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Act II: Review Based on Two Performances
of Akhnaten (1/30/2000; 2/1/2000)
- The BLO’s production began ingeniously
with the opera’s Prelude, which, in particular, focused on
the construction of the character of the scribe. The scribe is
cast as an archivist carefully recording the historical events
of the Armana period. He is seen pacing the stage, occasionally
stopping to scribble notes on a handheld tablet. These notes are
projected onto the dune-rippled, sand-colored set—a sort
of birds-eye view of the desert that at one stage in the production
featured an aerial view of the Gaza pyramids. The texts are not
translated into English but are renditions of the original stone
tablets found at the ruins of Akhetaten, Akhnaten’s holy
city. The music and libretto clearly support this interpretation.
Just as the archivist carefully sifts through the documents with
which he or she works, arranging them meticulously so as to allow
them to tell their own "story," so Glass’s music
is pieced together fragment by fragment before the listener’s
ears. A binary rhythm is transformed into a tertiary with the
addition of a single note; strings are introduced in the first
cycle of the Prelude, then woodwinds, and then brass. In addition
to his ancient Egyptian role, the scribe can be seen as a theatrical
representation of Glass and his collaborators, and of the creative
process of (re-)constructing the opera from found material. Glass’s
and his collaborators’ Foucauldian fascination with the document
thus finds its mirror image in the activities of the ancient Egyptian
scribe—the only character in the opera that can be said to
have a "personality," albeit a mercurial one.
- Near the end of the Prelude the scribe
tilts his tablet, which turns out to be a mirror, towards the
audience in order to direct light around the auditorium. Akhnaten’s
doctrine of light thus mediated—or reflected—finds
its way into the contemporary world. This becomes an apt metaphor
not only for the subject matter of the opera—Akhnaten’s
doctrine—but for the aesthetic upon which the opera is based.
The material is presented in the form of found texts. But still
a scribe is needed to relate the story (or stories) and both the
dimensions of the mirror and the material reflected by it are
guided by interpretive choices. The same is true of Glass and
his relation to his material. The story is incomplete but a story
is nonetheless told. The presence of a mirror here brings to mind
Lacan's "mirror phase," where the infant first perceives him-
or herself as distinct from the surrounding world and, ultimately,
the mother, thus entering the domain of the symbolic—just
as Glass makes his first self-conscious steps into explicitly
narrative structures in the piece.
- The funeral scene contains the most overt
references to ancient Egyptian iconography, the ancient Egypt
we know best—that of the pantheistic "old order."
From King of the Underworld Osiris to magical Zeret birds traversing
the stage in time to darting, delving woodwind flourishes, this
is some of the most powerful music and visual imagery in the opera.
Akhnaten’s headless father appears on stage, guided by the
pantheon of gods and Glass’s raucous, rancid torrent of sound.
Those versed in Freudian theory will have no trouble identifying
the psychological subtext to this appearance. This is Akhnaten’s
vision of his father—Akhnaten the iconoclast, the father-killer.
The original conception of the opera drew extensively on Velikovsky’s
controversial theory attributing the origins of the Oedipus legend
to events in the life of Akhnaten. And it is precisely in the
recurring image of the dead king in each act of the opera, that
Oedipus in Akhnaten comes to life. Glass insisted on the inclusion
of this imagery in this production, since his instructions, clearly
written in the libretto, were disregarded in the first two productions
to the detriment of the overall narrative coherence of the piece.
- The subsequent scenes gave the term "red
carpet treatment" a whole new meaning. Small red mats were
lugged relentlessly around the stage by Akhnaten’s servants,
flung in front of him as he arrived at any given point, whisked
out from under him as he departed. This procedure formed a cycle,
which for a while beautifully complemented the cyclical chaconne
patterning that is the main foundation for this character’s
music. Unfortunately, however, all of this became a little tiresome
as the opera progressed, leaving most of the audience as relieved
as the young king seemed to be when the mats were eventually discarded
after the introduction to the hymn. Clearly some sense of momentum,
some rhythmic impetus is needed visually to complement Glass’s
whirling, pulsating musical textures—in order to anchor them
to the surrounding multimedia environment and to set up a counterpoint
between these constantly shifting surface textures and the relatively
static (or at least slow moving) harmonic/linear "deep"
structures of the music. Unfortunately, this business with the
carpets was the closest this production came to providing a dramatic
parallel to the bustling, ebullient textures of Glass’s music.
