Akhnaten, like the 18th dynasty pharaoh for whom it is named, is an enigma. There are sober and intelligent opera fans who will tell you, in all seriousness, that it is the worst opera ever written. Others will rearrange their travel plans just to see this rarely performed work.
I’m in the second category. When I learned I’d be back in California on business, my first thought was to extend my trip an extra week so I could attend Oakland Opera Theater’s production of Akhnaten, billed as the West Coast premiere. But as the crowd gathered on opening night, I was not the furthest from home. That distinction belonged to two German visitors. They had come to California to see an opera―not for a grand gala production in San Francisco with internationally renowned stars. No, they came to see a low-budget production with local singers in a small black-box theater. In Oakland.
But for every European opera fan who might contemplate crossing the Atlantic for this piece, there are ten in San Francisco who won’t even cross the Bay. To them, Akhnaten, represents everything that is wrong with modern opera―which is to say everything that’s wrong with opera, period. Listening to a recording, or reading the libretto, one can almost see their point. There doesn’t seem to be much there. The libretto is a hodgepodge of excerpts from ancient texts in Hebrew and long-dead Egyptian languages. There is no discernible story. The music is rhythmic and monotonous, consisting mostly of short, simple arpeggio-like figures repeated over and over. On the rare occasion that a scrap of melody appears, it too is recycled and repeated to exhaustion. It is the musical equivalent of the “my eight-year-old kid could have made that” painting. It is the poster child for modern opera.
In fact, Akhnaten represents one particular type of modern opera, better known as “minimalist,” a term which those who dislike modernity often use interchangeably with “modern” (not to mention “atonal,” which this piece emphatically is not). Written in 1984, it is the third of composer Philip Glass’s three minimalist operas. Thanks to recent performances in Chicago and Boston, it is slightly better known than its companion pieces Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha.
Glass’s operas, and the strong reactions they evoke, go directly to the essential question of what “modern opera” is. The great majority of operas performed today were written before 1930. The most recent opera that can reasonably be said to be part of the standard canon (Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites) is nearly 50 years old. It’s not that new operas aren’t being written―there are scads of them, ranging from small-scale regional productions to much heralded big-company extravaganzas broadcast on PBS. (The former are invariably better, by the way.) But none of them survive beyond a handful of revivals, if even that.
The contemporary composer of opera faces a dilemma. If he or she writes in a way that is innovative, the fans complain, “That doesn’t sound like opera to me. Why do today’s composers write this modern [atonal, minimalist, etc.] crap? Why can’t anybody write like Verdi or Puccini?” But then if someone does write like Verdi or Puccini, he or she is berated for being an unoriginal copycat with nothing new to offer. Why would anyone want to listen to wannabe-Verdi instead of the real thing?
The truth is, the majority of opera fans don’t want new works. For them, opera is an antique art form: The fact that a piece is old, even obsolete, is essential to its value. A collector of antique furniture would never think to wish that someone would manufacture some new antiques. The very idea is nonsense. If it’s not created in the old style, it’s just furniture. If someone copies the old styles today, it’s still not an antique.
So too with opera. It is loved not just in spite of being obsolete, but because it’s obsolete. That’s why efforts to bring opera up to date are doomed to failure. If it’s up to date, it’s not opera.
No one sets out to build an antique. The furniture makers who built today’s antiques were only trying to make something that is both functional and beautiful. The composers who wrote the operas performed today were doing the same, writing for their own contemporary public. In its heyday, opera was the strongest medium available for telling a story. Grand opera combined drama, spectacle, music, and dance―literally everything that was available.
It’s no coincidence that opera’s decline coincides with the rise of cinema, and indeed several composers made the switch directly (e.g., Prokofiev, Korngold). To the extent that the real purpose of opera is to bring together every artistic technology to tell a story as completely as possible, a great “opera” composer of our day would be Steven Spielberg, using music composed by John Williams.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that opera is obsolete. If everything that opera sought to do is today better achieved in the movie theater, and the only ones who like original operas are antique collectors, what’s the point of creating a new opera? It’s not just a rhetorical question. It is the core question at the heart of contemporary opera’s identity crisis.
Oakland Opera Theater is a company that tries to answer that question. Significantly, although the company focuses exclusively on contemporary works, “contemporary” is not part of its name, but “theater” is. In almost every way, Oakland Opera Theater feels more like a live theater company than an opera company―the black box performance space, the intimate interaction with the audience, and especially the strong emphasis on the visual part of the performance. At times the emphasis reaches a point where preparation of the music is neglected far more than would be tolerated in any opera company, even a small-scale contemporary opera company.
