Some random thoughts of this operagoer, upon returning from a sold-out performance of The Voyage, the new Philip Glass opera, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to mark the discovery of the New World: Where have you been? Out. What did you hear? Nothing. What did you feel? Nothing. How much did it cost? A small fortune. What did you see? The latest glum chapter in the sad history of American opera. Why did you go? Hope springs eternal.
New-American-opera-wise, these have been a rich couple of seasons for the Metropolitan Opera. Last year, after years of ignoring the genre entirely, the Met produced John Corigliano and William M. Hoffman’s The Ghosts of Versailles; the French Revolution having been paid its due (even if two years late), it was now the turn of the Met to honor Columbus. In the case of the Corigliano opera, the Hoffman libretto was an integral and even formative part of the work’s conception; in the Glass opera, librettist David Henry Hwang, famous for his 1988 Broadway hit M. Butterfly (in the words of the program book for The Voyage, “a vividly theatrical chronicle of an affair between a polymorphously perverse Peking opera singer and a very confused French diplomat”), was relegated to writing what amounted to a short script, with the program making clear that the story of The Voyage was not by Hwang but by the composer himself.
As far as words and music are concerned, then, the
