My own feelings, having had a week to mull on it,  are that the central problem is the libretto.   If - as Dario Fo says - "all drama arises out of situations", there simply aren't enough situations, of enough different types, in the libretto to hold the interest.  There are only two moments which have action in them - the moment when Gandhi is stoned, and the moment when they burn the registration cards. All the rest of it is a sort of philosophical gloss on Gandhi's life, which belongs more in the concert-hall than the theatre.  The other characters are not properly drawn and severely under-parted, and they remain lifeless ciphers without characters or opinions of their own (except that we are compelled to assume that Mrs Gandhi agrees with her husband).  There are wasted opportunities here...  the act of rebellion in burning the registration cards should have been "prepared" by an earlier scene in which a "doubting Thomas" amongst the Satyagrahi speaks against Gandhi out of fear of reprisals...  without this, they looked unfortunately like brainwashed automatons of the kind you might have found at Sharpville.   Similarly, Mrs Gandhi needed a scene of her own, in which she voiced her private fears and misgivings.  I had no idea who any of this lot were at all (who was the Planter?), and when you have to look in your programme to find out who on earth they are, you know things have gone very wrong.  Similarly the stage-directors struggled to make the chorus of Boers into a group of individuals,  but there's nothing in the music to support this, and they lacked credibility - they were just a group of "baddies" straight out of "Blazing Saddles"... they lacked a ringleader to articulate their grievances with Gandhi, and if those grievances were unreasonable, racist, etc, then we needed to see that for ourselves...  who's to say Gandhi wasn't wrong?   Gandhi's powers as an orator, and as a leader against great difficulties were presented Blue-Peter style, as "one we made before the show", and were never seen during the action.

Of course, the idea of presenting the opera in Sanskrit without subtitles was a colossal miscalculation.  The opera is not self-explanatory in Sanskrit alone on the stage, and requires "learning up the story beforehand from the programme".  Christiansen's allegation of pretentiousness is fully justified on this score.  It's deliberate clever-dickiness that cocks a snoot at the audience.  If the idea was supposed to make the audience feel like the Boers, excluded from Gandhi's world by a linguistic barrier, then it not only fails, but misrepresents the facts, as Gandhi habitually represented his case in English to those who opposed him.   

Glass worked with different librettists on AKHNATEN and the results are clearly more successful.  There is a linear story-line in AKHNATEN, there are fully-fledged characters who have motivations and ideas of their own (even so, Horemhab and Queen Tye remain two-dimensional) and there is an ending which brings us up short and compels us to think about what we've seen.  In Satyagraha, I had the clear impression that it comes to an end because 3.5 hours had elapsed and the orchestra and chorus would be into Overtime Pay...  because there is no ending at all,  and this is the fatal weakness in the piece.

Reiner, I'd like to echo Richard, word for word.

Yes, welcome back, Reiner (bizarrely I wasn't quite sure it was really you at first!). Hope you got back OK.

I do think, reading what you say above, that my seat was even more problematic than I realised at the time, since several of the things you mention in terms of stage action I just didn't see. Still agree with you that the lack of surtitles was a major problem. I don't know Akhnaten at all so can't compare, but it did seem to me that Satyagraha had a meaningful ending, although from where I was sitting I certainly didn't see any of the storm-clouds mentioned in Rupert Christiansen's review (or was this in one of the other reviews I read?); in fact, on the contrary, I thought the ending was meant to be a vast expanse of blue sky opening up behind Gandhi in the course of his long, rapturous final aria.

Well, I agree with most of that, except that the orchestration didn't sound at all clumsy at ENO on Thursday; in fact its extraordinary transparency and the sense it gave of sustained attention to detail across very long repetitive spans were among the chief factors in convincing me that Glass wasn't just on autopilot, and towards the end of the evening even made me start to think of comparisons with the experience of listening through a long piece by Feldman.

More generally, I do find it very depressing the way what once seemed, as you say, like a single-minded radicalism with a chance of winning over bigger audiences etc. has in the end seemed to feel it necessary to abandon the former in order to achieve the latter. My New Notes article of last December (the Reich half, not the Finnissy half, obviously!) gave a few more detailed thoughts on this very subject.

No, but I am rather fond of Zappa's "The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny".

BUT i noticed in this sundays torygraph a good review along with 'do anything [non violent] to go see this', well, critics, a mixed bunch but if something has 'some' good reviews it must be worth a go eh

Absolutely seconded, Lord B: it is worth a go.

Reiner, I had rather assumed we were just unlucky in going on the first night. The intervals were very long, as you say, and I thought they might have smoothened up their set changes by now ... After all, the advertised finish time on the first night was 10.35, though it actually ended almost on the dot of 11.

Anyone planning to go now, it might be worth checking with the box office and see if they're still saying 10.35.

Agreed, it was an opening night when they were coping with the set-changes - although, ehem, any new show at the Coli will normally have had two orchestral stage runthroughs, a tech rehearsal, plus a General,  so they ought to have have had this nailed-down by the opening.   But alongside that there was the entire coterie of anyone who is anyone in New Music there in the audience (I spotted Nicholas Kenyon, Michael Nyman, and Peter Sellars,  and I wasn't even looking...) and they all had to be glad-handed in the intervals, tv-interviewed, etc...  and this might also have helped take it over time?