Lavish production distracts from Philip Glass’s painfully dull score

Philip Glass, the minimalist American composer, fills opera houses with the same facility as his British ritualistic counterpart, Sir Harrison Birtwhistle empties them. The sell-out run at New York’s Metropolitan Opera of his 1984 creation, Akhnaten, an opera depicting the life and times of Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV, the spirit of the sundisk God, Aten, is testament to that.

As well-tried favourites like Richard Strauss’ Rosenkavalier, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades and Mozart’s The Magic Flute struggle to hit occupancy rates in the high 60’s, the four performances of Akhnaten hit a till-ringing high of 100%. Kerching!

This is a mystery every bit as impenetrable as a Donald Trump Nato press conference. For the impact of Glass’ score is as dully and painfully repetitive as having a nail knocked into one’s skull, over three hours of incomprehensible – even though often spectacular – onstage action.

Besotted Glass aficionados claim the minimalist music is loaded with meaning. Meaning, self-evidently so great, that it has to be repeated, numbingly, in short phrases without ceasing, like President Trump’s outpouring of Tweet invective. There may be the odd blip of difference in the course of the oncoming torrent, but, really, little ever changes.

Take a look at the Akhnaten score. Bear with me for a couple of geeky paragraphs, please. The dance scene in Act II Scene III is typical. It kicks off with three forte two bar phrases, repeated, then two more sustained by an E minor chord, before moving to a sustained pattern of slurred, semiquavers C to A for four bars, before daringly switching to C to B and on and on, ad nauseam. Meanwhile, the bass is sustained by a single semibreve chord of two notes, then one.

For readers unfamiliar with music theory the downward pattern in the top line goes like this: Doh-La, Doh-La, Do-Lah, Do-La, times 12; then, Doh-Ti in the same pattern, oscillating with the odd variation, ad nauseam. Try it in your head. See?

Every single change of tone, coming after so much anaesthetising repetition is such a relief that it can easily convince that the composer must be mind boggling clever. When the noise stops there is the same feeling of relief as when an inconsiderate neighbour finally turns off that sodding car alarm at 3:00am.

Glass might be deemed cleverer still, should anyone ever tell him there are actually seven notes in the conventional scale, never mind all those funny black ones getting in the way. Faith in the great genius was shaken when I noticed that in the score, marked ¾ time – 3 crotchets in a bar – he rapidly moved to 4 beats, without a change of time signature. Maybe I’m being picky, holding the feet of greatness to an irrelevant fire of theory convention. Mere detail. Rather, I find the sloppiness inexplicable.

Another piddling detail. The world spells the pharaoh’s nickname Akhenaten – has done for, oh … merely 4,000 years. Whereas, Glass drops the first “e”. Why? Meaningful insight? Subtle suggestion that he is moving the character to a different plane? It is almost comical that the difference is acknowledged universally – including in the Met playbill – but then quietly passed over, unexplained. No-one dares suggest that Glass is careless and simply got it wrong. I do.

Now, if Tchaikovsky had written The Queen of Spuds, or Puccini Tournados, the error would have been corrected, or mocked. But that everyone is prepared to kow-tow to Glass’ unimportant, simple error perhaps explains why the more serious matter of his dreadful music goes largely unchallenged.

That said, this production at the hands of Phelim McDermott, the English actor, stage director and endearing Hobbit look-alike, is spectacular. It is another Met joint venture with English National Opera (ENO), as was this season’s gala opener, Porgy and Bess. It is visually beautiful. The staging is regularly backed by a huge, glowing, dark orange sun disk, the settings are spare but elegant and the pace of action processionally sedate, which matches the incessant droning from the orchestra pit as best it can.

What’s it all about? Act I covers the death of Amenhotep III, the coronation of his son Amenhotep IV – and in Scene III, The Window of Appearances, the new pharaoh sets out his aim to introduce a monotheistic religion, symbolically changing his name to Aknhaten, the spirit of Aten, the sun God.

In Act II the new religion is established and the change underpinned by the building of a new city, Akhetaten (the City of the Horizon of Aten) – lots of befuddling Aks, Akhs and Ats here – in praise of the new religion.

As history, it’s mostly bollocks. The backdrop of Egyptian fact is artfully added to, directing sharp, critical arrows at the political hubris of modern times – ranging from the assumption of the divine right of kings, to the building of new capitals distant from the centres of potential political unrest. Think Versailles and Brasilia.

