“Writing ‘Akhnaten’: A Co-Author of Philip Glass’ Egyptian Opera, Opening at the Met This Weekend, Recalls How the Monotheistic ‘Heretic Pharaoh’ Became the Fat Lady”, 2019-11-06 (; backlinks):
Akhnaten, Philip Glass’ “Egyptian opera”, opening at the Metropolitan Opera this weekend, premiered in 1984 and since then has been produced in many different stagings, primarily in European cities, where the composer has a very large and enthusiastic audience. Akhnaten’s American production story has been much more modest.
…Someone at the party had told Glass that I was studying Egyptian language and culture. He sought me out, introduced himself and asked if I knew anything about Akhnaten, the “heretic Pharaoh.” The party had put me in a jocular mood and my immediate response was “know about him? I just saw him!” I explained that I had only recently returned from Cairo, where the massive statue of Akhnaten in the Cairo Museum was the Egyptian artifact that had made the deepest impression on me. (Later I realized that in my response I was channeling a skit in 2000 Year Old Man in which Carl Reiner asks Mel Brooks if he had known Joan of Arc. “What do you mean knew her”, said Brooks, “I dated her!”) Our initial conversation about Egypt and Akhnaten lasted for more than an hour.
In his remarkably creative way, Glass had been reading widely about Egypt and Akhnaten. He had studied James Henry Breasted’s authoritative History of Egypt and he read Freud’s speculations about Akhnaten in his last book, Moses and Monotheism. We agreed to meet the following week to continue our conversation. I told Glass that for our next meeting I would bring pictures of Akhnaten, his wife Nefertiti, and of his artistic creations. For Akhnaten was an artist and poet, as well as a Pharaoh—or at least that was the claim of some experts. Our subsequent meetings at which I was introduced to Glass’ theater and music collaborators, Robert Israel and Richard Riddell, went very well. They had worked with Glass on Satyagraha and were collaborating with him on the creation of Akhnaten. Asked by Glass if I would be able to serve as a researcher on his Egyptian project, I said yes.
…His formulation was: “Einstein as the man of science, Gandhi as the man of politics, Akhnaten as the man of religion.”
In his 1987 book, Music by Philip Glass, the composer explained his fascination with the heretic king: “On becoming Pharaoh, he declared a new religion based upon Aten, associated with the sun, but not actually the sun itself, a very important point theologically. His new god was supreme and alone, making Akhnaten the first declared monotheist in history…Finally, by not completely identifying his god with the physical sun but emphasizing his independent nature, Akhnaten’s god is the first truly abstract god head we know.” Glass knew that not all historians of religion and culture agreed with this description. But for Glass, the main point was that “Akhnaten had changed his (and our) world through the force of his ideas and not through the force of arms.”