Words Without Music: A Memoir (44 page)

Subsequent scenes are “Tolstoy Farm (1910),” the first community Gandhi organized that was dedicated to social change through nonviolence; “The Vow (1906),” in which three thousand Satyagrahis raise their hands and vow in the name of God to resist, even unto death, the proposed discriminatory Black Act; “Confrontation and Rescue (1896),” in which Gandhi, upon his return to South Africa from London, is met by an angry crowd and rescued by the wife of the police commissioner; “Indian Opinion (1906),” showing the printing of the newspaper of the Satyagraha Movement; “Protest (1908),” which portrays Gandhi and his followers burning their identification cards, symbols of discrimination since whites were not required to carry them; and “Newcastle March (1913),” which takes place on the eve of a thirty-six-mile march from the Transvaal to Newcastle by two thousand people protesting, among other injustices, laws that made the marriages of Indians illegal.

Satyagraha
opens with a sequence of notes commonly heard in flamenco music. I had been aware for some time that there were hidden connections between the music of India and the music of Europe, and I had found evidence for this in the flamenco music of Spain. Thirteen years earlier, JoAnne and I had been in Mojácar, a small town on the southern coast of Spain, where the Gypsies, or Romany people, are to be found. I had taken great pleasure in listening to their music. The Gypsies are a people who have for centuries traveled between India and Europe. One part of the culture they brought with them was their music, and this music fit perfectly with how I wanted to begin
Satyagraha
. Melodically, the flatted second going directly to the tonic tells the whole story. In my case, I had reversed the Gypsies’ journey: while they had traveled from India to Europe, I had gone from Europe to India, listening to music all the way on my little transistor radio. I had been listening to what we now call world music from day one, and what I took away with me from that visit to the south of Spain was the flavor and sound of flamenco music, which became the seed of
Satyagraha
.

This was the first large-scale piece for which I had produced a full score in close to twenty years, since my Juilliard and Pittsburgh years. I was just forty-three and was, after almost twelve years with my ensemble, about to reenter the world of concert music and traditionally presented opera. I hadn’t forgotten orchestration or the hand/finger positions of the violin or how people played the trombone. I hadn’t forgotten anything. But the amount of work and preparation it took to get the music ready for rehearsal was new to me. I spent that summer of 1980 in Holland working through all the stages of learning and rehearsing a new work, an exercise I have repeated many times since. My years of work with Mabou Mines had been good training, though working with singers was a new discipline unto itself. I had an understanding of choral writing because I had sung a lot of it. But in addition, I was eager to make the solo vocal parts singable and was constantly pestering the singers for suggestions. I skoon learned that if you ask a singer how a vocal part works for her, she will definitely tell you.

The first to see the score to
Satyagraha
was Dennis Russell Davies. We had met briefly through his wife Molly, an artist and aficionado of new music. They were living in Minneapolis, where Dennis had been leading the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. He had won that job shortly after graduating from Juilliard and had made a name for himself and the orchestra in those early intense and creative years. He was about to become the music director of the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam when I met him again at their summer home in Vermont. He was interested in the opera right away, and I went there to show him the score. We immediately got along very well. Dennis had begun at Juilliard as a pianist and, along the way, had also become a conductor. When I met him, he was already a highly energized, engaged and passionate advocate for new music, and has remained so to this day. He also had a taste for motorcycles, which, of course, also pleased me.

Dennis had barely gotten through the score when he told me he knew Hans de Roo in Holland and wanted to conduct the premiere there himself. As it turned out, Dennis was about to have a great success in Bayreuth with Wagner’s
The Flying Dutchman
and was then offered the post of general music director at the State Opera House in Stuttgart, so he had to give up the Dutch premiere of
Satyagraha
, which would be taken over by Bruce Ferden. But Dennis promised to present the German premiere in Stuttgart, which was to be a completely new production under the direction of Achim Freyer, the German painter and opera director. After I let Achim know of my plans for a trilogy, he also undertook the
Akhnaten
opera and eventually a new
Einstein on the Beach
. The trilogy would be presented in 1986 with all the operas—
Einstein
,
Satyagraha
, and
Akhnaten
—presented on three successive nights, beginning with Achim’s complete and remarkable re-visioning of
Einstein
.

