Philip Glass: I'm drawn to Kafka's darkness

Philip Glass talks to Ivan Hewett about his decision to compose an opera based on one of the author’s terrifying tales



This week an opera based on one of Kafka’s darkest stories comes to London, with music by Philip Glass. It’s an unlikely conjunction of talents. On the one hand, the perpetually haunted Jewish outsider, hiding his terrifying visions under a carapace of bureaucratic ordinariness. On the other, a gregarious, affable American entrepreneur, so successful his friends jokingly call him a “captain of industry”.

Moreover, the imaginative space we call “Kafka-esque’ seems a world away from Philip Glass’s. In Kafka’s world, human beings are pinned helplessly by terrifying arbitrary forces they cannot understand, or even see. In Glass’s world, there are no dark corners. The characters in his operas – Gandhi, Einstein, Akhnaten – are creatures of daylight, serenely convinced that there is an objective truth and that they can help reveal it.

Yet, when I meet Glass on one of his gruelling European tours, it becomes clear that authors who deal in the dark side of life attract him. “I’ve been reading Kafka seriously since I was 15,” he says. “For a young person, the sense of strangeness and the bizarre is very attractive. There’s a sort of authenticity about it. He’s a doorway into the world of the imagination.

“Another writer who has the same quality – and, like me, comes from Baltimore – is Edgar Allan Poe, and several years before In the Penal Colony, I did Fall of the House of Usher.”

Both operas arose out of a practical need to create something intimate. “I wanted to write more music-theatre, and for some reason the big opera companies weren’t calling me. So I thought, I’ll do pocket operas – pieces for just a few singers and players, with sets you could put in a couple of suitcases; something you could do in a room like this,” he says gesturing around the Edinburgh pub we happen to be in.

The story he chose to set is grim even by Kafka’s standards. A Visitor comes to the penal colony of the title to witness an execution, much against his will. The Officer describes to the Visitor the wonderful Machine that performs the execution by carving the words of the law the criminal has transgressed on to his body. But times are changing, the Machine is decaying, and what used to be an elevating spectacle for the whole colony is falling into disrepute. The Officer badly needs the reassurance of the Visitor before he executes the latest prisoner, and when the Visitor withholds it – out of distaste rather than real outrage – he feels obliged to sacrifice himself.

“What fascinates me in this story is the moral inversion that takes place,” says Glass. “The Officer, having started as all-powerful becomes the victim, and he takes on the role with a kind of joy. He’s done everything he can to convince the Visitor of the virtue of the Machine, and, when he fails, he realises it’s over, and the only thing he can do is be the final victim.”

And the Visitor? “Well, he makes the right judgment, but we can’t admire him, because he does this by refusing to be engaged at all. He suffers no inconvenience, whereas we end up warming to the Officer more because he sacrifices everything for his principles.”

But perhaps there are no true innocents here? “No, this is what makes the story so dark. Kafka, I think, is suggesting that the mere fact of our human incarnation is enough to make us guilty.”

I suggest that given the subject matter, people might be expecting an expressionist treatment with shrieking clarinets and real blood. “No, realism doesn’t interest me. I could imagine the machine represented as a giant shadow, because that encourages the imagination, and what one imagines is always worse than anything that could be shown.

“As for the music, I’ve restricted myself to a string quartet because that is the medium that in the West has always been associated with introspection and intimacy. I’ve added just one double bass to lend an extra gravity and darkness.”

And the point of setting the story to music at all? “That’s simple. I want to articulate the structure of the drama, and amplify the point of view of the author, as far as I can discern it.

“One of the attractive things about the story for me as a composer is its formality. The Visitor gets away, but by avoiding judgment actually fails. The Officer, in a strange way, redeems himself. It’s a perfectly calibrated outcome, like a trap for a hummingbird.”

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