That’s not an accident, nor even a failing; it is a conscious choice. Oakland Opera Theater’s purpose is to provide a complete theater experience. In most opera companies, the theater is a vehicle for showcasing the music. Here, the music is one of many tools mustered―along with acting, dance, lighting, set design, and yes even cinema―to help create the complete theater experience. But in spite of its subordinate role, the singing is not marginalized. To the contrary, it is central.
This then is Oakland Opera Theater’s answer to the question of contemporary opera: Even in today’s technological age, with its ability to film images and record sounds, there is still something essential about the live human voice. Without it the experience would not be complete. And not just any voice. The singers here, even while they are unconventionally staged in unconventional productions, still sing with a true operatic sound. They are not reduced to pretty actors singing in a pop style with the help of electronic amplification, as in most of today’s musical theater.
For the telling of most conventional stories, the operatic form is no longer needed, but Oakland Opera Theater’s stories are never conventional. The company leans toward strange primal stories which speak to the audience in a way that is never literal nor direct―whether it’s the abstraction of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, or the grotesque imagery of one of Lorca’s “impossible” plays, Así que pasen cinco años. Works like these cannot be communicated in a direct and realistic presentation. They require the concert of sensations that seep into the consciousness from all directions. They require opera.
This is why of all the opera companies around the Bay Area, none is better suited than Oakland Opera Theater to present Akhnaten. In spite of the company’s marginal position on the fringes of the lively Bay Area opera community, and in spite of its scruffy little venue next to a porn arcade near Jack London Square, it’s a perfect fit. Philip Glass and Oakland Opera Theater share the same vision of why opera still matters today. It is the same reason that the traditionalist opera fans, listening to the CD in their living rooms, are baffled by this work. They have completely missed the central point. Akhnaten is not about the music, nor the text, nor even the story. It is about being immersed in the ritual experience.
That’s what this production seeks to provide, with mixed success. The performance art begins before the curtain goes up. Indeed, it begins before you even enter the theater. The front entrance is locked, and a sign directs you around the corner to a side entrance. A crowd gathers there around the makeshift box office set up on the sidewalk. As you join the crowd, you may or may not notice that members of the cast have joined alongside you. It is part of the production’s central innovation that the audience and cast are part of a single group which will experience the ritual together.
When the door opens, a “tour guide” invites the entire group to begin a tour of ancient Egypt. This is a departure from the score. In the original, the tour guide only appears as an epilogue, but this production, directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang, has made a prologue of it as well. The tour leads into a tunnel―it would have been more effective if it were darker and narrower, but I suppose one must be sensitive to claustrophobics―which after a few twists and a long corridor emerges onto the stage. In typical black-box fashion, the playing space fills the entire room, with seating arranged on two sides and a bar on a third.
The lengthy and repetitive prelude is already being played by the orchestra as you pass through the tunnel, and it continues as audience members find their way to their seats (or to the bathroom). Those tourists who are part of the cast remain intermingled in the group. A few take seats with the audience. Others poke about the set, exploring it as if it really were the Egyptian ruins to which it bears a (very) faint resemblance. And if a few members of the audience explore the set as well, that’s all right.
All of this thoroughly blurs the distinction of when exactly the opera has begun, but you know the action has begun in earnest when the first transformation takes place. By now the cast members are examining various artifacts, trying on bits of costumery, and digging in the sand. By some strange magic―reminiscent of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation―disturbing these artifacts has released a spell which causes the explorers to play out the roles of the ancient Egyptians they are studying.
Sadly, the exact nature of this transformation is not at all clear. Throughout the evening, the greatest weakness is the lack of consistent definition across the entire ensemble, as if each actor was left to his or her own devices in terms of characterization. It is the conceptual equivalent of a ragged kickline in which each dancer’s leg is at a different angle. It’s not that any one leg is better positioned than the others; the problem is that they don’t match, and the overall all effect is sloppy. In this case, one can’t tell whether the explorers are simply re-enacting the roles as a conscious game to enjoy or they have been truly transformed into different personalities. Most of the lead characters lean toward the latter approach, while Akhnaten and most of the ensemble lean toward the former.
For me, the most dramatically effective transformation was the one that was most extreme. Playing the tour guide, Michael Mohammed had a casual, friendly and approachable manner. After reading some carvings uncovered by the diggers, he performed a strange little ritual dance in which he doffed his tour guide costume in a highly stylized manner and replaced it with an ancient Egyptian-looking skirt. There was no mistaking that something very odd had happened to him. From then on, he was Amenhotep the scribe, whose imperious and aloof manner was quite different from the tour guide’s. (Unfortunately, this wonderful moment was garishly upstaged by a member of the ensemble, sitting at the edge of Mohammed’s spotlight and continuing to behave like a tourist, completely oblivious to the tour guide’s transformation―a disastrous blocking and lighting faux pas which I hope has been fixed by now.)
