Appomattox, Take Two

In my previous blog, I noted that technology moves forward but human nature does not. One could add that laws make progress but human nature does not. In just the past year Baltimore, Ferguson, Charleston and university campuses in Missouri have been the most visible examples of how far we remain from securing equal treatment for all our citizens. No wonder Philip Glass saw fit to revise his 2007 opera Appomattox to emphasize that in terms of race relations little has changed in the United States since the end of the Civil War. The new version of Appomattox premiered Saturday at Washington National Opera.

Not having seen the San Francisco performance, I cannot compare the two versions, but one critic described the first take of Appomattox as an "epic-proportioned opera, sensational in its conception, drama and music that had one sitting on the edge of one’s opera seat being witness to history." Much of this could be said of the revised version shown Saturday in Washington. While the production did not have me sitting on the edge of my seat with a particularly sensational conception, it had me sitting back and contemplating.

The opera starts with the final days of the Civil War and the surrender of Confederate Army commander Robert Lee to Union General Ulysses Grant in the village of Appomattox, Virginia. It then moves to a post-war meeting between President Abraham Lincoln and African-American activist Frederick Douglass in which Douglass tells the newly re-elected president he would like to see “voting rights for all free men of color.”

Generals Lee and Grant discuss their correspondence with aides.                Photo: Scott Suchman for WNO

One hundred years later in the second and most revised act of Appomattox we are in the midst of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and African-Americans are still fighting for their voting rights.   

Then the opera turns into a political farce in which President Lyndon B. Johnson cleverly handles political adversaries while ridiculing their small-mindedness behind their backs. As it moves to more recent years, Appomattox opens the door to a private conversation between two inmates (real-life characters) convicted of racially-motivated murders committed decades before. One, now dead, got away with a negligible sentence. The other, a former Ku Klux Klan member, will spend his life in jail, but scorns the punishment because for him no price is too high in defense of white supremacy - a state of mind not much different from suicide bombers. 

A group of women calling for the end of the strife and healing of the nation in the final scene concludes the epic on a soothing note.  

The first part of Appomattox struck me as the more operatic and colorful than the second. It opens with a gorgeous all-male choral piece sung by soldiers tired of war. Back home women lament the bloodshed. General Lee and his Union counterpart Grant are juxtaposed on the stage, against the background of huge Confederate and Union flags as each contemplates the other's moves. Their correspondence as well as direct communication are gentlemanly throughout, the interest of American people upmost on their minds. 

The second part felt like a surrealist docu-drama in which historic characters and events presented on the stage blend with those from current news reports, as they would in a dream. You could be listening to Martin Luther King or a reverend in Charleston's historic black church after the racially motivated killing of nine worshipers. The historic marches in Selma were sparked by the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, the 26-year-old civil rights marcher at the hands of a state trooper.  Today's Black Lives Matter movement was sparked by the deaths of several black men at the hands of white policemen.  As you watch the former, you think of the latter.  As the opera points out, it took much longer to get the voting rights law enacted than it did to get it repealed.  

The music is a mature and refined Philip Glass, with his signature minimalist style still clearly recognizable in the repetition of phrases that underline the text, or stand alone in their eloquence. The choral passages are unanimously gorgeous, at times angelic and ethereal, like the one that ends the opera, or steeped in the African-American tradition: spirituals and songs like The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Ol' Man River.  Glass even produced his own version of the Civil War anthem We Shall Overcome that brought to mind the original without imitating it.

The singers were mostly superb and well suited for the characters they portray. As the opera moves through the time, some of them could conveniently appear in two different roles without being recognized. Bas-baritone David Pittsinger was the epithome of a southern gentleman when portraying General Lee and sinister as murderer Edgar Ray Killen later on. I could not tell that it was the same singer.

The shining star among his equals was Washington's own Soloman Howard, a graduate of the WNO's Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program who has already debuted at the Metropolitan Opera. The 33-year-old bass is the only singer I can think of with the right stature and enough charisma to bring Martin Luther King to life. He also appeared as Frederick Douglass in the first act.

Soloman Howard as MLK in Appomattox            Photo: Scott Suchman for WN

Appomatox is packed with energy and powerful characters, but also (and I know I am going to be crucified for saying this) with occasional longueurs, the recitativi that drag it down like millstone.  In the traditional opera, parlando segments serve to speed up the action and can be as memorable and haunting as any aria. Like this dialogue between Tosca and Scarpia: 

Scarpia: "Or su Tosca, parlate!
Tosca: "Non so nulla."

