Glass' transcendent meditation

NEW YORK -- The production of Philip Glass’ "Satyagraha" that opened Friday night, the first at the Metropolitan Opera, is more than opera. This epic new vision of a Minimalist masterpiece revolving around the events in South Africa that inspired Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence is also more opera than I have ever witnessed at the Met or learned about in the annals of the storied company.

To sit in the large, tasteless house in Lincoln Center and, after hours of, say, Wagner, fall under the spell of a soprano or bass as the midnight hour approaches is, for many of us, the definition of opera. Orchestra, conductor, singers and great music conspire to transport us to some mythical place that inevitably transcends a banal production or a composer's rotten soul or a physically clumsy singer with a cold. If opera is transcendental art, you need something to transcend.

Or do you? Everything that reached the ear and eye Friday was on the same exalted level. Gandhi's goodness and his political impact are not, I hope, in dispute. And at a long evening's end, when the American tenor Richard Croft cast a neo-Wagnerian spell, he did so to offer guidance for enriching the wayward world that we were about to reenter. That is the way in which this was more than opera and was, I'm quite sure, a first for the Metropolitan Opera.

Premiered in Holland in 1980, "Satyagraha" is the second of Glass' many operas and the first written for the resources of a standard opera company. Four years earlier, the composer and director-designer Robert Wilson had broken the operatic mold with "Einstein on the Beach," music theater of images created for the composer's own ensemble and with no sung libretto.

"Satyagraha" began Glass' entry into a more traditional musical world. But although he wrote for classically trained singers and a standard orchestra, he did not leave his experimental roots behind. The era of high Minimalism, begun some 15 years earlier, was ending but not over. "Satyagraha" has all the repetition in the orchestra anyone could hope for, and the Met orchestra, conducted by Dante Anzolini, an Argentine making his Met debut, let the arpeggios luxuriate. The sound was gorgeous.

Gandhi's 20 years in South Africa are treated as ritual in historical scenes that take place between 1896 and 1913. The ingenious libretto, which Glass devised with Constance DeJong, is taken from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text to which Gandhi was devoted.