Fifty-five years ago Philip Glass queued for his first Prom. He was heading back to America from Paris where his family had sent him to learn French, come to his senses and decide on a career in medicine. On his return, he told them his French was much improved, thank you, and that he intended to go to music school. It is fortunate for anyone who has entered the semi-hypnotic state induced by his opera Einstein on the Beach or left the movie of The Hours humming that Glass knew how to face down his parents. But why, I wonder, has it taken until this month for one of America’s most celebrated composers, aged 72 and a four-times-married grandfather, to get his own Prom?
“Well, people wait a long time for this kind of thing. I mean I’m alive, aren’t I?” he responds. In his tweedy jacket, with his fuzzy hair, he plays the Manhattan intellectual abroad well, humbly attired amid an ornate London hotel suite but loquacious with it. His music still meets the occasional resistance. “I think it may have been fuelled partly by the fact that in the last few years I’ve done film scores and popular concerts of different kinds. And, don’t forget, when I first began, it was quite an avant-garde kind of thing.”
They used to say that you didn’t have to be stoned at a Philip Glass happening, but it helped. His ensemble played in art galleries, art schools, private homes, barges and parks. He was never reduced to busking on the subway, but he did not make the Carnegie Hall until 1979, by which time he was already 42. He blames a fear of the amplifiers he brought on stage, in those days associated solely with rock music. “Sometimes before we even turned on the speakers they told us it was too loud. The sight of the speakers itself could be painful.”
But Glass’s work offended not only the conservative public. The academy saw it as an assault on the serialist composers such as Schoenberg and Stockhausen (whose work, Bernard Levin once wrote, was not as bad as it sounded). Yet, I say, Music in Twelve Parts, Glass’s repetitive four-hour cycle from the early Seventies, is meditative and peaceful. It might bore you to death (I don’t add), but it doesn’t sound as if he had declared war. “I know, but I had actually. I didn’t do it by throwing stones at people or saying unpleasant things. I simply went ahead and wrote a different music without their permission and it’s that second part of the sentence that was the trouble.”
And now, I say, the revolutionary is best known for his film music; The Truman Show, Notes on a Scandal, The Hours. The dangerous minimalist is all over Classic FM, his style ripped off everywhere. He laughs. “But here’s the interesting thing. I’ve done quite a few operas, more than 20, and I’ve probably done more than 20 film scores — I’m sure I have but they are both popular forms. The opera was always the popular art form of its day and so I’ve just moved from one popular art form to another.”
His association with drama began early when he returned to Paris in the midSixties to study under the fearsome composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and fell in with a troupe of actors staging Samuel Beckett’s Comédie. It would be an exaggeration to say he met Beckett, although he did observe him through café windows. “We were terrified of him. I asked where he wanted my music to go and he wrote back and said, ‘In the interstices of the play, as it were’.”
When I recently saw the current Ian McKellen-Patrick Stewart Waiting for Godot, it struck me that it was just like a Philip Glass symphony: repetitive, static, reaching no conclusion: Godot never came. Glass nods. Yet when he was composing for Comédie, he was also studying under the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar and had embarked on a lifelong interest in Eastern mysticism. And there was Beckett saying there was no God.
“It’s Irish mysticism.” Beckett was a mystic? “Of course. We took him that way.” Really? I take him for the bleakest of nihilists. “That’s a highly defined form of mysticism!” laughs Glass, who calls himself — maybe even in earnest — a JewishTaoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist.
Walking the dog at home in New York, he was recently reminded of those Parisian days when he ran into the actor Bill Raymond who had worked with the troupe. He was, he realised, the “Greek” in The Wire. HBO’s crime series, of which Glass has an impressive knowledge, is set in Glass’s home city of Baltimore. The 78rpms that his father sold in his shop provided much of Glass’s early classical musical education. He died in 1971, but Glass is not sure if he ever heard his work. “It was funny. We didn’t talk about it very much. I didn’t ask him if he had heard them. There are a number of things we didn’t talk about in those days. It was unfortunate in the latter part of his life we weren’t as close as we had been earlier.”
The rift was, it is said, caused by his father’s disapproval of Glass’s first wife, the theatre director JoAnne Akalaitis, with whom he has a grown-up son and daughter. Sixteen years after his death, Glass dedicated his Violin Concerto (to be played by Gidon Kremer at the Proms) to him. Was it a conversation with him beyond the grave?
“Of course. I wrote the Violin Concerto, and when I listened to it, I said he would have liked that. I’m sure he would have. To me it was as close as I could get to Mendelssohn.”
Did its success grant him permission to inject his personal life into his pieces? “It had always been there,” he says, and I realise how hard I find it to read emotion rather than maths into the early work. I was thinking of his chamber opera Orphée, written after his third wife, Candy Jernigan, died suddenly of liver cancer at 39. Orpheus’s pursuit into the Underworld of his dead wife Eurydice is surely an artistic fulfilment of every bereaved person’s wish.
“This is the funny thing: I had a ten-year marriage to a wonderful woman painter. She died in 1991 and shortly after that I began a trilogy of operas and the first one was Orphée. Now, Orphée is about the death of the poet Orphée’s wife, yet I did the whole opera without thinking it had anything to do with that marriage. I completely blacked it out and no one said anything to me and I think they didn’t say anything because they thought I’d know. And, of course, I did know, but I didn’t know.”
