That’s the term one of Philip Glass’s collaborators, Shalom Goldman, famously applied to the idea of transforming texts from ancient artifacts into the libretto for Akhnaten. Glass worked with Goldman and a handful of others to craft the libretto for this third in his trilogy of “portrait operas” including Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha.
I’m completely spellbound studying this work now ahead of the Los Angeles Opera production directed by Phelim McDermott and starring Anthony Roth Costanzo (which premiered to ecstatic reviews last spring at ENO).
Glass stated that he was drawn to these iconic figures as “people who changed the world through the power of ideas rather than through the force of arms.” Recalls Glass:
I came across a work by [Immanuel Velikovsky] that was new to m: “Oedipus and Akhnaten.” It is a concise and scholarly work in which Velikovsky attempts to trace the origin of the Oedipus legend to the period of Akhnaten, the 18th-Dynasty Egyptian pharaoh who, in modern times, is looked upon as the first monotheist. Like everything else about Akhnaten, though, this one-word description hides more than it reveals.
Filed under: Los Angeles Opera, Philip Glass
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 