What do you think?
Rate this book
Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts
- GenresMusic
Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
9 people want to read
About the author
Philip Glass
114 books70 followersPhilip Glass is a three-time Academy Award-nominated American classical music composer. He is considered one of the most influential composers of the late-20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public (along with precursors such as Richard Strauss, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein).
His music is described asminimalist, from which he distanced himself in being a composer of "music with repetitive structures". Although his early, mature music is minimalist, he has evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as "Classicist", trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert.
Glass is a prolific composer: he has written ensemble works, operas, 8 symphonies, 8 concertos, film scores, and solo works. Glass counts many visual artists, writers, musicians, and directors among his friends, including Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Doris Lessing, Allen Ginsberg, Errol Morris, Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, John Moran, actors Bill Treacher and Peter Dean, Godfrey Reggio, Ravi Shankar, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Patti Smith, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, and electronic musician Aphex Twin, who have all collaborated with him. Among recent collaborators are Glass' fellow New Yorkers Leonard Cohen, and Woody Allen. He has also composed an opera for the opening of the Expo '98.
He describes himself as "a Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist",[10] and a supporter of the Tibetan cause. In 1987 he co-founded the Tibet House with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman and the actor Richard Gere. He has four children: two, Zachary (b. 1971) and Juliet (b. 1968) with first wife, theater director JoAnne Akalaitis (m. 1965, div. 1980); and two, Marlowe and Cameron with his fourth and current wife, Holly Critchlow. [11] Glass lives in New York and in Nova Scotia. He is the first cousin once removed of Ira Glass, host of the nationally syndicated radio show This American Life. Philip Glass's father is Ira Glass's great uncle.
His music is described asminimalist, from which he distanced himself in being a composer of "music with repetitive structures". Although his early, mature music is minimalist, he has evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as "Classicist", trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert.
Glass is a prolific composer: he has written ensemble works, operas, 8 symphonies, 8 concertos, film scores, and solo works. Glass counts many visual artists, writers, musicians, and directors among his friends, including Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Doris Lessing, Allen Ginsberg, Errol Morris, Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, John Moran, actors Bill Treacher and Peter Dean, Godfrey Reggio, Ravi Shankar, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Patti Smith, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, and electronic musician Aphex Twin, who have all collaborated with him. Among recent collaborators are Glass' fellow New Yorkers Leonard Cohen, and Woody Allen. He has also composed an opera for the opening of the Expo '98.
He describes himself as "a Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist",[10] and a supporter of the Tibetan cause. In 1987 he co-founded the Tibet House with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman and the actor Richard Gere. He has four children: two, Zachary (b. 1971) and Juliet (b. 1968) with first wife, theater director JoAnne Akalaitis (m. 1965, div. 1980); and two, Marlowe and Cameron with his fourth and current wife, Holly Critchlow. [11] Glass lives in New York and in Nova Scotia. He is the first cousin once removed of Ira Glass, host of the nationally syndicated radio show This American Life. Philip Glass's father is Ira Glass's great uncle.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 21, 2020
The following is not a review. I keep notes of every time I re-read a libretto for a new performance, and Goodreads Notes field does not have sufficient space. In this case, I studied ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs for months and took online courses on Egyptian history and Egyptian religion prior to attending the live performance at the Met. You certainly do not need to understand any of the libretto to enjoy the opera, but a trip to the Met is a big deal for me and so I simply enjoyed immersing myself in the world of the work in antioption of the performance.
"Phillip Glass Notes:
Akhnaten marks the culmination and conclusion of a lengthy period in my compositional life. It completes the trilogy of “portrait” operas I began in 1975 with Einstein on the Beach (in collaboration with Robert Wilson) and continued in 1979 with Satyagraha (whose libretto was a joint effort by me and the writer Constance de Jong, with the assistance of designer Robert Israel).
I will leave detailed remarks about the historical Akhnaten to Shalom Goldman who, with Robert Israel and Richard Riddell, shared with me for over a year the pleasures and pains of shaping this libretto. That shaping began in January 1982, after Akhnaten had been commissioned by the Stuttgart Opera, and continued during the actual process of musical composition, which I started in the summer of 1982. Work on Akhnaten was hardly continuous, though, for during that same time span I wrote such fairly sizeable pieces as The Photographer and Koyaanisqatsi, as well as a number of less expansive works.