Or Germont's rebuke: "Di sprezzo degno se stesso rende qui pur nell'ira la donna offende."

Or Eboli's outrageous shriek:  "Voi la regina amate!"

In the modern opera, these half-sung-half-spoken conversations, or monologues as the case may be, sound monotonous and if they go on for too long can become a crashing bore. Not only do they always sound the same, but the voice or the intonation raised in the wrong place or at the wrong time makes me wince. I cannot tell if it is the English language, or a lack of effort, or the belief that modern music should not concern itself with appeal, but few of the modern recitativi - if they are still called that - are memorable. And while they are somewhat tolerable in a staged performance, it is hard to imagine that anyone wants to listen to them at home on CD.

One solution Philip Glass and his librettist Christopher Hampton have found to overcome the tedium is the use of witticism and irreverence in the text, for example in LBJ's conversation with U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. Another trick is following LBJ's "televised speech" with an especially attractive instrumental passage.  Still, the sing-song talk combined with Donald Eastman's unchanged set of pillared facade with a long balcony, creates a static impression, turning the opera into an oratorio at times.

Overall, Glass and Hampton have created a quintessentially American work, focused on voting rights, but sending a powerful message about the legacy of racism that has plagued the world's leading democracy since its inception. The accompanying photo exhibit A Journey from Civil War to Civil Rights is a helpful preview, especially for those of us who missed that chapter in the history book.

During the 1960's rights movement in the United States, I lived in eastern Europe where the assassination of Martin Luther King received no more attention than the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende, Che Guevara or Haile Selassie. When I came to live in the U.S. capital 20 years later, it was with the conviction that racism and segregation were forgotten things of the past. It took years to realize that racial tensions were not just lingering here and there, but seething under the surface all this time to reach a new boiling point this year.

Washington is probably a better place than San Francisco to introduce an opera such as Appomattox, but the work should be seen by more ordinary Americans than the limited number of shows in D.C. can accommodate. Let's hope that WNO records one of the performances for a nationwide television broadcast in the near future, say during the upcoming dreary months of January and February when many people like to stay at home.

Philip Glass and US Civil Rights Movement

As Americans observe Martin Luther King's holiday, the news reaches us that composer Philip Glass is working on a rewrite of his opera Appomattox. "It's about the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement," he told The Monterey County Weekly during a recent visit to California where the Arts Council for Monterey is giving him a Lifetime Achievement award.

Appomattox premiered in San Francisco in 2007 to mixed reviews.
Ostensibly, it deals with the historic meeting between Ulysses Grant and Robert Lee in April 1865, when Lee's surrender brought the bloody hostilities to an end.  But the opera's scope is wider as it looks to the recurring violence in the United States in the next hundred years, notably during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

"This stuff about the Selma march—that's in this opera," Glass told a blogger at The Monterey County Weekly. 

"It's going to be performed in (Washington) DC. It covers about 100 years in 2 and 1/2 hours. It goes by very quickly. It's about President Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who were partners in the Voting Rights Act. Neither could have done it without the other. There's a big fuss about who did what. You know what? They did it together."

Blogger Walter Ryce calls Glass "probably the most important living classical music composer walking the Earth today." But he adds that "what may be more relevant is that his music can be beautiful, accessible, expressive, demanding and propulsive. If you're into that sort of thing." And that's the crux: if you are into that sort of thing!

The Monterey article reminded me of my own encounter with the revered composer in 2001, during the Washington premiere of his 1999 Symphony No. 5.

The composition is a 12-movement choral work, almost two hours long, involving hundreds of singers and orchestra members. As one movement followed another I could not determine what distinguished them. If someone played back a piece of the symphony for me, I could not tell which movement it was.

"It may be 10 minutes, it may be two hours, but at some point in a piece by Philip Glass you hit the wall. The slow-moving harmonies and constant repetition that were at first soothing become vexing, bright minimalist material that was spare and hypnotic becomes merely dull," wrote Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. It was vastly amusing to see that a professional music critic was not above expressing sentiments similar to mine, noticing that even the performers felt the same.

