was by contrast). Although at times it felt like Cirque du Soleil, the waves of motion moving steadily across the stage to the music, stately and fluid and when the puppetmasters formed newspaper and baskets into huge figures wondrous, seemed perfect for Glass' music, though there was perhaps a surplus of ingenuity in the first acts, one wonderful stunt or effect following another without cease, possibly distracting from the music.But then the final act - after some silliness involving scotch tape - entered the meditative loop of Glass at his profoundest, and I was transported. All the earlier stuff, including the splendid images, was still there, somehow, but now it was just Gandhi repeating a single line, a statue of Martin Luther King in the distance before an open sky (it made sense in context). I was moved in the way I was when I finally got "Tristan und Isolde" a few years ago (also at the Met), something whose music seemed to me to work on me like a chemical reaction.
"Satyagraha" has been advertised throughout the city with posters asking "Could an opera make us warriors for peace?" and similar questions. Seemed cheesy if effective marketing to me before (the production is sold out), but now I wonder if the answer isn't yes. Director Phelim McDermott's words in the program ring true: One of our outdoor publicity posters asks the question, "Can an opera make us stand up for the truth?" After working on this piece I have come to the conclusion that it is perhaps only through an epic form like opera that we can communicate the complexity of ideas behind such a thing as satyagraha. It is through art like this that we can tell stories of what happened, not just as events, but as shifts in group perception about what is possible if people transform their state of being as well as what they do: we can be given a felt sense of what satyagraha might really mean on all the deep levels it demands. As Gandhi says, "Be the change you want to see in the world."
