Philip Glass’ “Satyagraha” will be given its Metropolitan Opera premiere next season as part of a co-production with the English National Opera.
Glass’ opera, which had its world premiere in 1980, focuses on Mohandas K. Gandhi’s years in South Africa and features Glass’ repeated musical patterns. The title is the Sanskrit word for “force through truth,” and the libretto is based on the Hindu text “Bhagavad-Gita.”
“‘Satyagraha’ is one of the operas that I first identified as a piece the Met should be producing,” Met general manager Peter Gelb said Wednesday. “It’s one of the major contemporary masterpieces. I believe it’s perhaps Philip Glass’ most important work.”
Part of Glass’ portrait trilogy with “Einstein on the Beach” and “Akhnaten,” “Satyagraha” had its world premiere in Rotterdam, Netherlands. This new production opens at the ENO on April 5, 2007, as part of a celebration of the minimalist composer’s 70th birthday year and arrives at the Met on April 11, 2008, starring Richard Croft as Gandhi. It will be directed by Phelim McDermott and designed by Julian Crouch of Britain’s Improbable theater company.
Glass’ only previous opera produced by the Met was “The Voyage,” which was commissioned by the company for the 500th anniversary of Columbus discovering America and opened in 1992.
“One of my artistic initiatives for reconnecting the Met to the mainstream of the opera world and to culture in general is to focus each season on major contemporary pieces, either ones that have not been performed previously at the Met or directed by the Met or new commissions,” said Gelb, who took the Met helm Aug. 1.
Gelb has scheduled the Met premiere of John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic” for the 2008-9 season, a revival of John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles” the following season with Angela Gheorghiu and Kristin Chenoweth and a world premiere of an opera by Osvaldo Golijov in 2010-11.
The Met and the ENO also collaborated on a production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” by director Anthony Minghella that opened Gelb’s first season in September.
“Satyagraha,” which has a libretto by Glass and Constance DeJong, was given its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1982.
“Has there ever been an opera that went so far on so few musical ideas?” The New York Times’ Donal Henahan wrote, saying it had “a score whose chief aim seems to be to induce the drugged, trancelike state that lies beyond boredom.”
On Dec. 21, the Met presents the world premiere of Tan Dun’s “The First Emperor,” commissioned under Gelb’s predecessor, Joseph Volpe.
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