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Rockwell Matters: Episode Transcript (11/05/07)

This is a comment about Philip Glass about his new opera about David Gockley in San Francisco and inevitably segueing you might wonder why to Doris Lessing and her recent Nobel Prize for literature. The San Francicso Opera just finished a run of an opera by Philip Glass called "Appomattox" about the end of the Civil War. It was to me a partial success. A partial success because although Robert Woodruff's direction was fabulous with the acting of the entire cast especially Duane Croft as Robert E. Lee and Andrew Shore as Ulysses S. Grant was riviting the libretto by Christopher Hampton was excellent and Philip Glass's music was unobjectionable. However, one would hope for more than that from an opera. I have long reiterated a position that Phil's music in the first twenty years of his career from the mid 60's to the mid 80's was almost entirely brilliant and most of it since then has been immatative of himself or pallid. In this case he held down the music so severly that you almost wondered whether it was there. It was setting vaguely wistful moods, but that was about it. Still, the experience as a whole was interesting but it also revealed something about David Gockley. This was his first world premire. In Houston, where he was for thiry years, he had a reputation for putting on world premieres but they were mosly of a kind of audience friendly and safe kind. They didn't challenge the audience with theatrical innovation or musical dissonace or weirdness he kept it safe. A little like Paul Kellogg has done recently at the New York City Opera. Nothing against that, it's not exactly the most visionary kind of opratic leadership you could imagine, but more power to him in future years.

Now the way I segue here to Doris Lessing is as follows. I am an admirer of Lessing's writings, a fan is a better way of putting it. And as I said I was a huge admirer of Phil Glass up until the mid 80's and sometime around there I was talking with Phil and I suggested to him that some of Doris Lessing's so called space fiction might be suitable for an opera for him. And the result was two, count 'em two, operas by Phil Glass with librettos by Doris Lessing. The first one was the "Making of the Representative for Planet 8" which came out in 1988 at the Houston Grand Opera. And the second was called "The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4 and 5" which was premiered in Heidelberg in 1997 and which I never saw. Now, the first one was part of typical late Glass. It was to my taste not very interesting. So I can't take a huge amount of pride in my midwifery role here. But I am pleased for Lessing and I am pleased for her Nobel. I have been pushing for it in print and conversation for years. However I have an unusual take on Lessing.

Almost all of the articles about her winning the prize had to do with her wonderful semi-autobiographical stuff from the 50's, 60's and 70's. About her growing up in Rhodesia, about her feminism, about her break from her family, and about the implied and overt feminism of these early works. She then went off into other directions and then has settled down into a kind of mixed late career in which various kinds of books, inclucing some that recall the earlier kind, like "The Sweetest Dream" which dates from 2001 are prominant but she is rejected by standard critics, even by those who tolerated the African stuff for her works in the 70's and 80's. This began with briefing for "A Descent into Hell" which was based on her contacts with R.D. Lang and is the best description of a bad acid trip I've ever seen. "Memoirs of a Survivor" same deal, then she fell under the influance of Indra Shah and sufism and that is the source of the five Shikasta novels, the space fiction novels, "Canopus and Argos" plus subseqent pieces like "Mara and Dann". I find these fables to be extraordinarily telling and to me that's the center of Lessing's work. That's why I thought Phil might like those works and he did because the two operas are based on two of the five "Canopus and Argos" things.

Doris Lessing is still with us. She hasn't, as she put it, popped off yet and more power to her. Phil is still with us too and I believe that he is still capable of great work and I look forward to it.

 — John Rockwell

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