But in doing so The Ghosts of Versailles raised a challenge to every new piece that comes to the Met after it. That's a challenge for Philip Glass, who penetrates the house this year with his new opera, The Voyage. The libretto, by playwright David Henry Hwang, is characteristically abstract, reflecting another influence outside the normal scope of culture at the Met, the world of performance art. Glass once described his operas as animated paintings, and that's certainly how this one seems. We'll see Columbus alone in mid-voyage, reenacting in his mind a conversation he once had with Queen Isabella, while his mates call out the dawn watch.
Nothing happens to dissolve the tableau.
But now prepare for a shock, because there are also ways in which The Voyage might not be all that different from ordinary opera. Then there are precedents for Glass's fluid tableaux, in, of all places, operas of the grandest sort. In the end, though, The Voyage really might feel like traditional opera, however mutated, because Columbus, however reinterpreted, is a monumental subject. From its earliest days, opera was larger than life, telling tales of heroes, gods, and kings. Even in its greatest days, when a new opera was as timely as a new Madonna video, works were nearly always set in the past, and in exotic climes.