Appomattox review – Philip Glass's revised opera considers race in America

There is greatness in the newly expanded version of Appomattox. But it is an incomplete greatness.

And that fragmentary quality – occasionally frustrating at a level of drama, often intellectually engaging, on the whole unfinished-feeling – is, by now, practically part of the design of this civil war-meets-civil rights opera from composer Philip Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton.

The audience that took in director Tazewell Thompson’s sparely staged and smartly directed world premiere of this new version, on Saturday night, went in knowing about all the changes. In his program note, Glass explained how this opera, originally presented in 2007, had previously barely touched on the modern history of American racial politics, instead focusing on the events leading to Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865.

After being invited by Washington National Opera to present the work again, the composer said he realized the opera had to march forward into the modern era. When I interviewed Glass this summer, he said his urgency to revise and extend the opera’s remarks was inspired by a successful legal challenge to the Voting Rights Act, which was upheld by the supreme court in Shelby County vs Holder. (Glass’s takeaway from that decision? “We discovered that the civil war isn’t over yet.”)

I didn’t see the original two-act version of this opera, and so can’t speak to how the new version compares as a totality. But the Grant-Lee section that remains – now compressed into the opera’s first act – is not one of Glass’s most inspired dramatic hours. None of the quickly changing scenes are given enough stage time to serve as anything other than reference points. Gradually, the first half of Appomattox comes to feel like a dutiful, elementary school grind through historically significant tableaux.

It moves programmatically, too, as opposed to dramatically: Lee meets his wife; Grant meets his wife; Lincoln meets his wife; Lincoln meets Grant; Lincoln meets Frederick Douglass; Lee and Grant start exchanging letters about possibly winding up the war.

There are sparks of invention, as when the black journalist T Morris Chester – given a righteous power, in this production, by the talented young tenor Frederick Ballentine – insists on his right to cover the imminent fall of the south. And Glass ventures, here and there, into new musical territory – including a campfire group song voiced by a squadron of weary black soldiers (which sounds like Glass’s version of Ivesian folk-citation). But these stray moments are overwhelmed by the more familiar qualities of the rest of the act.

This damper effect disappears after intermission. Glass’s opening second act scene – a wake for murdered activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, at which Martin Luther King Jr addresses the mourners – creates a powerful spell, thanks to Glass’s intriguing dynamic pivots between the solo speech-maker and the larger group. The communication isn’t call-and-response in nature: instead, there is a palpable sense of the crowd wanting more from King, and steering him to provide the leadership that they desire.

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It’s a moment in which the great-man approach to ripped-from-history opera is usefully complicated. The scene was a triumph for the opera company’s chorus, as well as bass Soloman Howard. Though Howard sounded slightly underpowered in the first act, when playing Douglass, Glass’s writing for the role of King seemed to sit more comfortably in his voice. Howard’s performance in the second act was suitably noble without feeling clichéd: a significant achievement when approaching such a celebrated real-life figure.

Several other singers claim dual roles in the opera’s first and second acts; almost uniformly, everyone sounded better when digging into the more contemporary material. Likewise, while the orchestra performed well throughout – thanks to the fluid conducting of Dante Santiago Anzolini – they also sounded more accustomed to Glass’s chugging rhythms in the second half. While baritone Tom Fox’s Abraham Lincoln was ably sung but suspiciously character-less, his Lyndon B Johnson was many-sided. By turns vulgar, intemperate, sarcastic, and justifiably proud of legislative victories, the latter president’s profile also permitted Glass to engage in some more variegated writing, including comedic stretches of presidential scatology, to help the evening along.

The challenge of fusing operatic vibrato with something approaching a Texas accent resulted in some sludgy English diction, but Fox’s overall feel for Johnson was expertly judged. The Washington crowd laughed at nearly every Johnson profanity, but perhaps most forcefully when LBJ swore about Congress, or else “that asshole George fucking Wallace”. (Johnson’s eventual White House meeting with Wallace seems rather heavily indebted to a theme from the first movement of Glass’s Symphony No 8, though a piece of music that propulsive is worth recycling a bit.)

The crowning glory of Glass’s score, though, is its haunting, penultimate scene, which is driven by two homicidal race-haters from recent American history. Here, James Fowler – who was belatedly, briefly jailed for the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson – visits Edgar Ray Killen in prison, where the latter spins out a majestically evil “philosophy” that effectively demolishes every single hope articulated by the first-act figures who oversaw the conclusion of the civil war. (In this way, the second act retroactively made that first act resonate more profoundly than it did as it was playing out.) The slowly unfolding scalar writing here, less antic than the frantic ostinato repetition that most listeners readily identify with Glass, contains a demonic power that is the inverse of the similarly paced finale to Satyagraha, the composer’s 1980 opera about Gandhi.

If the opera had ended right here, it would have closed amid discomfort so alarming as to render audiences incapable of applause. While such a result might have been more in keeping with Glass’s understanding of the ways in which the story of racial progress in the US is unfinished, he and Hampton have passed up this potent opportunity, instead giving us a brief choral paean to more enlightened civic thoughts and hopes.

This final twist is respectable, but also undeniably sentimental. It is potentially unearned, too, as the opera’s worthy explication of frustrated moral progress makes clear. In his program notes, Glass even leaves open the possibility (or the necessity) of expanding the opera further, musing that “perhaps we have stumbled upon a radically new approach to opera, where ‘Art’ struggles to keep up with rapidly changing events in ‘Life’”.

That form of opera might never boast a classical sense of dramatic unity, but as this Appomattox proves, some of our most critical stories don’t resolve in like fashion. Some of those fractured narratives might even be the most important ones to tell.

Washington National Opera’s production of Appomattox runs through 22 November.