(5 of 6)
Glass's style was evolving beyond the severe tenets of minimalism; the extreme sparseness of his idiom was giving way to a new melodic sensuousness. The pounding, rock-influenced sound was still there, but hints of traditional harmony had begun to creep in. "I just couldn't throw out my Western music and education entirely," he explains. Today he no longer considers his music minimalist, although the label has stuck.
In 1973 the Glass Ensemble performed at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, which was run by Michel Guy, a French aristocrat fascinated by the New York avant-garde. Appointed Secretary of State for Culture the next year, Guy later commissioned Einstein on the Beach, which had its premiere in July 1976 after a year of rehearsals. The unconventional Einstein was a near pantomime set to Wilson's typically elliptical spoken texts and allusive stage pictures of railroad trains and spaceships. There were no formal arias or indeed any set pieces at all; a small chorus sang "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight" and solfege syllables (do, re, mi) over hypnotic, relentless music. Sellout audiences loved it. The work toured Europe and then came to the Met in November.
In America, the work attracted widespread attention, both pro and con, but it ran up a deficit of $100,000; to pay off his share, Glass went back to driving a cab. The experience was worth the price. "The main thing about Einstein is that it put me on the world theater map," he says. "After that I could work in the theater -- not at will, but something close to it."
Glass's next operatic opportunity came in 1978, with a $25,000 commission from the city of Rotterdam for Satyagraha. Glass decided the work would be sung in Sanskrit, a mellifluous, vowel-rich language, to a text drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita. As his subject he chose Mohandas Gandhi's early years in South Africa, during which Gandhi developed his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. If the elemental Einstein was Glass's breakthrough, the gentle, serene Satyagraha was the first major work of his mature style. By poignantly transforming a flute line from the second scene into Gandhi's eloquent apostrophe to freedom at the end, Glass created one of the most powerful moments in modern opera. The melody is simplicity itself -- a scale consisting of the tones from E to E on the white notes of a piano, repeated 36 times -- but the purity of its calm resolve has the effect of an emotional tidal wave.
Akhnaten is the third of Glass's trilogy of operas about remarkable men. A musically luminous treatment of the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh some consider history's first monotheist, it unfolds in gradual waves to reveal two particularly striking moments: a ravishing trio for Akhnaten (a countertenor), his mother and his wife in the first act; and Akhnaten's glorious hymn to the sun disk in Act II. The prevailing mood, though, is dark and brooding, emphasized by Glass's use of an orchestra without violins. Rich in detail and sharp in characterization, Akhnaten is