Akhnaten (Philip Glass; 2019 Met HD; libretto)

The rise and fall of a prophet. Akhnaten is one of the shooting stars of history: a brilliant figure whose short career spans the world wreathed in flames and ending in agonies, like Alexander or Emperor Julian the Apostate or Napoleon. Posterity claims them for its own as their contemporaries could not. Akhnaten comes out of nowhere, declaring a new supreme god to dethrone Amun and a new city, only for it all to melt back into the sands of Egypt, damnatio memoriae’d & forgotten for thousands of years. Even without the connection to Tutankhaten (better known by his later name Tutankhamun), Akhnaten draws the eye of anyone interested in monotheism or ancient Egypt (such as Sigmund Freud) for how singular he is—how could such a monotheist (even if perhaps he was really just a henotheist) emerge in ancient Egypt, Egypt of the eternal cycles? Why did he worship the sun? Why did he seem to eventually turn on and persecute the old gods? How did he fall? What did he make of it all?

No interior sources. Glass, wisely, does not attempt to answer this. We have no accounts from companions like Alexander, or chroniclers like Julian, or scores of volumes of letters & diaries like Napoleon. Egyptology struggles to infer the most basic facts about Akhnaten, like whether he fathered Tutankhamen or whether he co-ruled with his own father or when he persecuted the old gods. We have the striking “Great Hymn to the Aten”—which Glass makes the centerpiece of Akhnaten—but was that even written by Akhnaten? And we have nothing at all for Nefertiti (who may or may not have ruled after Akhnaten). With such scanty materials, the task is insurmountable.

Akhnaten evokes in us Akhnaten’s religious awe. Instead, Glass aims at evoking a mood of Ægypt, as it were. Every scene is a ceremony (drawing on the Book of the Dead/Pyramid Texts), and movement is ritualized and slow, weighted with solemnity; the visual imagery, like Akhnaten’s ascent in front of a giant sun while singing his hymn, hits like a hammer. (Wagner would be jealous.) The music repeats with variation. In a particular stroke of production genius, a troupe of jugglers appears throughout as servants and soldiers etc; while initially a little perplexing, I soon realized that juggling was perfect, because the balls become symbolic of the heavens as they travel in orbits, always returning to the same point. (This was a risky choice because the juggling makes it difficult for the actors to move around safely, and even professional jugglers may drop balls over the course of several hours—as in fact they did several times. I do not blame them because while I liked Glass’s music, I’d find it staggeringly difficult to maintain my concentration & juggle in sync with the music for hours without an error.) The costumes are psychedelically weird: silk robes sweep blood-red across the stage during an ostensibly-romantic duet, and the idea to make Akhnaten’s royal robes out of gilded faces from baby dolls is inspired (although perhaps daemonically). Dislocatingly, the Met HD chooses to provide subtitles for neither the spoken English narration (commentary from Akhnaten’s deceased father Amenhotep III, the physically overpowering Zachary James, reduced to a passive observer) nor sung English (“Great Hymn to the Aten”) nor the various other languages.

The net effect of the lighting, juggling, costuming, singing, and music is an altered state of consciousness and a religious awe. The sun rises, the sun sets; and there is always another meteor.