PHILIP GLASS — SATYAGRAHA (PARIS, OPERA GARNIER)

Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, staged at the Opéra de Paris under the inventive direction of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, and conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, unfolds as a mesmerizing convergence of music, movement, and meditation. From the very first notes, Glass’s minimalist score, with its repeating arpeggios and slowly evolving harmonies, establishes a hypnotic rhythm that permeates the auditorium. The production immerses the audience in a contemplative sonic landscape, where every gesture, vocal line, and musical phrase seems charged with quiet spiritual intensity.

The singers deliver performances of extraordinary precision and expressive subtlety. Anthony Roth Costanzo (counter-tenor) captivates with ethereal, floating tones that underscore the opera’s meditative quality, while sopranos Ilanah Lobel-Torres and Olivia Boen offer luminous, sustained passages that echo the score’s hypnotic repetition. The baritones, Davone Tines and Amin Ahangaran, bring a grounding, resonant presence, and the chorus—including Adriana Bignani-Lesca (alto), Deepa Johnny (mezzo-soprano), Nicky Spence (tenor), and Nicolas Cavallier (bass)—provides a collective voice of moral steadfastness, weaving together the soloists’ lines into a tapestry of contemplative intensity. Each vocal entrance and sustained note enhances the work’s ritualistic cadence, inviting the audience into a heightened state of attention and spiritual reflection.

 

Smith and Schraiber’s choreography accentuates this trance-like atmosphere. Dancers move with deliberate, almost ritualistic precision, their physicality mirroring the hypnotic patterns of the music. The interplay of orchestra, singers, and movement creates a rare form of immersive theatre: time seems suspended, and the stage transforms into a space for shared contemplation rather than narrative drive.

The spiritual dimension of Satyagraha is heightened by its oratorio-like qualities. Sung in Sanskrit, the text invokes ancient wisdom, and the singers’ vocal lines, from the ethereal counter-tenor to the sonorous bass, articulate a collective sense of devotion. The production renders Glass’s minimalist score not merely as music, but as an enveloping experience of mindfulness, resilience, and ethical steadfastness.

Ultimately, this staging at the Paris Opera transforms Satyagraha into an almost sacred experience. It is less about dramatic climaxes than about immersion, repetition, and reverent attention. One leaves the theatre not merely entertained but subtly altered, carried along by the serene insistence of persistence and contemplation, delivered as powerfully through the singers’ ethereal and grounded presence as through music and movement.

JOHN ADAMS' NIXON IN CHINA

John Adams’ Nixon in China stands as a landmark in contemporary opera precisely because of its distinctive musical language, which blends post-minimalist energy with cinematic lyricism. From the opening notes, the score establishes a hypnotic, propulsive rhythm that mirrors the relentless choreography of politics, while still leaving room for introspective nuance.

 

Adams’ orchestration is remarkable in its clarity and color. Strings often provide a shimmering, almost ethereal backdrop, while woodwinds and brass punctuate moments of political ceremony or personal tension. Percussion, from delicate cymbal washes to insistent rhythmic patterns, adds both drama and momentum, creating a sense of inexorability, as though the historical events themselves are unfolding in real time before the audience.

Harmonically, Adams favors slow-moving shifts and layered textures over traditional Western progression. This allows repeated motifs to accumulate emotional weight, making even seemingly simple phrases resonate deeply. The music often feels both monumental and intimate at once: the vastness of global politics is conveyed without sacrificing the human vulnerability of the characters.

Vocal writing is equally sophisticated. The roles demand singers capable of sustained lyrical lines within a rhythmic, almost speech-like framework. Nixon’s arias, for example, combine declamatory passages with moments of unexpected tenderness, while Mao and Pat Nixon are framed by music that underscores both authority and quiet introspection. The interplay between ensemble and orchestra is carefully calibrated; Adams’ choral writing, particularly in the mass ceremonial scenes, transforms the chorus into both a visual and sonic instrument, embodying collective ritual without diminishing individual expression.

One of the most striking achievements of the score is how it captures time and place. The music evokes the grandeur and strangeness of Maoist China through subtle modal inflections and occasional pentatonic gestures, yet it remains unmistakably Adams: American, modern, and psychologically attuned. The combination of repetitive motifs, layered textures, and shifting tonalities creates a sound world that feels both contemporary and timeless—a mirror of the historical and human themes at the opera’s core.

John Adams’ music in Nixon in China is a masterclass in post-minimalist opera. It transforms political history into living drama, using rhythm, texture, and vocal lyricism to illuminate both the monumental and the personal. It is music that lingers long after the final note, compelling the listener to reconsider the interplay between power, history, and human emotion.

[READING] BERIO ON THE IDEA OF MUSICAL THEATER

Opéra National de Paris. Pelléas et Mélisande – Elena Tsallagova (Mélisande), Stéphane Degout (Pelléas), Stage set up by Bob Wilson, 2012  © Charles duprat

 

"We are close to an idea of musical theater that is a theater of the mind and memory, perhaps a virtual theater, a theater that invites our attention to constantly oscillate between listening and looking and back again, a theater that constructively challenges those who watch and those who listen, that arouses the desire to listen with one's eyes and look with one's ears. Eyes that can listen to different things from the same perspective and ears that may see only one thing, but from different perspectives. In other words, we are thinking of a theater made intelligible not only by the things we see and hear, but also by the desire to penetrate, discover, and confuse the different times of sounds and images.

Seeing music. The need to seek a link between image and sound comes from far away, from an ancient synesthetic vision of the world. Exodus 20:18: “And all the people saw the thunder and lightning and the sound of the shofar.”

The link between light and sound, between light and speech, is common to almost all stories of origins, primordial events, myths, and world consciousness, and music often seems to become the most powerful intermediary between the eye and the ear, between the moving and extreme points of a space that must always be explored and questioned anew. A space that sometimes seems to lead us to the threshold of a mystery. A space that we also try, with the tools of theater, to explore and stubbornly secularize, but which, in fact, always contains an intangible and perhaps sacred core."

Luciano Berio, "Des sons et des images (1995)"