I have recently spent a while on these board explaining why I think Glass's AKHNATEN succeeds whereas SATYAGRAHA fails - and I laid the blame squarely at the feet of the librettist of SATYAGRAHA,  whose understanding of what stimulates an audience's interest, involvement and appreciation clearly differs radically from.... well, from what's been used in successful operas.

I was fascinated to see therefore that Osvaldo Golijov was prepared to consider expert counsel as to what the problems might have been with his opera AINADAMAR, and why he was so unhappy with its premiere that he considered scrapping the work? Golijov met with opera director Peter Sellars to find a way of rescuing the piece - a meeting which resulted in librettist David Henry Hwang reworking the piece (which is based on the life of Lorca).  Opera Boston are now premiering the substantially rewritten version of the work.

[Boston Globe article:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2007/10/19/in_a_new_light/]

Of course, in the "glory days" of opera such reworkings and rewrites were absolutely normal - consider how Verdi rewrote his own MACBETH, Mussorgsky's hopeless struggle to produce a fair version of BORIS (for which we still have no "authoratative" version), Offenbach's monster rewrite of TALES OF HOFFMAN or Tchaikovsky's deft scalpel-work on his own MAZEPPA (reversed the final two scenes, added new linking material and a pianissimo final curtain).   Intriguingly Shostakovich's own notes to the performing edition he'd made of BORIS GODUNOV outline quite clearly that he'd ruthlessly adhered to anything that would restore the dramatic narrative strength of the Pushkin story (ie even if history was twisted as a result).