Numerous performances and tours, some of them international, with the Philip Glass Ensemble further interrupted any musical excursions to ancient Egypt. Eventually, though, both music and text were finished (in July 1983) and, working with Michael Riesman, Kurt Munkacsi and Richard Einhorn, I proceeded to make a complete synthesizer recording of the opera “in real time”. I then sent the tapes to the Stuttgart production team eight months before the scheduled date of the opening. On March 24, 1984, Akhnaten had its world premiere in a production by Achim Freyer.
Akhnaten, Gandhi and Einstein — three men who revolutionized the thoughts and events of their times through the power of an inner vision. This, then, is the theme of the trilogy. Einstein — the man of science; Gandhi — the man of politics; Akhnaten — the man of religion. These themes (science, politics, religion) are, to an extent, shared by all three and they inform our ideological and real worlds.]
We took all our texts from Akhnaten’s own time, the Amarna period. Decrees, titles, letters, fragments of poems, etc., were all left to be sung in their original languages, thereby emphasizing the artifactual slant of our approach. The greater part of the Amarna period has come down to us as fragments. Therefore, rather than to “make up” the missing parts of this ancient story — to fill in the gaps, as it were — we chose to present the historical period as we found it, much as we might learn from Akhnaten and his time from the partially told story revealed in the exhibition cases of modern museums. The original languages, their sounds and cadences as understood by contemporary scholarship, became part of the story to me and my collaborators.
Our narrator provides the audience, in today’s language, with an account of what is being sung and spoken during each scene.
Each of the three operas of this “portrait” trilogy has its own distinctive sound world. Einstein on the Beach, an opera about a great mathematician who loved music, is for amplified ensemble and small chorus singing a text compromised of numbers (actually the beats of the music) and solfège syllables. Satyagraha, a work about one man leading his people to freedom, is a large choral opera with text taken directly from Gandhi’s philosophical guidebook (the Bhagavad-Gita) in the actual language (Sanskrit) in which he read it. In Akhnaten, my emphasis is orchestral, with choral and solo voices sharing common ground with the orchestra.
Despite the differences in timbre and mood of the three operas in the trilogy, they are strongly linked musically. The “knee plays” (short connecting scenes) of Einstein on the Beach became the source of primary musical materials of the other operas. (In Akhnaten this should be particularly noticeable in the Epilogue.)
Should the three operas be performed within a fairly narrow time span (within the same week, for example), I believe their internal connection will become increasingly obvious and provide the audience with a coherent musical and theatrical experience."
21 June 2020 Update: Saw live in at the Metropolitan Opera house in New York on 23 November 2019 -- which happened to be the matinee that they recorded for the live in HD. Saw again on 4 December 2019 in the Harrisburg movie theater's Met Live Encore broadcast. Just viewed it again during the pandemic on MetOpera.org's special live stream. The epilogue, which I remember live so vividly, now felt like an elegy for the lost world of November 2019. We were all so busy... and then the balls just start dropping from the air.
23 November 2019 Met Opear production Conducted by Karen Kamensek; starring Dísella Lárusdóttir, J'Nai Bridges, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Aaron Blake, Will Liverman, Richard Bernstein, Zachary James.
20 December 2020: Saw the the Opéra Nice Côte d'Azur digital production produced during the pandemic (complete with masks for chorus members.) Lucinda Childs' choreography and her performance as the scribe particularly struck me. Intriguingly, this production included English subtitles for all the text, not just the central hymn to the sun. It also does away with the Professor in the final act entirely.
Direction musicale Léo Warynski
Mise en scène et chorégraphie Lucinda Childs
Scénographie et costumes Bruno De Lavenère
Lumières David Debrinay
Vidéo Étienne Guiol
Akhnaten Fabrice Di Falco
Nefertiti Julie Robard-Gendre
Reine Tye Patrizia Ciofi
Horemhab Joan Martín-Royo
Amon Frédéric Diquero
Aye Vincent Le Texier
Amenhotep (rôle parlé) Lucinda Childs
Six filles d’Akhnaten Karine Ohanyan, Rachel Duckett*, Mathilde Lemaire* Vassiliki Koltouki*, Annabella Ellis *, Aviva Manenti *
"Phillip Glass Notes:
Akhnaten marks the culmination and conclusion of a lengthy period in my compositional life. It completes the trilogy of “portrait” operas I began in 1975 with Einstein on the Beach (in collaboration with Robert Wilson) and continued in 1979 with Satyagraha (whose libretto was a joint effort by me and the writer Constance de Jong, with the assistance of designer Robert Israel).
