Thanks Ian - and here it is. I also know practically nothing about Otte beyond Das Buch, but very interested to hear about his other activities.

It seems to me that it's around the mid-to-late-70s that everything sort of goes "wrong" for minimalism: Glass and Reich ran up against the buffers with Einstein on the Beach and Music for 18 Musicians respectively and seemingly couldn't see where to take the idea any further except by compromising it with more "classical" ideas of form, as in Reich's Tehillim which I did quite like at first until a certain Mr Smith described it in a review in Contact as "milking the audience" and the scales fell from my eyes.

By "wrong" in the above I suppose I'm taking the same "purist" stance as Autoharp here: having got to know these composers from their earlier works and been attracted by their radical approach to material and form, I could only be disappointed by the directions they subsequently took, while others like Riley and Young didn't make those compromises with the result that they've remained in relative obscurity except for getting the obligatory namecheck as "pioneers" when their more famous colleagues are being discussed.

OK, but I think that the thing about Einstein certainly, is that it's a different kind of stage piece to Akhnaten. The title 'opera' was adopted because that's how Wilson referred to his large theatre pieces and the gnarly question of how it fitted in to established genres only really came up when Glass became more overtly concerned with Classical form and its trappings.

Satyagraha is a similar case - obviously not as extreme as Einstein - where he's really writing a meditation on the subject, with stage action. I really enjoyed a lot of the puppetry and 'tricks' (and having worked in physical theatre as a teenager, I don't like that word!  ), but there were too many irrelevancies that could have been ironed out or explained (I suspect that, in an attempt to streamline the production, some links were removed that would have revealed some unities in the production but then I'm rather charitable). The moment I felt that the production really fell on its face was in the final act where there was a lot of dead time with Gandhi walking up and down the stage without any clear purpose (I thought that this completely undermined the point of the opera). It seemed that the production had been mis-paced leaving rather too much time at the end. I can't really comment on the vocal writing - I don't have anything like enough experience in this field! - but I think that I'd agree that he's largely writing vocalise for the soloists, but I'm not sure that I really have that much of a problem with it. The text doesn't have to bear the meaning of the words in the context of the piece and when the singer was up to it (as, I fear, the police chief's wife was not) the effect is quite striking. We might have to agree to disagree on this one though.

I agree that Akhnaten is a more successful attempt at a conventional theatre piece, and is going to make audiences (and critics!) happier than the other two but I don't think that they can be compared on a like-to-like basis as you seem to be doing. It wasn't just that Glass was slowly learning how to be an opera composer (I'm not sure that can be disputed really...) but that also, he was moving away from the tradition of experimental theatre with which he'd been heavily involved as a young man. It's interesting that he later returns to it, working with Wilson on the CIVIL warS and Monsters of Grace but the music doesn't have the same edge.

I think that the recording of La Belle et la Bête is a very strange recording of a very strange piece. I don't understand why he uses a synthesiser to play what sounds to me like it is an orchestral score. If it was due to the financial constraints of the commission, I don't see why he didn't insist on a professional recording with an orchestra. Also, the way that (I think this is what happens) the voices are matched to the film produces this artificial 'too-fastness' for all of the vocal parts that's either absurd or a master-stroke. I think we've got a DVD of the film with the score in the library, so I'll have to get it out before my card spontaneously combusts at the beginning of next month.

I largely agree with Richard's points about Glass and Reich. I think that they do sometimes write interesting pieces (certainly there are quite a few composers floating around who never write better than Reich's worse pieces (not so many in the case of Glass...)) or perhaps I should say that they write nice pieces, but that in contrast to what Riley and Young are still doing they are incredibly insubstantial. Perhaps it's the emphasis on performance rather than on dots on the page that's important here.