And this was a very happy marriage? His first and second (to Luba Burtyk, a doctor) ended in divorce. “Yes, it was an awful thing to happen, and for her it was an awful thing. My children were very close to her. My daughter at the time was 19 and my son was 17, and they had not been introduced to a personal death, something so close to them, before. I remember my daughter saying how unfair it was.”
In a 2007 documentary by Scott Hicks, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts, Glass’s sister raises her eyes to heaven when the matter of “the wives” comes up, but even she may not have realised that the marriage at the centre of the film was unravelling. Early in the film Holly Critchlow, 30 years Glass’s junior, happily recalls Glass falling for her while she was managing a restaurant he frequented. Her partner left her, they married in 2001 and had two boys, Marlowe and Cameron. By the end of the film she is tearfully explaining to Hicks that Philip wants “different things” from his life. He is now with the cellist Wendy Sutter (roughly the same age as his 41-year-old daughter).The night we meet she performs at the Barbican Songs and Poems for Solo Cello he has written for her, Glass looking on as her muscular Madonna arms sweep vigorously across the strings to produce some hauntingly romantic music.
Did it surprise him, falling in love again? “People do it all the time. There are all sorts of romances going on in old-age homes. Didn’t you know that? You don’t outgrow those things.”
And now he is writing the lush music of a young man? “I thought the early music was lyrical and romantic too,” he says. “To me music has always been about expressivity, it has not been ideological.”
It must be nice to be with someone with whom he can talk about his music. “I think that’s a very important thing, although I didn’t have it for a long time. Well, the one that died, she was a beautiful painter. That was quite a long time ago, but she was a beautiful painter.” So he has been married to a painter, a theatre director ... “I’ve had a run of the arts pretty well.” But also a physician and a . . .”
“Do we have to go through this? It’s embarrassing!”
I have to ask, however, what sort of father he makes. “You would have to ask my children, wouldn’t you?” What does he think? “Well, my oldest children, the ones who can talk about it, thought we did pretty well. At the time they didn’t. I have a daughter, who’s 40 now, and she remembers growing up in poverty.”
Working as a plumber in the Seventies, Glass once turned up at a SoHo loft to install a dishwasher, only to be recognised by its owner, the art critic Robert Hughes, who exclaimed: “But you’re Philip Glass!”
“And I was a cab driver. If I was in their neighbourhood, I would pick the kids up from the babysitter and take them for a ride and take them home. I found out 30 years later they were terrified of these rides because they thought I’d stolen the cab and I was about to be arrested. But the point is, we did a lot of things together. Spending time with your children is what it’s about.”
And the new crop? “We are having a great time listening to music together. I have a son who’s a songwriter, but the littlest one, who is writing music like crazy, is only 7.” Seven! He must have been born a genius, I protest, wishing to end on a high note rather than on a post-mortem examination of his love life. “He’s born a musician,” he replies. “After that we don’t know.”
But the Proms has made up its mind about his father.
BBC Prom 37, Philip Glass, August 12, 10pm, Royal Albert Hall
Biography
Philip Glass was born in 1937 and brought up in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a record shop owner, Ben, and his wife, Ida, both children of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants.
Early life: After the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School, he spent two years studying in Paris under Nadia Boulanger, who forced him to review his traditional training. Back in America in the Sixties and early Seventies, he worked as a plumber and cab driver while writing and performing music for the Philip Glass Ensemble and befriending Manhattan artists, such as Chuck Close, who painted an iconic portrait of him. Fame followed his opera Einstein on the Beach, a collaboration with Robert Wilson, which became a hit for the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1976.
Later work: From the mid-Eighties his work tended to become more accessible and he used conventional string quartets and even symphony orchestras. Compositions include the 1987 Violin Concerto and his symphonic Trilogy. In more recent years his work has tended towards the lyrical and romantic. The Toltec Symphony, to be played at the Proms later this month alongside the Violin Concerto, is inspired by the pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica. Critics accuse him of writing too much that is too similar.
Theatre music: As well as operas such as Satyagraha (based on the life of Gandhi and revived by ENO in 2007), Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and Orphée, he has written numerous film scores including Kundun for Martin Scorsese, The Thin Blue Line for Errol Morris, The Truman Show for Peter Weir and The Hours, which won a Bafta for best score.
Personal Life: Divorced three times and widowed once, he has four children, and is now in a relationship with the cellist Wendy Sutter.
Small talk
On Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar: The difference between them was Boulanger taught through terror and Ravi Shankar taught through love. The results were pretty much the same.
On John Cage’s silent 4’33”: He was defining, in the most direct way, one of the principles of modernism, that the audience completes the work of art, that a work of art has no independent existence, it’s a transaction. It wasn’t a metaphor, it was the thing itself. If you sat in a room and listened to three or four minutes of silence, the music was the noise in the room.
On being 72: Musicians tend to be active for a long time. I still play a lot of music from memory. I do a whole piano recital of 90 minutes without looking at music. Rubenstein was 92 when he stopped working, you know.
On death: There’s no real wisdom with the understanding of mortality.
On today’s youth: The composers in their twenties are the most interesting generation in a long time. They are completely fluent. They can play the piano beautifully and they play around with computers. They know the whole business top to bottom.
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