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New opera tackles racism and war

How do you bring an end to a devastating war? Forty years after Vietnam, the question once again haunts America in Iraq. As American politicians are discovering, it is an easier question to pose than to answer. The necessary solution — by stopping the fighting — is sometimes itself only a starting point. Eradicating the tensions that caused the conflict and that war itself bequeaths can be the work of decades and of generations.

Now one of America’s most distinguished contemporary composers has stepped in where politicians fear to tread. Philip Glass’ new opera Appomattox, with a libretto by Christopher Hampton, was premiered in San Francisco this weekend. It addresses the topical question of war head on through the frame of history, taking as its setting the final days of America’s 19th-century Civil War — Appomattox is the tiny village in Virginia where the south surrendered to the north in April 1865.

Those days have acquired an almost mythological status in some American eyes for the spirit of magnanimity and reconciliation between the two sides. President George W. Bush himself is said to have studied them for enlightenment. Yet the Civil War did not end with the surrender. Racial divisions continued to be vicious and, in some ways, the war is still being fought today. As Mr. Glass and Mr. Hampton are at pains to show, race remains the open wound that cuts across contemporary American life, a century and a half after President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. It is the dominant theme of this new opera.

Appomattox is at least the third opportunity that Mr. Glass, now 70, has had in his career to write the defining American opera of the post-Leonard Bernstein era. His first, Einstein on the Beach, premiered at the New York Met as far back as 1976. It was full of the hypnotic, repetitive musical phrases that marked Mr. Glass’ earlier operas such as Satyagraha (revived by English National Opera earlier this year) and Akhnaten (an ENO success 20 years ago). At first, Einstein on the Beach also attracted an enthusiastic and largely new opera audience. But the work was five hours long and lacked both a story or a conventional libretto. It has rarely been revived.

A second attempt, also commissioned by the Met, came in 1992 with The Voyage, written to mark the 500th anniversary of the crossing of the Atlantic by Christopher Columbus. But the work fell between two stools. Musically, it was a mellowing of Mr. Glass’ more defiant and idealistic style of the previous decade — dismissed by modernist critics as “music by the yard” — but the glacial distance between the music and the subject matter won few admirers.

Appomattox, commissioned by the San Francisco Opera’s new general director David Gockley, a long-time enthusiast for the composer, is still recognisably a Glass work. The characteristic arpeggio figurations, repeated minor key chords and abrupt changes of tempo between paragraphs are there in abundance. But they are much more concisely deployed than before — the work lasts half as long as Einstein on the Beach and there is far less repetition. The stylistic mellowing process has gone further than before, too. This is a musical stage work with a story, characters and an argued text, whose words Mr. Glass tries hard to make intelligible. A proper opera, in fact.

It is clear from the outset that Mr. Glass is also seeking to make a serious statement. His score is more dark, solemn and brooding than any of his earlier operas. Though the familiar dramatic distance and static style are still there, his music responds with new attentiveness to changes of situation and mood on the stage. “War is always sorrowful,” sing several of the characters at various points in the opera, “and this war the most sorrowful of all.” Let it be the last time, they add — leaving the audience to reflect that it will not be so. In a notable innovation in Mr. Glass’ style, the opera is interspersed with specially composed American colloquial music such as hymns and marching songs.

Appomattox is unlikely to acquire the cult status accorded to the earlier trilogy. But it has an engagement — at least by Mr. Glass’ own fastidious standards — that the works of the 1970s and 1980s eschewed: “I’m in a different place compared to where I was 30 years ago,” Mr. Glass writes in the programme. “I’ve moved away from the kind of idealism you see in my early works. To put it succinctly, the world is a more threatening place than it used to be.” — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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