This really was only the beginning, but a most impressive one, of Dennis’s involvement in my music output. Over the next three decades he would commission operas, concertos, and symphonies from me. The symphony commissions alone accounted for nine out of ten symphonies and number eleven is already in the planning stage. Though, of course, there is a lot of orchestral music in large-scale operas, the fact is that I didn’t even begin my first symphony—the
Low
Symphony—until I was fifty-four. That surely must make me one of the all-time late starters among symphony composers. After years of writing for theater and opera, it was a real jolt for me to drop all of the extramusical content and make the language of music and the structure unfolding in time the sole content.

At one point I asked, “Dennis, why are you commissioning all these symphonies?”

“I’m not going to let you be one of those opera composers who never wrote a symphony,” he replied.

THE PREMIERE OF
SATYAGRAHA
WAS IN ROTTERDAM.
At the first rehearsal, the first hour of playing the music was so distressing that Bruce Ferden, an excellent conductor, stopped everything. “Anyone who would like to leave is welcome to leave,” he said. About fifteen of the forty string players stood up and walked out. When Bruce started up again, the piece suddenly began to sound very good.

At the dress rehearsal I was sitting with Bob Israel, the production designer. Bob and I had gone with Constance DeJong, the librettist, to south India to the Kathakali Kalamandalam, and Bob had dressed up Krishna and Arjuna in typical Kathakali costumes. When the piece begins, Gandhi is seen walking upstage, and then behind him, these two characters come out in their chariots.

I leaned over and said to Bob, “What if people laugh?”

He just looked at me, kind of surprised, and didn’t say anything. But no one ever laughed.

The reception of the piece on opening night depends on whom you talk to. I thought the audience liked it; it was pretty much all applause. But, as with
Einstein
, it made some people extremely angry. The new head of the Netherlands Opera, the successor to Hans de Roo, assured the public that
Satyagraha
would never be played in Holland again. He thought I had done something bad, that I had somehow sinned against music. There were some people in the press who didn’t like it, and some professional musicians definitely didn’t like it. If they were angry about
Einstein
, they were doubly angry about this. So not only did I get them mad about
Einstein
, I got them mad about something that was completely different from
Einstein
. They were going to be mad at me no matter what I did. But luckily I have a wonderful gene—the I-don’t-care-what-you-think gene. I have that big-time. I actually didn’t care then, and to this day I still don’t care.

For some people, it was a tremendous disappointment. They really wanted something else, but I knew what I had done. “Did you really think I was going to write
The Son of Einstein
? Or
The Return of Einstein
?” I said. “Why would I do that?”

What
Einstein
had demonstrated was a style of rhythmic composition that I had been developing for ten years, and which was not carried over into
Satyagraha
. I was looking for a way of radicalizing the music again, and sometimes that can mean doing something that people already know. Recently I wrote “Partita for Solo Violin,” which could be mistaken for something written a hundred years ago. What I’m interested in are my own abilities to think of things, to express, to use a musical language, to make it listenable. I had always felt there was a public that would like this music, and over time, the audiences, so small in the beginning, have only gotten larger.

WHILE LOOKING FOR THE THIRD PART
of this trilogy of operas, I was thinking about the three estates: science, politics, and religion. I had been stuck in the twentieth century with Einstein and Gandhi, and now I began looking for a subject in the ancient world. I knew about the pharaoh Akhnaten from Velikovsky’s work
Oedipus and Akhnaten
and, in fact, in my first pass at a libretto, I was going to do a double opera: Oedipus would be upstage and Akhnaten would be downstage, and I would do the two operas at once.