At the opposite extreme was Akhnaten. Paul Flight initially looked like a cheery and somewhat boorish tourist, which was fine. After a while he changed his clothes and looked like a cheery and somewhat boorish man dressed up as a pharaoh. Had he transformed into Akhnaten? Or was he the same person playing dress-up, merely pretending to be Akhnaten? Elsewhere in the piece, blurring of distinctions was effective, but here it was just weak. It didn’t help that his character choice for the pharaoh was to wear a perpetual self-satisfied smirk as if to say, “It’s good to be the king.&%8221; (In one scene, where Akhnaten is greeting a throng of admirers, he looks positively presidential, in the 21st century sense of the word.)
Glass’s opera tells the story of the 18th dynasty pharaoh Akhnaten, though “tells” and “story” are both used very loosely here. Akhnaten was a radical reformer. Defying ages of tradition, he threw out the old Egyptian pantheon in favor of worship of a single god, Aten, the sun. Many consider Akhnaten’s religion to be the first instance of true monotheism in history. His reign lasted only 17 years. After a frenzy of prosperity and ambitious building, Akhnaten’s regime collapsed, whereupon the forces of reaction resurged to demolish him utterly. Like the sun he worshiped, Akhnaten was raised on high, shone brilliantly, and then declined.
It was a weakness of this production that Akhnaten did not shine as brightly as he might have. The finale to the second act, a Hymn to the Sun, was staged beautifully. Akhnaten towered above the worshippers, holding the disk of the sun and bestowing its rays upon his people both in the ensemble and in the audience. The same cannot be said for the “Window of Appearances,” the opera’s only real aria. The text of this number, the only words sung in English, are drawn from Akhnaten’s own writings. It is a poetic statement of faith. Glass highlighted this scene in many ways, clearly intending it to be the place where the interpreters of the work reveal what Akhnaten’s religion might represent to us today. Instead, this great opportunity was squandered, as Akhnaten was made to sing the entire aria sitting on his throne. Trapped there, Flight fidgeted as he sang, compounding the listener’s desire to see him doing something more.
As a rule, the voices were strong and attractive. None stood out as extraordinary, but none were bad either. In a piece which is primarily about the ensemble sound, that was entirely satisfactory in every role but the title role. In the role of Akhnaten, written for countertenor, Flight sang well. But for this enigmatic titular pharaoh one hoped for something extraordinary. Flight’s best sounds were in the occasional higher notes. The entire role is written quite low, barely an octave in range and all in the vicinity that would be considered “alto” for a female singer. Most countertenors shine in a somewhat higher range, and one wonders if perhaps the part lay uncomfortably low in Flight’s voice.
Most impressive vocally were two of the secondary male leads. In the first concertato number, the funeral of the pharaoh who preceded Akhnaten, Amenhotep III, is presided over by his royal kinsman Aye. In the role of Aye, John P. Minágro’s rich and voluptuous bass-baritone voice soared both over and under the concerted forte of the rest of the ensemble. In the Temple scene which opens the second act, the High Priest of the traditional religion rallies his forces. Alan Cochran brought an exciting virility to the part of the High Priest, singing with a well-produced trumpety tenor. (In the program he is erroneously labeled “Amon,” but that is the name of the chief god they worship.)
The most thrilling singing of all comes in a brief appearance by two of the sopranos later in the same scene. The scene, titled “Temple,” is the longest and the greatest number of the opera, and it perfectly encapsulates the genius of Glass’s minimalist strategy. Superficially, the music is completely boring. The same few sparse harmonic figures are repeated over and over ad nauseam, with minute changes to the orchestration in each iteration. The voices do nothing but punctuate with intermittent exclamations of “ah! ah!” in various vocal combinations.
But on stage, what a difference! What might otherwise sound like your child’s noisy finger exercises repeated until your head explodes instead becomes a monumental clash of ideologies. Having rallied his team, the High Priest stands his ground against Akhnaten’s arrival. At first, Akhnaten, with his strange, girlish voice and his puny entourage, seems like no threat to the manly priest. But with each repetition, Akhnaten’s persistent theme slowly erodes at your consciousness. Gradually―imperceptibly at first―the instruments in the orchestra pile on. On stage, one by one the voices unite with Akhnaten’s team. The priest alone remains standing silently and stoically as the tide turns against him.