- Directors such as Robert Wilson and Achim
Freyer have intuitively understood the importance of "keeping
things moving" when working with music of this ilk. Mary
Zimmerman did not always manage to keep these two elements in
balance, all too frequently allowing the bold to become bald and
the strikingly or tellingly stark to appear just plain starkers.
This was most apparent in Akhnaten’s "Hymn to the Sun"
à la Zimmerman. Critic Richard Dyer perceptively pointed
out this weakness in his Boston Globe review of this production.
As this writer put it, Zimmerman is "better at deconstructing
images than creating them" (Dyer 8)." What Dyer refers
to as "[s]himmering Glass" (Dyer 1) did not, therefore,
translate into visuals. Zimmerman’s hymn did not shimmer.
The pulsional discourse of Kristeva's semiotic, present in abundance
in the music, was nowhere to be seen as the quietly regal but
mostly static figure of Geoffrey Scott delivered the opera’s
pivotal text from center-stage. The director was evidently relying
on the compelling, budding talent of the young counter-tenor to
hold the audience’s attention for the full eight minutes
or so of the hymn. However, with little going on dramatically
and the backstage choir banished to the wings in this scene, as
stipulated in the libretto, this may have been asking too much
of any singer. The intention on Zimmerman’s part could have
been a kind of Brechtian alienation effect. In this scene Akhnaten
communicates with the audience in English, the only time he does
so in the opera. Perhaps by stripping things down dramatically,
the intention was to provide an opportunity for direct communication,
in effect bringing down the fourth wall (presumably this is what
Dyer means when he writes of "deconstruction"). This
was certainly the case in the Epilogue, which I shall return to
in a moment—but if the same was true of the hymn then it
was hardly sufficiently indicated dramatically. The high point
of the opera—Akhnaten’s dazzling moment of apotheosis—thus
fell a little flat.
- Arguably the two strongest scenes in the
opera, certainly in terms of the operatic voice, are the trio
called the "Window of Appearances" (featuring Akhnaten,
counter-tenor, Nefertiti, contralto, and Tye, soprano) and the
duet (featuring Akhnaten and Nefertiti). Here Glass’s quasi-renaissance
counterpoint is some of the strongest writing in the opera. These
scenes also offer some of the sexiest and most challenging material
from the standpoint of the director. In the scene the "Window
of Appearances," Zimmerman opted for self-reflexive "deconstruction"
(of theatrical illusion), and here it was called for. In this
scene Zimmerman addresses one of her key "interpretive"
concerns: to draw attention to the discrepancy between the real
Akhnaten (the living flesh and blood man) and the Akhnaten we
construct from the artifacts passed down to us from the Armana
period of Egyptian history. She also addresses the discrepancy
between public and private selves and, in the following texts,
draws a parallel between the story of Akhnaten and the fragmentary
narratives constituted by the artifacts relating to our own lives.
Zimmerman writes:
For me, Akhnaten the historical
person, and Akhnaten the opera have become emblematic
also of the discrepancy between the experience of a life and
the recorded memory of a life. What part of us will remain,
and what will go, when we go, into black granite? We leave
behind that which is public and recorded: in Akhnaten’s
life a coronation, a plan for an eternal city and a funeral;
in ours, an address, a few dates of births and weddings, and
perhaps a death. But these public or historic records provide
only the faintest outline of a guide to our lives, and are
often far distant from our private experiences, about which
they communicate nothing. (Zimmerman 23)
- The Window of Appearances, then, becomes
a family photograph. A life-size picture frame descends from the
flies behind which the three protagonists stand. Different levels
of reality and illusion become superimposed onto one another as
the singing begins: public/private, historical/contemporary, theatrical
illusion/everyday life. And in the midst of this confusion the
voices of the three protagonists confuse issues further. The intertwining
voices of Akhnaten and Nefertiti, counter-tenor and contralto,
both occupying the same vocal range, and Tye and Nefertiti, the
former of which is cast with the voice that should rightly belong
to the latter (romantic leading ladies are usually sopranos).
Towards the end of the scene, the protagonists turn their backs
to the audience and gaze with them into the now empty picture
frame. Here once again echoes of Brecht are perceptible.