I will leave detailed remarks about the historical Akhnaten to Shalom Goldman who, with Robert Israel and Richard Riddell, shared with me for over a year the pleasures and pains of shaping this libretto. That shaping began in January 1982, after Akhnaten had been commissioned by the Stuttgart Opera, and continued during the actual process of musical composition, which I started in the summer of 1982. Work on Akhnaten was hardly continuous, though, for during that same time span I wrote such fairly sizeable pieces as The Photographer and Koyaanisqatsi, as well as a number of less expansive works.
Numerous performances and tours, some of them international, with the Philip Glass Ensemble further interrupted any musical excursions to ancient Egypt. Eventually, though, both music and text were finished (in July 1983) and, working with Michael Riesman, Kurt Munkacsi and Richard Einhorn, I proceeded to make a complete synthesizer recording of the opera “in real time”. I then sent the tapes to the Stuttgart production team eight months before the scheduled date of the opening. On March 24, 1984, Akhnaten had its world premiere in a production by Achim Freyer.
Akhnaten, Gandhi and Einstein — three men who revolutionized the thoughts and events of their times through the power of an inner vision. This, then, is the theme of the trilogy. Einstein — the man of science; Gandhi — the man of politics; Akhnaten — the man of religion. These themes (science, politics, religion) are, to an extent, shared by all three and they inform our ideological and real worlds.]
We took all our texts from Akhnaten’s own time, the Amarna period. Decrees, titles, letters, fragments of poems, etc., were all left to be sung in their original languages, thereby emphasizing the artifactual slant of our approach. The greater part of the Amarna period has come down to us as fragments. Therefore, rather than to “make up” the missing parts of this ancient story — to fill in the gaps, as it were — we chose to present the historical period as we found it, much as we might learn from Akhnaten and his time from the partially told story revealed in the exhibition cases of modern museums. The original languages, their sounds and cadences as understood by contemporary scholarship, became part of the story to me and my collaborators.
Our narrator provides the audience, in today’s language, with an account of what is being sung and spoken during each scene.
Each of the three operas of this “portrait” trilogy has its own distinctive sound world. Einstein on the Beach, an opera about a great mathematician who loved music, is for amplified ensemble and small chorus singing a text compromised of numbers (actually the beats of the music) and solfège syllables. Satyagraha, a work about one man leading his people to freedom, is a large choral opera with text taken directly from Gandhi’s philosophical guidebook (the Bhagavad-Gita) in the actual language (Sanskrit) in which he read it. In Akhnaten, my emphasis is orchestral, with choral and solo voices sharing common ground with the orchestra.
Despite the differences in timbre and mood of the three operas in the trilogy, they are strongly linked musically. The “knee plays” (short connecting scenes) of Einstein on the Beach became the source of primary musical materials of the other operas. (In Akhnaten this should be particularly noticeable in the Epilogue.)
Should the three operas be performed within a fairly narrow time span (within the same week, for example), I believe their internal connection will become increasingly obvious and provide the audience with a coherent musical and theatrical experience."
21 June 2020 Update: Saw live in at the Metropolitan Opera house in New York on 23 November 2019 -- which happened to be the matinee that they recorded for the live in HD. Saw again on 4 December 2019 in the Harrisburg movie theater's Met Live Encore broadcast. Just viewed it again during the pandemic on MetOpera.org's special live stream. The epilogue, which I remember live so vividly, now felt like an elegy for the lost world of November 2019. We were all so busy... and then the balls just start dropping from the air.
23 November 2019 Met Opear production Conducted by Karen Kamensek; starring Dísella Lárusdóttir, J'Nai Bridges, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Aaron Blake, Will Liverman, Richard Bernstein, Zachary James.
20 December 2020: Saw the the Opéra Nice Côte d'Azur digital production produced during the pandemic (complete with masks for chorus members.) Lucinda Childs' choreography and her performance as the scribe particularly struck me. Intriguingly, this production included English subtitles for all the text, not just the central hymn to the sun. It also does away with the Professor in the final act entirely.
Direction musicale Léo Warynski
Mise en scène et chorégraphie Lucinda Childs
Scénographie et costumes Bruno De Lavenère
Lumières David Debrinay
Vidéo Étienne Guiol
Akhnaten Fabrice Di Falco
Nefertiti Julie Robard-Gendre
Reine Tye Patrizia Ciofi
Horemhab Joan Martín-Royo
Amon Frédéric Diquero
Aye Vincent Le Texier
Amenhotep (rôle parlé) Lucinda Childs
Six filles d’Akhnaten Karine Ohanyan, Rachel Duckett*, Mathilde Lemaire* Vassiliki Koltouki*, Annabella Ellis *, Aviva Manenti *
Displaying 1 of 1 review