It could all go wrong – and it does. Akhnaten and his wife, Nefertiti, become isolated in the insular world of their own creation – Oval Office, Number 10 bunker – and Melania, oops, sorry, Nefertiti, fails to temper her husband’s growing delusional conviction that he is a turning point in history.

In Egypt there is no 2020 election and impeachment is replaced by impalement. The citadel is stormed, Aknhaten killed and the old polytheistic religion restored. To ram home the fact that this all carries a message for the present day, the crowning of Tutankhamun, Aknhaten’s successor, is anachronistically overlaid by a group of students listening to a history lecture delivered by a professor. It is a crude, theatrical device which clashes with the rest of the work’s allusional obscurity.

To make the performance bearable there is much well-choreographed action onstage. Choreographer, Sean Gandini, is the hero of the hour. He is founder of Gandini Juggling, a London based circus company. The mesmerising, juggling action throughout was a true spectacle, and I’m sure Gandini’s slick contribution goes a long way to explain the full house.

To be fair to Glass – come on, I’m allowed to be fair sometimes – he sees his music as only a backdrop to his operatic works, following the course of onstage action, rather than setting the dramatic pace. He has no ambition to be Richard Wagner, telling of mythical, heroic deeds through a sweeping, emotional score. But, in any visually lesser production this work would be but three hours of relentless tedium. Why anyone ever buys a CD of the damned thing I can’t figure out.

To my surprise the performance was a surtitle free zone. As even operas sung in English usually carry surtitles, the conclusion of management that the audience was self-evidently fluent in ancient Egyptian struck me as odd. So, after clicking around for a long time I unearthed from a hitherto undiscovered libretto-tomb a full libretto. Having blown off the dust and stamped on the scorpions, on teasing the papyrus apart it was immediately obvious why the surtitle department simply gave up. Here’s a chorus:

Ye-nedj hrak yemi em hetepu
Neb aut yeb sekhem kha-u
Neb wereret ka shuti
Nefer seshed ka hedjet
Mertu netcheru maanek
Sekhi men em weptek

Clearly, needs no explanation at all. Come on, guys, a hint at what was being incanted would have been helpful. I had left my Rosetta Stone back home.

Akhnaten is the final part of a Portrait Trilogy of Glass operas focusing on turning points in history. Einstein on the Beach (1976) addresses the moral dilemmas posed by Professor Albert Einstein’s unlocking of the secrets of relativity, so paving the way for the nuclear age. Satyagraha (1979), loosely based on the life of Mahatma Gandhi and referencing Martin Luther King Jr., focuses on the peaceful assertion of truth against prejudice.

The idea is to view fulcrum points in history through the personas of those who played crucial roles in the events of the day. This is not a stunningly insightful approach, but it is engaging. Composer, John Adams, had a go in Dr Atomic, using the lens of J. Robert Oppenheimer to examine the implications of the Manhattan Project. Worked well.

A reviewer in The New York Times bemoaned the fact that no opera house was likely to stage the whole Portrait Trilogy in the manner of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, regularly presented in series. Just watch Einstein on the Beach to find out why. Out of idle curiosity – and to prepare for Akhnaten – I watched a production by Theatre du Chatelet, Paris in 2014.

Observing the decay of Uranium-234 over its half-life of 25,000 years would be riveting compared to suffering the assault of Einstein on the Beach on the brain for an uninterrupted half-life of five hours. It seems to have been composed in an era when Glass had discovered only three notes, not the lavish four he uses today.

Unfortunately, he had by then stumbled only upon the dynamic marking fff, so the Einstein score is a Black and Decker drill on hammer setting. There is no plot and the repetitive onstage action is an incomprehensible as the results from random collisions in Cern’s Hadron Collider. No trilogy is likely to be staged anytime soon.

On the other hand, the Met’s production of Satyagraha in the 2011-12 season was well received and has the unfashionable benefit of a comprehensible plot line, to which an audience can readily relate.

Glass is an unstoppable force, in spite of the simplistic, repetitive character of all of his music. So long as that is so, we are fortunate to have productions such as this mesmerising Met/ENO Akhnaten to allow the eyes to distract from what is assaulting the ears.