Philip Glass: Satyagraha and Contemporary Opera

68 interview 69 Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha had its Am.erican premiere at Artpark in L-wiston, New York this past summer and its New York Citypremibre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November. It was commissioned by the City of Rotterdam in 1980. Since 1968 Glass has composed and performed in over three hundred concerts as both a solo performer and with The Philip Glass Ensemble. He received a special OBIE award in 1976 for his compositions for Mabou Mines. His opera Einstein on the Beach, written in collaboration with Robert Wilson, toured widely in Europe in 1976, and received its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in November of that year. Among his many albums are Music With Changing Parts and North Star; Glass recently signed a recording contract with CBS Masterworks. This interview was conducted by John Howell in October 1981. John Howell is the editor of LIVE (a PAJ Publications magazine) and a Contributing Editor of Performing Arts Journal. Why do you think very few composers have worked in both opera and concert music at the same time? Is that true? There's Mozart, Beethoven did one opera, Dvorak wrote about nine.... Handel, Britten too, but the list is very short. I know you've written vocal music since the beginning of your composing career. I wrote a lot of vocal music when I was just out of music school. Within the first two years after I left Juilliard, I wrote some twenty choral pieces, so I was pretty well prepared when I began writing Satyagraha. Of course, I had written that big choral piece for the Carnegie Hall concert in 1978, Another Look at Harmony, Part 4, and there was a lot of choral music in Einstein on the Beach. [Glass's notes on Einstein appear in PAJ 6, 1978.] So I've done a lot of vocal music but it's not that well known because most people associate me with Ensemble music. When I met you, you were making up pieces for The Saint and the Football Players, and had already written music for The Red Horse Animation and for Music for Voices, all for Mabou Mines. So I thought of you as a vocal composer as well because you didn't seem to make any distinctions between vocal and instrumental music composition. Writing for voices is kind of a specialty, it takes a long time to learn how to do it. There's a lot to be learned about the voice and I'm still learning. Satyagraha is the most vocal piece that I've done in the sense that the 70 voices really stand out as voices and are not used instrumentally. With the Ensemble, the voices are used in an instrumental way, but by Dance 5, the voice has separated from the Ensemble. That happened partly because I began to work more and more with people who had legitimate vocal training . You used to avoid those people. Yes. For the most part, singers work within a very limited range of music and sing in a certain style which is not appropriate for my music. With the Einstein On the Beach music, I was working with non-singers and I got out of them what I wanted, but there were real limitations in what they could do. Since Satyagraha was commissioned by an opera house, I was given trained singers, and at that point I addressed myself to the problems and possibilities of real vocal writing. Then what I tried to do was to convey the style of singing I wanted in the opera, and I was more or less successful. Doug Perry has a beautiful, clear tenor and I can find nothing wrong with the way he sings. With some of the others, it was a problem to get them to adapt to the kind of very extended singing that was required. For example, I didn't want heavy vibrato or warbling on stage. Does all of that come under the heading of bel canto? Generally speaking it derives from bel canto although my knowledge of opera history and tradition is pretty sketchy. In your vocal work for...