A mere 27 years after its world premiere in Rotterdam, Philip Glass’s Gandhi opera Satyagraha has finally been staged in London. It has taken the sixtieth anniversary of Indian independence, a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and substantial support from Sky Arts (which dedicates an evening to Glass next Saturday) to bring it about. On the first night, standing ovations greeted the 70-year-old composer as he took his bow.

English National Opera was responsible for the staging of Glass’s Akhnaten in 1985, and The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 in 1989. Satyagraha has been long awaited, for it is vintage Glass. The focus on Gandhi’s South African years (1893-1914) and his work for satya graha, or “firmness in championing the truth” through nonviolence, is central to Glass’s own thinking. And, at this phase in his career, his music was in its glorious prime: those repetitive patternings shifting and shining with ingenious rhythmic and melodic ideas, interlocking, overlapping, yet ever calm.

The greatness of Satyagraha (and this ENO performance, conducted by Johannes Debus, proves it to be so) is in the perfect marriage of music and subject matter. There’s a sense of striving suspended in stasis; a sense of progress that is not linear, but cyclical and transformational. Or, in the words of the Baghavad-Gita, from which the libretto is made: “This is the fixed, still state which sustains . . . the athletes of the Spirit.”

ENO has collaborated with the theatre group Improbable; and Phelim McDermott, directing, with Julian Crouch as assistant director and set designer, have created a masterwork of theatrical intensity and integrity. All three acts take place within an arc-like wall of curving corrugated iron. Within the slow waves of music and human movement, an ensemble of acrobats and puppeteers conjure miracle after miracle. Newsprint looms large: there is a ubiquitous whispering of newspaper as sheets are shifted, read (the founding of Indian Opinion was central to Gandhi’s work) — and then, almost imperceptibly, formed into gigantic papier-mâché puppet-figures of gods, beasts and politicians.

High in the iron wall, windows disclose the three iconic figures who watch over the three acts: Tolstoy, Tagore and Martin Luther King. As the last act unfolds, the great wall buckles and disintegrates, leaving a miming silhouette of the preaching King high on his plinth, and the diminutive figure of Gandhi below, singing a simple rising scale — no fewer than 30 times.

Image after image is etched indelibly on the memory, in its masterly fusion of the aural and the visual. The beauty of the sung Sanskrit is bewitching: sober sepia projections of key passages replace supertitles; but verbal comprehension isn’t really the point. Although it would be inappropriate to single out individual performances in a work that has so little to do with conventional operatic glory, Alan Oke’s central performance as Gandhi is a masterpiece of compelling clarity and absorption; and he is supported admirably by the magnificent chorus and a cast including the soprano Elena Xanthoudakis as his secretary, Miss Schlesen, the mezzo Anne Marie Gibbons as Kasturbai, his wife, and by Ashley Holland as Mr Kallenbach.

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