The revival of Philip Glass’s minimalist meditation of an opera, Satyagraha, which forms the second part of Glass's "Portrait Trilogy" of operas about men who changed the world, has now returned to The Metropolitan Opera with a timeliness and a vitality that is almost too perfect to be coincidence.

Composed by Philip Glass with a book penned by Glass and Constance DeJong, it was originally commissioned by the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and was first performed at the Stadsschouwburg (Municipal Theatre) there on September 5, 1980. It had its North American premier at the Artpark in Lewiston, New York, on July 29, 1981 and first came to the Metropolitan Opera for its 2007-2008 Season in conjunction with a production staged in the UK by the English National Opera.

The piece follows critical moments in the lives of champions of peace throughout history, though it focuses primarily on the lives of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The progression of the narrative is as non-linear as Glass’s music, skipping around to times and places intended to evoke a particular thought or feeling. The title is Sanskrit for “truth force” and was the term used by Gandhi to describe the core values of his philosophy of non-violent resistance. The lyrics are all drawn from relevant passages of the Bhagavad Gita (from which Gandhi himself also drew much of his inspiration) and is sung in the original Sanskrit with projected English supertitles. Interestingly enough, the Sanskrit language is one which assigns specific values and powers to the sounds of words when they are spoken (or sung), Glass no doubt choosing this language in the hopes of injecting a mystical and spell-binding urgency to his piece.

The staging of the piece is quite impressive, complete with various giant puppets capable of doing a multitude of things, from doing epic battle on the mythical Kuru Fields of Justice to towering over a seemingly puny Gandhi, faces scowling in cartoonish disapproval. These inject a larger than life feeling to the piece and give the moments they are involved in great weight, creating striking metaphors of visual poetry that capture the essence of an unseen titanic struggle of wills between those who seek equality with the majority and those who seek to oppress the minority. However, in seeking to fulfill its purpose of communicating a grand, all-encompassing canvass of time and place with which to paint this tale, the designers did not simply stop with puppets. The set, a solid wall composed of multiple panels that are capable of being opened, separated, shifted, removed, raised into the ceiling, back-lit, or rappelled down from (and probably a few more things that I forgot it can do), managed to make itself versatile enough that it could adapt (very believably, I might add) to the wide variety of places that it was required to become. These things, combined with very clever utilizations of the Met proscenium’s naturally dizzying height and an enormous and multi-talented ensemble capable of quickly and skillfully manipulating the set served to accomplish what I can only describe as the Herculean task of making the world Philip Glass created on paper a believable reality on stage.

In terms of the music, Glass has written something that, to no one’s surprise, toes the awkward line between “this is genius” and “this is annoyingly repetitive”.  The orchestrations and choral numbers I can only describe as a series of obtuse and geometric explorations of various ascending and descending modal scales and complex rhythmic patterns; So much so that at one point in the second act, the entire chorus managed to lose its place within the music and basically stopped singing. (This moment came complete with various terrified and bewildered looks from the ensemble members who quickly realized their mistake, and elicited quite a bit of dismay and fury from the conductor.) In their defense, this music is at times impossibly complex, with multiple overlapping rhythms and pitches and at times I wasn’t even quite sure what I was listening to.  By the same token, many of the character’s solos, duets, trios, etc. were what I found to be among the most moving musical aspects of this piece. Though at times it tried my patience with its almost hypnotic repetitiveness, Gandhi’s final solo in the third act was crafted so well and delivered with such passion and conviction that I found myself willing to approach the moment on its own terms: as a sort of meditation on the struggles past, present, and future of those who seek equality and peace. There were other moments similar to this in the previous two acts, but to me, this is Glass at his most virtuosic, encapsulating a complex thought, feeling, and/or ideal that could take years or even decades to realize on your own into a unified series of musical moments.

This opera is not for the narrow-minded, impatient, or faint of heart, but I sincerely believe that this piece is managing to communicate, in its own long-winded way, what few other pieces are capable of or willing to. It is alarmingly relevant to what is happening currently with Occupy Wall St. and around the world, and it would behoove anyone with a concern for cutting-edge art, social justice, and three spare hours to go see it.

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