Photo by Steve Pike
We are not about to tell you that Opera Theatre Saint Louis’ American premiere of The Trial was scored by “the minimalist composer” Philip Glass. Glass, who once had to pay to rent Carnegie Hall but is now hailed as a genius, loathes that tag.
“The difficulty with the name was that it told people what they were going to hear, and they didn’t hear that. It’s not the reporters’ fault,” he adds graciously. “Editors like a short description. But I didn’t spend my life doing work you can describe in one sentence.”
He’s spent it writing 20 operas, 36 film scores, 11 symphonies, concertos, chamber and ballet music, all of it fresh.
What does it feel like to be the most famous living composer in the world?
You mean all the other ones are dead? What happened?
You say you’re an “accidental” opera composer?
When I started writing operas in the 1970s, no Americans were writing operas. I was writing for European companies. And now I don’t know anyone who isn’t writing for opera. Young composers are dealing with social issues, and an audience is developing for new work. It’s not torture for people to go to the opera anymore.
What changed?
I think the interest in collaborative art forms, with the elements of music and text and movement and image. The language of the arts today is rooted in collaborative work. And operas are above all collaborations.
Who are your favorite collaborators?
Allen Ginsberg was one, and I loved working with Leonard [Cohen]. And Godfrey Reggio, who made Koyaanisqatsi. These days I’m working with Laurie Anderson. The criteria for me is if the work is interesting, something I haven’t heard before. I’m always looking for new things. I have collaborators from Africa, Australia, Brazil, China, Tibet—and they all have different musical backgrounds, and I have to find a new way of working every time.
Tell me about The Trial.
Kafka wrote it in 1914, before the first world war, at a time when the feeling in Europe was one of tremendous optimism. It looked like the world was entering a period of peace and prosperity. But somehow he had this sense of foreboding that wasn’t evident to anybody else.
Any clues as to why?
I think it’s in the text itself. It’s such a modern piece. We are talking about the corruption of bureaucracy, where bureaucracy instead of sustaining a society begins to attack it. It’s America right now. It’s France right now. It’s Russia.
Er…how does the tale end?
With a strange scene in a cathedral, with a person who might be a priest and might not be a priest, and a person knocks on the door looking for the truth and is made to wait. And he spends his life waiting for the truth.
And Kafka and his friends laughed over this book?
I see it as a black comedy. I was following what I believe was Kafka’s intention: The story is so dark that you can’t tell it that way. It has to be burlesqued.
So if we’re living in Kafkaesque times, what’s the solution?
We’ve been there before. I’m old enough to remember when McCarthy was running around finding Communists under every doorstep, and people I knew were losing their jobs… And then that collapsed. It’s a huge pendulum that swings back and forth. On the dark side of the pendulum, the thing that saves us and revives us is the arts. That’s when Allen Ginsberg started standing on tables reading poetry. Jackson Pollock turns up dripping paint. Mother Nature takes pity on us. [He waits a beat.] And of course our government wants to cut the NEA.
Yet you say you’ve lived long enough to be an optimist…
Well, the National Endowment for the Arts never had any money to begin with. It’s embarrassing that we have a country that would shut it down—it’s symbolic. But things rebalance themselves. “Oh, it’s the end of the world”—not yet. I went on the march in January with my two sons. People were out in the street for the first time since the Vietnam War. Before that, they were home playing video games. Now we have marches every week. There’s a science march. I think we should be grateful to the extreme right wing.
You just turned 80. What would have surprised a young Philip Glass about the evolution of your work?
I had a conservatory background. Juilliard. But when I began writing music, it wasn’t acceptable to the town halls even. The first I played in, I rented it myself. Five years later, I rented Carnegie Hall. I was not part of the classical music world. I rather naively thought I’d be playing with my ensemble forever. I didn’t ever expect to be at the Metropolitan Opera House—or any other opera house. Things change. And I was part of that change, but I didn’t know that.
The writer George Saunders has said your memoir taught him to “be less hesitant to take chances.” How did you learn not to hesitate?
I studied with Nadia Boulanger, and when I left her I had tremendous confidence about my technical abilities as a composer. That was a big help, because I began to do music that no one would listen to. And then I was free of self-consciousness because I had no audience. I had no critics. I had nobody to tell me I was wrong.
Has any criticism since then stung?
I don’t pay much attention to it. But recently I did an opera about Walt Disney called The Perfect American. I treated him as an icon, as an American who invented a way of making art and commerce. Before Andy Warhol, the idea of factory-making art came from Disney. I saw him as a man with his feet in the mud and his head in the clouds. He wasn’t a perfect person. Gandhi wasn’t a perfect person. [Glass also composed the score for Satyagraha.] No one is. For some reason the Disney company thought I was going to trash their hero. But why would I spend all that time to write an opera to make fun of him?
What assumptions has your music challenged?
Nothing. I didn’t invent anything. Repetitive music was part of the work of Schubert!—we all stand on other people’s shoulders. I grew up in a music store [his father owned a record store in Baltimore], and I understood that everything in the store was connected.
You talk about the freedom of being unknown, but you lost that freedom a long time ago.
Well, not so long ago. The New York Philharmonic is going to play a piece of mine for the first time. I’ve lived in New York since the 1950s.
Your close friends have included Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen, Woody Allen—is there a certain kind of rebel artist you’re drawn to?
I don’t pick my friends because I like their work. What’s interesting to me are people who have a feeling of independence. They are not depending on a grant. The first music prize I got, I was 75 years old and it was from Japan. A few years later, I got the arts medal from [President Barack] Obama, but there was no money attached to it.
You were a steelworker, a cabbie, a plumber…
I did a lot of things. I wrote a book, Words Without Music, and I teased my editor one time, I wrote two pages about how in the old days you could install a toilet by melting lead… I was looking forward to a debate. And he said, “It’s great! It’s going right in!”
Back to Kafka—have you ever felt caught up in events outside your control?
Oh, I feel that all the time! I feel that right now! But control is not the issue. Control and independence are opposites of each other. I don’t have the control, but I do have independence.
What’s next?
There’s an opera I want to do with a text of Doris Lessing’s. I did two of hers; I knew her mind well. This one is Memoirs of a Survivor. It’s the story of a woman living in London after the third world war. It’s a post-apocalyptic world. It will complete that trilogy. The Trial is actually the completion of another trilogy: Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe and In the Penal Colony by Kafka. They are different versions of the same story.
The Trial opens June 4 and runs through June 23. All performances take place at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Arts, 130 Edgar. Tickets are $25–$135.
