Should new music be accessible? For American minimalist composer Philip Glass, the answer is clearly yes. That’s why millions listen to his music and why his operas have been shown everywhere from Amsterdam to New York.
It’s also why the first-night audience stood and cheered at the end of Waiting for the Barbarians last Saturday. A brand new state-of-the-art theatre in the Thuringian capital of Erfurt (Germany) saw the birth of the 68-year-old composer’s 21st opera, a two-and-a-half-hour musical translation of JM Coetzee’s 1980 novel.
Glass’s new opera takes a story that South Africans claim as their own and shows that its themes are universal. Everyone must decide how to react to institutionalised brutality. And these decisions involve a journey of self-discovery.
Since turning a novel into an opera is a tricky process, Glass chose his librettist carefully.
“I wanted a theatre person, preferably a writer, who himself has been a director and a filmmaker, to do this adaptation,” he explains. “To adapt this to the stage, it takes someone who lives in the theatre.”
He found all these qualities in Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Sunset Boulevard). Hampton’s adaptation of the novel focuses on the central figure of the magistrate, using him to link what Glass sees as the two stories within the opera. Hampton’s magistrate is a less ambiguous character than Coetzee’s. He is a thoroughly good man, fighting the fight of “the one just man” within the evil Empire.
The composer sees this conflict between good and evil as the basic text. He calls it “the easy story”. It’s the one to which we can all relate and it provides an orientation point for the more difficult exploration of the subtext, which tells the magistrate’s personal story, “a story about the difference between dreaming and reality”.
Although he had already written an opera on the life of Mahatma Gandhi (Satyagraha, 1980) before reading Waiting for the Barbarians, Glass makes no connection between the central conflicts presented in the novel and life in apartheid South Africa. Instead, he believes that the book foreshadows current global politics.
“It’s not exclusively written for a South African audience,” he says. “I think it’s very similar to George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty Four. He wrote the book in the Fifties, and at the time he wrote it, no one would have imagined that the things he was talking about would happen. But I remember very clearly, as it got closer to 1984, every event in the book, in every detail, came to pass. When I wanted to do the piece [Waiting for the Barbarians] in 1989 and I met Coetzee, I had no idea that there would be a war like that, or that there would be excuses to start a campaign, that there would be torture. I was interested in the character of the magistrate.”
He still is, but for stage director Guy Montavon and his high-profile team, this is primarily a piece about state terrorism and brutality. George Tsypin’s set is dominated by a series of human corpses, wrapped in winding sheets and lashed to poles suspended from the flies. Lit from within, they are disturbingly reminiscent of the Roman emperor Nero’s human torches.
The costumes (Hank Irwin Kittel) form a pastiche of totalitarian symbols from the past 80 years. Colonel Joll and his henchmen are kitted out with Nazi trench coats and boots; they carry baseball bats and hide behind the reflective sunglasses of the generic despot. In contrast, the barbarian torture victims wear nothing but orange pants, with small black hoods hiding their faces. The reference to Guantanamo Bay is far from subtle.
And yet, in spite of all its obvious imagery, the production is beautiful. This is largely thanks to the saturated colours of Thomas Hase’s lighting scheme. Constantly shifting shades of orange and blue transform layer upon layer of semi-opaque gauze from desert to watery dream country to city wall and back again. They provide the link to Glass’s dream world, which would otherwise be confined to a few of the magistrate’s more private musings and the diffuse score.
Glass doesn’t aim to break musical ground in Waiting for the Barbarians. “Where the primary job is to convey the meaning of the story, I try to work within a language which will be listenable. So it tends to be tonal and it tends to be rhythmic. It’s in a language that we’ll understand. The story is challenging enough, without making it any more difficult,” he says.
The score is correspondingly pictorial, with dark woodwind passages creating a heavy atmosphere, punctuated by dramatic reinforcement from the brass and some lyrical moments in the strings and upper woodwinds in the dream scenes. Vocal lines are declamatory and the text is never obscured by the music.
The desire to make the opera accessible seems to have been shared by the entire production team. Coetzee’s wonderfully nuanced allegory has been oversimplified for didactic purposes and the slick piece of theatre that has replaced it probably belongs in the realm of the musical rather than in an opera house.
But would a musical tell a story like this? For all its simplicity, Glass’s Waiting for the Barbarians clearly speaks to its Erfurt audience. Its message is strong and unequivocal. The piece goes on to Amsterdam, Austin (Texas) and Cincinnati. Accessibility, it seems, is no longer a dirty word in the new music scene.