Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1981 - 13

The Printing Press (11,2).

Police escort the Satyagraha army (III).

Act II, Scene 2

Final image from the opera. Martin Luther King on a
truncated pyramid, Gandhi below on the stage, and
the army in the starry sky.

erature, and theatre. The music is Philip Glass', but the theatrical concept of Satyagraha was conceived by all three of
them: the designer, Robert Israel, influenced the narrative of
the opera, and the composer and librettist influenced the mise
en scene. Collaboration on the opera began in the earliest
stages. Glass actually began composing the music only after
the theatrical scenario, including the complete visual aspect
of the work, was completed. The director, David Poutney, had
only to put singer/actors into this ready-made mise en scene
and to block the scenes.
Philip Glass is considered one of the foremost avant-garde
minimalist composers. His music, which is based on repetition
and variation of melodic and rhythmic units, does not, at first,
appear to be well suited for a dramatic opera. If Glass' music
can be described as minimalist because of its repetitive structure, its sound, which is often exuberant and joyful with pulsating rhythm, does not fit this description. Glass' music has
its sources not only in the avant-garde but also in traditional
musical forms and contemporary popular music as well. Glass
had some influence on the rock scene (David Bowie and Brian
Eno), and he himself is influenced by some aspects of contemporary rock.
Before composing Satyagraha Glass collaborated with
Robert Wilson on Einstein on the Beach (TO&T, Spring,
1978). Robert Wilson called Einstein on the Beach an opera.
Wilson always calls his large works operas, but this time with
USITT /Summer, 1981

Glass' music and parts for singers he was closer to the genre
of opera than ever before. If we think of opera in terms of
spectacle with music and parts for singers rather than in terms
of a melodramatic plot with music and great singing roles, Einstein on the Beach can be described as a modernistic opera.
Glass did not have to adjust his music to Wilson's theatre. The
repetitive music suited Wilson's plotless, static spectacle very
well. When Glass decided to write an opera based on the life
of Mahatma Gandhi the situation was different. With a central
character, and the life of Gandhi as material for plot, Glass
made a decisive step toward dramatic structure which in turn
led him to some different musical considerations, and finally to
the genre of opera.
Glass' initial idea was to deal chronologically with the early
life of Gandhi in South Africa, and, with the librettist Constance De Jong, decided that the opera would cover the 21
years of Gandhi's life from his arrival to South Africa in 1893
to the New Castle March in 1913. It was in these years that
Gandhi developed and for first time successfully practiced the
concept of passive resistance: Satyagraha. If this initial concept were followed literarily, the opera would have been a
long, historical epic documenting Gandhi's life. In the finished
work, however, the initial idea of Gandhi's life is still at the
center and provides its ideological and philosophical framework, but the epic aspect is partially deemphasized in favor of
a more static and allegorical structure.
Theatre Design & Technology

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