural interpretation with the uncommon grace of his arguments.

Philip Glass’ new opera, “Galileo Galilei,” which premiered Monday at the Goodman Theatre, has its own original ideas about movement and dance. It proceeds backward in time, from stillness and doubt to sublime, purposeful motion. The first image we see is the blind, dying astronomer no long able to peer into his telescope and having, instead, to turn his gaze grimly inward. Some 90 minutes later, with the planets personified in their orbits in a delirious opera within an opera, the music and movement become one big, happy, infectiously life-affirming swirl.

Galileo is a natural subject for Glass. In his first opera, “Einstein on the Beach,” Glass and director Robert Wilson represented the life and work of another great scientist not as biography but as a series of images, particularly of a train and spaceship, which allude to Einstein’s own studies of motion. Over the next 26 years and in nearly as many operas and music-theater works (the distinction between the two is often blurred), Glass has repeatedly returned to the interrelated themes of discovery, religion and the cosmos.

In “Akhnaten,” a pharaoh proposes a single celestial deity. Operas on discoverers Columbus in “The Voyage” and Vasco da Gama in the “White Raven” transcend their historical milieus and our planet. The science-fiction operas--”1000 Airplanes on the Roof,” “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8” and “Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five”--concern aliens from other planets.

Despite the backward narrative, “Galileo Galilei” is the closest Glass has come to conventional biography. His main collaborator is Mary Zimmerman, who won a Tony this year for her production of “Metamorphoses.” The idea for the opera was Glass’, but she wrote the libretto (with contributions from Glass and Arnold Weinstein) and directs the production.

The decor (sets by Daniel Ostling and costumes by Mara Blumenfeld) represent the period at first dully but, as Galileo gets younger, with a hint of fancy. The intention here is realistic theater rather than the magical, mysterious atmosphere that has been typical of other productions of Glass discovery operas.

There are eight scenes from Galileo’s life. As he progressively gets younger, he recants as heresy his proofs of the Earth’s revolutions, faces the Inquisition, has a sympathetic meeting with Cardinal Barberini before the cardinal becomes the less sympathetic Pope Urban VIII and presents his telescope to the Medici court in Florence. There are idylls with his daughter, the nun Maria Celeste, and there is a scene of gravitational experiments with falling balls. At the opera’s center, there is a brief theatrical setting of Galileo’s famous treatise, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World.”

The epilogue, and the most wonderful and fanciful part of the production, is the opera within an opera. The child Galileo watches a mythological work, presumably by his father, a member of the Florentine Camerata, which devised the notion of opera. At last, conventional biography is transcended. The cosmos opens up as the hunter Orion takes his place among the stars, and the court and entertainers alike revolve merrily like planets. The last bit is corny: The old Galileo has reappeared and is led to his own place in the firmament by his daughter, now an angel. But the music by this point is so joyous, the dance so irresistible, that the corn is agreeably sweet.

The history in reverse works to Glass’ advantage. The score progresses like a raga, warming up with quiet, mood-setting music and gradually getting livelier. That is often how Glass proceeds, noodling for a while as he finds his way into a drama. So, as we move in reverse through a life, already knowing the plot, the main surprise is ever fresher music. Zimmerman, too, seems happiest when she can pull away from straight biography and exult in stage movement. She is conventional in operatic settings, and the staging of the “Dialogue,” with three debaters floating on a gondola through Venice, is flat. But the pantomime of the experiment--balls on an inclined plane--is great fun.

“Galileo Galilei” is a stretch for a theater company. The cast is large, featuring fine young voices. Two veteran Glass performers, though, portray the older Galileo (the tenor John Duykers) and the younger Galileo (the baritone Eugene Perry). The facts that they do not look alike, are of different builds, races and voice types, was curiously untroubling. Both are compelling on stage, but both struggled with the high tessitura and were often hard to understand. Consequently, Galileo was at a vocal disadvantage when faced with a powerful-sounding Pope (Andrew Funk), a piercing countertenor Inquisitor (Mark Crayton) or a firm-voiced priest citing scripture (Andrew McQuery). The women--the younger and older Maria Celeste (Alicia Berneche and Elizabeth Reiter) and the Grand Duchess Christina (Mary Wilson)--were affecting.

One wonders, though, about the strain of opera singers working in a theater company that requires them to sing six days a week (some days with matinee and evening performances). The strain of a theater company performing opera was also apparent in an 11-member instrumental ensemble that sounds thin and sometimes scrappy. Beatrice Affron is the dutiful conductor.

But theater also offers the advantage of time for improvement. The production travels to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and London’s Barbican Centre in the fall.

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“Galileo Galilei” continues at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, through Aug. 4, (312) 443-3800, www.goodman-theatre.org.