Paola kudacki biography of mahatma

When Peter Gelb became general manager in 2006, he made expanding the Met’s repertory of contemporary opera a major priority for the company. In his artistic vision, the Met would present both brand-new work and company premieres of recent American operas that had proved successful elsewhere. The operas of Philip Glass and John Adams had been widely produced in Europe and the United States, and these composers had developed a fan base, many of whose members were not part of the traditional opera audience. Eager to broaden the company’s horizons, Gelb brought vibrant new stagings of operas by Glass and Adams to the Met.

As part of his efforts to produce new work, Gelb approached André Bishop, the director of the Lincoln Center Theater, with the idea of a collaborative workshop program to foster new theatrical creations. Together they launched the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program, bringing together the Met’s musical forces and the theatrical expertise of Lincoln Center Theater to nurture, promote, and stage new work.

With the naming of Yannick Nézet-Séguin as Music Director in 2018, the Met has added another strong proponent of contemporary American opera to its creative team. Together, Gelb and Nézet-Séguin have programmed an ambitious slate of new works for the coming seasons that far exceeds the plans of any previous management. The goal of establishing an American repertory at the Met, from its first tentative steps in 1910, has taken on an unprecedented dynamism in our own day.

Philip Glass’s Satyagraha

Satyagraha (“force of truth”), adapted by Philip Glass and Constance DeJong from the Bhagavad Gita, reflects on Mahatma Gandhi’s earliest civil resistance movement in South Africa from multiple perspectives. The Met’s 2008 co-production with English National Opera, in collaboration with Improbable, was d

HUMANITY: Where do you think you learned to be who you are? Your compassion, your empathy—how did you learn to be who you’ve become?

DESMOND TUTU: It’s a very good thing to be aware that you owe so much to other people. What you become is the influence of so many. I say the major influence of my life as I look back was my mother, who was not terribly educated; she finished elementary school and then went to a trade school to get a diploma in domestic science. I say to people that I resemble her physically. She had a large nose like mine and was thumpy, but I say I hope I resemble her in who she was. She was a very compassionate and caring person and couldn’t stand someone having an injustice done to them. She would very gently try to be on the side of the one who was having the rough time. You don’t consciously say you are emulating somebody, but in fact it is someone that has left a stamp of their personality on you. There was a very famous English priest; I had TB and I was in the hospital for 20 months, and amazingly, this man, who used to be very busy in Sophiatown, just outside Johannesburg, would visit me every week when he was available. When he was not available he would send another of his brethren. And so I am clear that so many people have touched my life and helped me to become a slightly better person than I’d otherwise have been, and to have had the wonderful support of my wife, Leah, in the days that we were struggling during apartheid. It was rough for her and for the children. Sometimes the apartheid government would target my wife. I have to take my hat off to Leah and to the children in the way that they were there with and for me in a very difficult time in my career. And so I hope that I’ve been able to contribute in helping us all to become slightly better people. Our country, which was being crushed under the burden of the vicious policy, the racist policy—I was part of a huge movement in the country and internationally, the anti-apartheid

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The leap from musical theater to opera isn't too far — or so one might think. And yet many musical-theater fans find opera intimidating. The obstacle is linguistic for some: Having to read subtitles to understand the singers while trying to follow a plot and take in stagecraft can be a lot handle at once. Length can also be a hindrance: The three-and-a-half hour running time of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro or the five hours of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde may be difficult for some to endure. But perhaps the biggest barrier to opera appreciation, though, is its perception as an "elite" art form.

But it's worth noting that opera was conceived in the late 16th century as an extension of the oldest art form of all, theater, and that in other countries and older time periods, opera was considered a people's art, one meant to appeal broadly to everyone. There's no reason that the art form can't still have that cachet now, especially as companies like the Met continue to try to find ways to encourage younger audiences to turn out.

The Met recently announced its 2019-20 season, so we've selected a handful of operas to investigate if you're a musical-theater fan looking for solid introductions to this time-honored and still-vibrant art form.

Agrippina (1709)

Most people know Baroque composer George Frideric Handel for his oratorio Messiah, the holiday-season mainstay featuring the "Hallelujah" chorus. Before he wrote that, though, Handel was considered one of the finest opera composers of the 18th century. Few of those works remain in the operatic canon. But with a libretto by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani that abounds in cynicism toward the selfish political machinations of its main characters, Agrippina — being presented by the Met in a new production by Sir David McVicar — is due for a resurgence in popularity during a time when fait