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Through A Glass Darkly
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10469 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
1,336 Words |
| Author
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Philip Kennicott
Philip Kennicott, based in New York, is a writer on
performance arts. |
A century ago, when the industrial world was first beginning to mark self-congratulatory holidays like the quadricentennial of Columbus' first New World voyage, at least two operas appeared to celebrate the event. In Italy, Alberto Franchetti produced an unjustly neglected epic, Cristoforo Colombo, while in the United States Silas Gamaliel Pratt produced a much inferior medley of grand opera clichés called The Triumph of Columbus. Although neither work has stood the test of time, and while public response to the five hundredth anniversary has ranged from apathetic to downright hostile, the Metropolitan Opera nevertheless celebrated the October 12 holiday with a premiere of yet another Columbus opera: Philip Glass' three-act The Voyage. Unfortunately, even if all the mitigating circumstances are taken into account such as the political controversy about Old World colonialism, the sheer size of Glass' work, and the difficulty of getting an essentially conservative institution to do justice to a decidedly contemporary musical and theatrical aesthetic Glass' most recent opus was a failure.
There is an important distinction, however, between a failure and a disaster. The Voyage falls into the former category because it accomplishes very little, either intellectually, emotionally, or dramatically. But because it was clearly well crafted, expertly staged, and beautifully performed, it cannot in all fairness be called a disaster.
The Voyage has a traditional operatic score with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, author of the popular Broadway play M. Butterfly. Unlike some of Glass' earlier operas, especially his five hour Einstein on the Beach, the libretto of The Voyage is essentially narrative. The scenario juxtaposes a stylized (and completely fabricated) romance between Columbus and Isabella with a futurist scenario about aliens and earthlings longing for some distant, metaphorical sense of home. An opening prologue introduces the theme of discovery and announces Glass' fascination with the peculiar duality of man: He is both physically frail and spiritually restless. The first act introduces the crew of a spaceship, hurtling out of control toward earth some fifty centuries ago; the second is free fantasia on Columbus at the Spanish court of Granada, followed by a shipboard scene en route to America. A third act, set in 2092, presents man's belated return to the world from which the first-act voyagers came; finally, the epilogue returns to Columbus on his death bed and concludes with the explorer's assumption to the heavens. Unfortunately, Glass' vocal setting is so awkward that most of the details of the libretto were unintelligible without reading it beforehand.
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