I entirely agree with you here, but I fear there was no rich source of ideas and material in Glass's work for the producer to mine in the Martin Luther King section - it was, as you say, "dead time".  But the problem lies in the material, not the production... and in fact it lies deeper than than the score, it lies in the libretto,  which is essentially too weak to support such an extended work.  I use the word "weak" advisedly, because it's poorly written...  for example, the "baddies" in Act II - who the hell are they?  If they are Boers, then why are they speaking in Sanskrit?? (Except, I mean, as a ludicrously pretentious pose). This is as barmy as a John Wayne movie in which John Wayne speaks in Hopi throughout.  It isn't avoiding presentism - it's a falsification of the actual situation. And why do they hate Gandhi?  They never tell us. Not one single word is said on the topic. If they are racists, then let us hear them say so (racists are usually anything but reticent on the topic)?  Or if it's about issues of land, or elections, or voting rights, then let us hear their view. But don't, please, sledgehammer us with a picture of two-dimensional cut-out baddies, who are simply baddies straight out of The Eagle Book For Boys.  Even the baddies in BLAZING SADDLES at least had an explicable motivation - they'd been hired by "Hedley" Lamarr to run the settlers out of town, and Lamarr wanted their land.  But a supposedly "intellectual, liberal" opera couldn't even get as far as a Mel Brooks satire?


PS I challenge anyone to identify (a) "first mystic elderly gent with a long beard at an upper window" in Satygraha, and for double points identify (b) "second identical mystic elderly gent with a long beard at an upper window", and for quadruple points mention any aspects by which (a) can be distinguished from (b).   Ted Bovis's First Rule Of Opera - "When you need to explain it all in the programme notes because what you've done on stage is utterly meaningless, then you've failed totally".  Perhaps the producers should have made it multiple-choice?  Please select from the following:

• Father Christmas
• Mussorgsky
• Count Leo Tolstoy
• Buster Merryfield
• Tagore
• Marx
• WG Grace

Everyone sings in sanskrit in the opera because the libretto is derived from the Bhagavada Gita. Glass isn't presenting a narrative situation in which he wishes you to believe, he's meditating on Gandhi and alienating you from direct involvement in the action (rather like Stravinsky's use of Latin in Oedipus).

I think that you're looking for a chicken in an abstract painting here (sorry Karlheinz!). You're looking for narrative and explanation where there just isn't any, but this isn't necessarily a failure, or Glass being uneducated in the art of opera. He's trying to do something different and if you can't get into that mind-set then the whole thing is never going to work for you.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I get really fed up with entrenched opinions about what music, theatre or opera can be or rather what it can't be. You really won't like any opera I ever turn my hand to...

Both Tolstoy and Tagore were identified at the beginning of each act (or at least when they take up their position) with their names projected onto the wall next to their window. I can't remember the exact details that distinguish Tolstoy, but Tagore has his raven... As far as I can remember from what I've read, the setup for both of them is quite detailed and distinctive for what it's worth.
Ted Bovis' First Rule of Opera only really works when you're trying to write an 'Opera' and maybe Glass didn't write one, but in my opinion he produced something far more interesting than the great majority of those written in the last thirty years.

IRF - try Reich's Desert Music. It occurred to me this afternoon that if you like the Glass Violin Concerto, you might like that.

Yes, errr, I knew that   But it was you who pointed-out that the final act is just Gandhi wandering around aimlessly - and I am saying that the problem stems from a poorly crafted libretto,  no matter where it was sourced or in what language.  "Music-Theatre" isn't an either/or choice between the two

PS I think you would be surprised what music-theatre pieces I like (and have directed, and commissioned)  

Alas there's very little available on disc - there is also his Book of Hours on d'c records, which I find somewhat less convincing, and I think a few other more recent recordings which I haven't yet heard. But his earlier stuff is practically unrecorded to the best of my knowledge; there was one major work (think it was Tropisms) on an old DG LP, and a choral work somewhere on a Wergo disc as well, but I can't remember the details offhand - will look them up and get back on this.

But I would give Das Buch der Klänge a try - I find it staggeringly beautiful.

When I read almost anything by Kyle Gann I always get the impression that he finds any music not from the USA quaint and possibly even faintly diverting, but ultimately not very significant compared with what goes on in the States - is he the Donald Rumsfeld of contemporary music?