Now we feel the true power of minimalism. Glass’s fifty pages of insipid music are not for nothing. Inexorably they create an emotional tide whose visceral effect on the listener is indescribable. Just when you think it can’t possibly build up any more, it does. By the time the full orchestra is playing fortissimo along with most of the voices on stage, strange dark emotions from deep in your soul are already welling up to the surface threatening to burst.
Then come the sopranos. First is Angela Dean Baham, playing the Queen Mother Tye. Out of nowhere her voice rings out with a big high note that seems to burst right through you. Then while you’re still reeling from the first hit, ensemble soprano Victoria Jensen―who up to this point has shown no sign of being anything other than an ordinary chorister―piles on with an even bigger and higher note which positively flattens you. These two are singing a octave above everyone else on stage. In context it feels as if they must be singing impossibly high. In reality, the notes are only moderately high (A’s and B’s), just high enough to be in the heart of the soprano’s “money range” without being uncomfortably out of reach. There is no text here to get in the way. No consonants, no dynamics, no tricky lines leading up to them. The singers have nothing to do but plant themselves firmly on the ground and make sound―chthonic sound which seems to come to their bodies directly from the bowels of the earth.
It’s truly an extraordinary moment, and it alone is worth the price of admission and the schlep to Oakland.
As for the rest, there are some other nice moments, as well as some flaws. The duet with Akhnaten and Nefertiti (Darla Wigginton) is lovely, further enlivened by Wigginton’s sinuous belly dance. The building of the City is brilliantly conceived and fairly well executed.
The small orchestra, conducted by Deirdre McClure, was perched on a platform above the bar, which the set designer half-jokingly refers to as the “mezzanine level.” Added last fall for the third annual Four Saints production, it’s an ideal solution to the problem of where to fit the orchestra in such a small playing space. The players in the small ensemble gamely wrestled with Glass’s thankless score―a strenuous assignment which is technically difficult but unglamorous. They were at their best in the numbers dominated by percussion and in all the loud passages, when big sound contributed forcefully to the overall artistic assault.
Like so many small company productions, Oakland Opera Theater’s opening nights are perilously under-rehearsed, which leaves room for hope that some of the kinks will be ironed out in later performances. The central gimmick of contemporary tourists being made to relive the ancient drama, while effective in drawing the audience closer to the action, sits uncomfortably close to the tired opera director cliché of staging an entire opera as a gigantic flashback. The tightness of the scheme is nearly lost in bad acting. In tourist mode, much of it is high-schoolish pantomime that fails to suspend anyone’s disbelief, while in ritual mode it is too undisciplined to effectively communicate the other-worldliness of the drama. Even among the better actors, there are some unfortunate decisions which break the spell. In the Hymn to the Sun, Cochran, who in the previous scene had played the High Priest, is pressed into service to join the ensemble. As if to explain his unwonted presence, he affects a sarcastic reluctance, which is good for a laugh from anyone watching him but not worth the price it incurs in disturbing the grandeur of the entire scene.
For a company known for its creative visual effects, Oakland Opera Theater seemed to skimp this time around. The usual multimedia projections were absent. Many of the scenes were complete without them, but others really needed a boost from more visual cues, whether projected or otherwise, to help set the mood.
A few of the prop and set choices were obnoxious. Prominent on stage were a pair of anachronistically modern metal filing cabinets. According to a preview article in the East Bay Express these “represent the British Museum, where ancient history is catalogued and hidden away.” To me they just represent temporary rehearsal props that no one got around to replacing. Equally unconvincing was an exotic-looking board game which Akhnaten’s daughters played in a family scene that looked like a poorly acted television commercial. This supposedly “symbolizes the political gamesmanship that accompanied Akhnaten’s rise and fall.” Can directors really say such things with a straight face? This is a prop looking for a concept, not vice versa. It calls out, “Here’s a cool Egyptian-looking thing. Let’s try to fit it in somewhere.”
When all is said and done, this Akhnaten, like all of Oakland Opera Theater’s productions, aspires to a vision which it fails to achieve. What the audience sees in the production is not so much what the company actually presents as what it points to and sketches out just enough that the audience can imagine what it ought to be. This is not a bad thing. Indeed, it’s what I love most about the company. Perhaps it is always trying to reach beyond its grasp, but consider the opposite case. There is nothing sadder in the opera world than the company that lavishes abundant resources on a production that has nothing interesting to say. Why such companies continue to receive large grants while the artistically exciting companies must persist on a shoestring budget is another mystery of the opera world.