"A violinist in the orchestra accompanying the Choral Arts Society on Sunday afternoon hit the wall about three-quarters of the way through Glass's almost two-hour Symphony No. 5 (..........) And suddenly, his head lolled to the side, his cheeks puffed with air, and he blew a strand of limp hair straight upward -- a sign of sheer monumentally crushing boredom. And there was still more than 20 minutes of sawing back and forth between two notes to go."

The choir members chanted through 22 pages of the text that combined sacred and traditional verses of cultures from all over the world.

"I wanted a text that was woven together from really the great wisdom traditions from everywhere," Glass told me. 

"So there are texts from Africa, from Asia, from South America. Of course, there is the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, there are Buddhist texts, there are Hindu texts, American Indian texts," he said. 

The twelve movements tell the story of the world, starting before Creation and ending in Paradise. The last movement, Dedication, is looking into the future. It is set to a passage from an 8th century guide to the Buddhist way of life. Its message, originally written in Sanskrit, is one of peace: "May the rains of lava, blazing stones and weapons become a rain of flowers." And of goodness: "May every single being abandon all forms of evil and forever engage in virtue."

According to The Washington Post critic, Glass had avoided texts that might be inconvenient or offensive. For the creation of human beings he did not use the Old Testament story about Eve being created from Adam's rib, but lines from a Guatemalan myth about making the man from corn and water -- "basically the same recipe as tortillas."

Although the pieces of the text come from such diverse cultures, Glass said they were carefully chosen to fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

"We sing it in English," he said "and if you read through the text and you don't look to see where the text came from, after a while you forget to look and they all seem like they were written by the same person, which is - maybe they were."

The symphony, subtitled Requiem, Bardo and Nirmanakaya, was commissioned for the 1999 Salzburg Festival to celebrate the past millennium. At the Washington premiere, it was offered as a tribute to the victims of September-11 attacks that had happened two months before. The composer said the work is suitable for both occasions because it is "conceived as a bridge between past and future, moving from the Requiem, signifying death, to Bardo, an 'in-between' world, and finally to enlightened rebirth or Nirmanakaya."

Glass's probably most famous work is his 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, which he created together with stage director and dramatist Bob Wilson. The five-hour epic, not reminiscent in any way of classical operas with a story line and melodic arias, is considered a landmark in 20th century music theater. The text consists mostly of numbers and music expressions, and the course of the opera revolves around a few dream-like images. One of them is the image of Einstein with a spaceship, which represents a potential for liberation unleashed by the scientist's work. Glass's fans rave about it.

When I met the composer, he was working on an opera about another famous scientist: Italian Renaissance astronomer, physicist and mathematician Galileo Galilei.

"Galileo was one of the most astonishing and interesting people who ever lived," Glass said. "We are talking about 400 years ago, and, you know we are talking about a man who was also deeply religious. So the whole question of science and religion, which is something we still talk about today - they became embodied in him. And [he was] a man of great genius, of great devotion and who lived a brilliant, but somewhat troubled, life."

Galieo Galilei premiered in Chicago in 2002. Reviewer Jonathan Abarbanel had this to say about the music: "Scored for 11 pieces including string, woodwind and brass trios, plus percussion and keyboards, the music features Glass's signature hypnotic pulsing and repetitive instrumental lines with contrapuntal staccato punctuation."  

The word "hypnotic" is often associated with Glass's music. During a Met broadcast of his opera Satyagraha, I reclined on a settee with a book, and distinctly remember falling in a sort of a trance - a state that reminded me of the worshipers I had seen chanting in a Hindu temple in Mumbai. Maybe that's Glass's intent.  Otherwise, why bother to repeat one musical phrase gazillions of times? But a more important question is why a composer would want to hypnotize with his music. Glass told me he usually plays a new music phrase to children and if they respond well, he uses it. 

Most people have heard his music in the movies such as The Hours, Kundun and The Truman Show. Glass also wrote music for the renewed version of the 1931 horror classic Dracula with Bela Lugosi.

Appomattox has not had a notable performance since its 2007 premiere. In its broad message against violence, it included a couple of references to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. But those events are gaining renewed attention in the wake of Ferguson protests and the release of the new movie Selma, which is nominated for the Academy's best picture award. The movie examines the life of the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., focusing on the 1965 freedom marches from Selma to Montgomery. 

So perhaps it's a good time to add more of "this stuff" into a rarely performed opera and possibly attract new attention to it.

Here's an excerpt from the original version of Appomattox. It's less than 4-minutes long so you are not likely to hit the wall from Kennicott's review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J14flyMOQo