Music Monday

It started out sunny, despite the 70% threat of thunderstorms, and I ran my errands and did my morning chores in hopes that I would get out in the garden this afternoon.  We have had slightly more than 12 inches of rain in the last month, which is unusually high.  To some extent I don't mind as the rain and the shady front yard is unusually lush this year.  But so are the weeds and it has rained enough that I have not been able to keep up with them.  

Some part of me fears that this lush spring will be followed by an unusually dry July and August; it has happened before, and I am not eager to be out gardening in the heat, so I was out in the yard working and planting a few things until I was pretty well soaked through.  

Then it seemed like a perfect time to come inside and listen to Philip Glass's Waiting for the Barbarians.  Although I once would have said that I was not a person who listened to operas (although I attending performances), it seems that I have been mistaken. 

I ordered the recording of the opera after watching a film about Philip Glass on PBS (GLASS:  a portrait of Philip in twelve parts).  The film was quite interesting, but what I really wanted was to see the opera Glass was composing, and which was performed, while they were filming.  Of course I can't see it now, but I certainly could buy the CD, and I have been listening to it pretty frequently since it arrived in mid May, with the exception of the week that Owen was here.

I admit to loving the music of Phillip Glass.  I have loved Glass's music since I purchased a couple of albums in college (Music in Eight Parts, Einstein on the Beach). But I do think I would love this opera regardless of whether I knew anything about the composers previous work.  In this opera the work is unmistakably glass, but there is a greater variety in the orchestration than in his early operatic works and the music and the mood it conveys consistently portrays and reveals the progression of the story.  The voices are almost spoken, narrated even, as if instead of reading a book, or having the book read to us, it is performed for us with the same immediacy that one finds in reading a book.  But of course instead of reading words on a page and imagining, one is listening and the power of the words are joined by the strength of music to convey urgency and crisis.  

It seems to me that Waiting for the Barbarians stands on it own as a musical work very well and is quite beautiful and effective as music, without the visual stimulus of seeing it on the stage.  Yet I would love to see this opera, not just hear it.  Although given the frequency with which contemporary opera's tend to be performed I do not see this as quite likely.  Once upon a time I would have said I would fly off anywhere to see it.  Once upon a time that may have been possible, but this is not the tenor of my life right now, so it would have to come pretty close to home, and even then I might miss it.  Still, Waiting for the Barbarians joins the short list of contemporary operas I would really like to see someday.  

Although not at all alike, it strikes me that the other opera on this list is Poul Ruder's opera The Handmaid's Tale which, although not at all like Glass's opera, is also more of a music narrative than a traditional opera.