But when I began researching Akhnaten, he became much more interesting than Oedipus. We think of the ancient world as Greece, but the ancient world was really Egypt. The Greeks were the heirs to the Egyptian culture. The more I got involved with the story, the less interest I had in Oedipus. What I was interested in was social change through nonviolence in the three estates, so to look at Oedipus as a psychological casualty didn’t help my argument very much. Finally, I was rereading Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism
, which I had read originally at the University of Chicago, and it convinced me that Akhnaten was the person I was looking for.

Akhnaten was an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh whose name, wherever it appeared, had been eradicated from all public records. We didn’t even know he existed until the city he founded, Akhetaten (near present-day Amârna), was excavated in the nineteenth century. Then in 1922, when the tomb of Tutankhamun was uncovered, references to his father, Akhnaten, were found. There was a very big missing part of their history that the Egyptians, who had been so traumatized by the ideas of Akhnaten, had exorcised in a kind of a forced amnesia. Akhnaten had overthrown the traditional religion of Egypt in favor of a new monotheistic religion that he expected everyone to follow, and he was punished for that. He was pharaoh for seventeen years, but his punishment was to be erased from the record of kings for eternity.

It’s hard for us now, I think, to appreciate how radical the idea of a monotheistic religion must have been. However, even today in indigenous societies around us, there are still multiple deities connected with the sun, the moon, and the forces of nature. This idea has historically preceded the development of an individual godhead. Some might ask, “Did the Egyptians really believe in their gods, or is it just poetry?” I don’t think it was poetry, and I think when Akhnaten dethroned all those gods, he was acting like a murderer, and the Egyptians of his day couldn’t tolerate it. Basically, it destroyed his reign, and he himself was dethroned and forgotten for thousands of years. Thinking back on it, it seems improbable that one man could change the whole society, which at that point had been governed by a polytheistic religion for two or three thousand years. In fact, he didn’t succeed, though some credit him with the origin of monotheism. Freud’s idea was that Moses was one of the priests of Akhnaten and that the Aten religion went underground and later formed the basis of Judaism, an idea that still presents some factual challenges.

The texts used in
Akhnaten
were found by my associate writer, Shalom Goldman, a scholar of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and ancient Egyptian. The singers sing in those languages, plus Akkadian and a fifth language, which is always the language of the local audience, be it English, German, or another. I gave myself the benefit of a narrator, thereby allowing the story to be more easily understood by the audience. I used the original ancient languages for two reasons: first, because I liked the way the words could be sung, and second, because I wanted the overall experience of the opera to come through movement, music, and image. However, “The Hymn to the Sun” in Act 2, scene 4, is singled out as an exception. Here, Akhnaten sings in the language of the audience for the first and only time, and at that moment they suddenly understand everything he is singing.

This aria is followed by an offstage chorus singing Psalm 104, in the original Hebrew. This Hebrew text has striking similarities to “The Hymn to the Sun.” In the productions we used projections of the English or German translations on the walls of the stage, which I had also done for the Sanskrit text sung in
Satyagraha
.

The sound of the music in
Akhnaten
developed in a way that was unexpected. It was commissioned by the Stuttgart Opera, but unbeknownst to us, they had scheduled a renovation of the opera house for the year we would work. Dennis Davies called me and said, “We don’t have the opera house, but we’re going to do the opera—don’t worry.”

“Where are we going to do it?”

“In the Playhouse. But you have to come over and look at the Playhouse, because it’s not very big.”

I went to Stuttgart and we asked to see the Playhouse. When we got inside, we discovered that the orchestra pit was tiny.

“What do you want to do?” Dennis asked.

Every once in a while, I have a really good idea, and I don’t know where they come from.

“Get rid of the violins,” I said.

Without the violins, half the orchestra was gone. What was left was a very different orchestra in which the highest string instrument was the viola. The violas became the firsts, the cellos became the seconds, and the double basses became the cellos. Now the orchestration was very dark and rich. Once I had established that texture, it became the sound of the prelude. To lighten it up, I added two drummers, one on either side of the stage, because I thought, It’s kind of dark, I’d better add some juice. With the drummers in place, and the addition of the chorus and soloists, the sound of
Akhnaten
was complete.