- Brechtian distancing arguably becomes a
more pressing concern as the opera approaches its conclusion,
or in-conclusion. And perhaps this is when it is needed
most; when the primary directives of narrative form guide the
viewer/listener most powerfully towards a resolution that can
easily take on the appearance of necessity. In the scene depicting
the ransacking of Akhnaten’s temple to the sun god, a Wilsonesque
touch is added by having an upside-down Perspex pyramid drop down
from flies. When Akhnaten’s torch-lit adversaries (visually,
a cross between Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and David
Lynch) assume control of the temple, the ultimate adversary is
revealed to be time itself as the pyramid becomes an hourglass
dropping sand onto a glass-encased model of the temple. This not
only is an accurate representation of what happened—Akhnaten’s
holy city was buried under sand for more that three millennia—it
also brings to the foreground the artifactual foundations of theatre
itself, the very theatrical artifice the model of the theatre
is part and parcel of.
- Brecht, or the elusive yet ever-present
non-representational stratum of theatrical experience so much
of the contemporary theatre has sought to invoke, becomes an almost
embarrassingly obvious presence in the epilogue. Here tourists
are seen perusing the ruins of Akhnaten’s holy city. In the
BLO production these took the form of a handful of garishly-attired,
camcorder-wielding North Americans. Towards the end of the scene
a young boy breaks off from group and is seen defiling the ruins
with a spray can. "I was here," he writes; a motto that
no sooner than it is written is adopted by the ghost of Akhnaten,
who appears on the stage, eventually scaring the child away from
the ruins. As the diegesis shifts in time from the Armana age
to the present day, the temporal transition is negotiated theatrically
by having the entire flying apparatus—bars, chains and all—descend
into view. These come to rest at approximately knee height, about
the height of the real Armana ruins. When discussing previous
solutions to the problems raised by this scene, I considered the
possibility of interpreting Glass’s attempt at "historification"
in post-Brechtian terms. Glass’s intention was "to somehow
underscore the fact that although we twentieth-century people
were looking at an imaginary version of Egypt in 1400BC, the very
ruins of that Egypt exist today. Therefore I decided to create
an epilogue set in the present" (Glass, Music 154-55).
But in order to really convince us that we have returned to the
present, I thought Glass, or the directors of future productions,
should go further than previously:
Ostensibly a Brechtian strategy,
the return to the present day at the end of the opera in fact
adds a second diegetic stratum to its "rock formation":
that of the "mythologized" contemporary. The text
read by the scribe may be archaeological in the Foucauldian
sense, but the tourists must be re-presented; real tourists
cannot magically materialize on the stage for each performance
of the opera—unless of course a video installment or
some similar means of presentation is utilized. In order to
fully realize the post-Brechtian potential of this moment,
then—to properly ground the opera in the non-diegetic
present—a strategy such as this might be called for.
(Richardson 239)
Zimmerman evidently heeded these words
or was thinking along similar lines. But whether her interpretation
is convincing is finally in the hands of the individuals watching
this specific production. A proportion of these may well have
been savvy with respect to recent theatrical techniques, but
perhaps these people were not the intended addressees. Perhaps
knowledge of theatrical convention deprives the moment of its
full rhetorical clout. To a more knowledgeable audience, Zimmerman’s
solution may have appeared a little hackneyed. I myself applauded
the director’s awareness of the issues raised by the composer
in this scene. And for some it did appear to have the intended
effect; an elderly lady sitting behind me at one of the performances
audibly gasped as the stage was stripped bare. However, even
the epilogue did not appear to be enough to shake the impression
of an overriding realism; as I was walking out of the theatre
on the same night, I overheard one season ticket holder tell
another how she was "transported to Egypt in all but body."
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In a sense, it is possible to understand
these remarks. Much of the iconography of the BLO production
drew extensively on relics from the Amarna period. And many
in the audience would have been familiar with the source materials,
since performances of Akhnaten coincided with an exhibit
put on at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston called "Pharaohs
of the Sun." This exhibit was the largest collection of
artifacts from Akhnaten’s holy city ever gathered together
under a single roof. Back projections, stage sets, dance steps,
and costumes in the BLO production were all to some extent modeled
on images from the exhibit. A nice touch that certainly complemented
Glass’s and his co-librettist's wholesale dragging of archaeological
artifacts into the libretto. But the transportation of the audience
into the interior world of the work went beyond the archaeological,
thus setting up a dualism between presentational and representational
strata. The scribe, played by Christopher Donohue, clearly "acted"
in a part that according to Dryer "requires more authoritative
oratory" (Dyer D8), dance movements were lyrical and expressive,
and the lovers in the duet were clearly in love. Thus realism
on one plane came up against antirealism on another, resulting
in some degree of aesthetic confusion.
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