Akhenaten

Although sharing many primary sources with Jarman's screenplay, Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten offers little of Jarman's insight either on ancient Egypt or on contemporary culture. Akhnaten has been called 'a form of "singing archae­ology" ' which effectively avoids political debates, in spite of Glass's debt to the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht.

²² Glass's lack of political engagement also applies to his use of camp. Although Glass's and Jarman's versions of the Akhenaten myth can both be seen as high camp, they deploy camp very differently in rela­tion to gay culture. Jarman's camp Akhenaten illuminates gay history, while for Glass he merely provides a liberating style, a way of presenting a universal story through artifice and exaggeration which separates camp from its roots in gay culture. As such, Akhnaten works best as a marvellous entertainment, a piece of Glass's music theatre.

According to Glass's own account of his opera's development, his interest in Akhenaten came from the idea (following Breasted, Weigall, et al.)

that Akhenaten is an inspirational man of ideas. He is thus an appropriate figure to complete Glass's operatic trilogy, the other two parts of which are Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi) and Einstein on the Beach. Glass regards all three as men out of time, whose ideas transcend temporal boundaries. 'I saw that if Einstein epitom­ized the man of Science, and Gandhi the man of Politics, then Akhnaten would be the man of Religion.'

²' It is a rather old-fashioned view of Akhenaten, but Glass is not interested in historical accuracy. I also suspect that he himself has some personal involvement with the idea of the misunderstood genius. For a long time the musical establishment cold-shouldered him, and he did not earn a living as a musician until he was in his early forties. The publisher's blurb on the back cover of Glass's musical autobiography, Opera on the Beach (1987), describes it as the testimony of 'a true innovator who has stuck to his beliefs in the face of prejudice, misunderstanding and hostility'. The same could apply to Gandhi, Einstein and especially Akhenaten as well.

Akhnaten

was first performed in England at the English National Opera, London, in June 1985 and successfully revived two years later, confirming the popularity of Glass's music and his subject matter. The action in ancient Egypt proceeds chronologically, but it was taken out of time by Orientalist touches in the production. As Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the rest sang their parts, extras in modern Islamic dress played peasants winnowing corn or making bricks, never leaving the stage. One of the implications is that Akhenaten's story is for all time.

The opera opens at Thebes with the funeral of Amunhotep III, the mourning rituals sung in Egyptian derived from Budge's ubiquitous bilingual edition of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It moves on to Akhenaten's coronation, and then to a scene at the palace window of appearances, where the tension in the love triangle between Tiye, Akhenaten and Nefertiti is explored. They sing (in Egyp­tian again) an excerpt from the 'hymn' to the Aten, which 'is a hymn of accept­ance and resolve and, in spirit, announces a new era', according to Glass.²⁴ The next act begins with Akhenaten's destruction of Amun's monuments. Scene 2 is entirely devoted to a love duet between Akhenaten and Nefertiti, sung in Egyp­tian: here the libretto uses the same ancient text that Jarman's script gave Akhen­aten to recite over the mutilated body of Smenkhkare'. Glass, with his interest in the heterosexual love story, puts it back into the mouth of Nefertiti, as the original editor of the text suggested.²⁵ The act ends with another setting of the 'hymn' to the Aten, this time juxtaposed with the Hebrew version of Psalm 104, its sup­posed analogue. The implication is that Akhenaten's monotheism is a precursor to Christianity. The final act begins with an idyllic scene of the king and queen en famille. with their daughters at home, but in the world outside all is not well. Akhenaten has almost psychotically withdrawn from the world and refuses to do anything about the political situation in the empire. His fall is now inevitable. The libretto conveys this with a setting of one of the Amarna letters, sung in the original Akkadian, telling of the fall of Egypt's foreign empire. Tutankhamun is made pharaoh, Akhenaten blinded, and Akhet-aten destroyed. The opera ends in the present at the devastated city, where tourists mill around taking photographs (and, in the London production, urinating on the ruins). Finally, Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Tiye appear amid the devastation, singing wordlessly, and at first apparently not knowing where they are.