| Waiting for the Barbarians | |
|---|---|
| Opera by Philip Glass | |
 Glass in 2006 | |
| Librettist | Christopher Hampton |
| Language | English |
| Based on | Waiting for the Barbarians by John M. Coetzee |
| Premiere | |
Waiting for the Barbarians is an opera in two acts composed by Philip Glass, with libretto by Christopher Hampton based on the 1980 novel of the same name by South African-born author John M. Coetzee. The opera was commissioned by the Theater Erfurt in Erfurt, Germany.
Waiting for the Barbarians premiered on September 10, 2005 at Erfurt Theater, directed by Guy Montavon and conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. There was one other European performance in Amsterdam in 2006. Its American premiere was performed on January 19, 2007 by the Austin Lyric Opera in Austin, Texas. The opera was also performed on June 12, 2008 at the Barbican Centre in London.
On the border of an unnamed Empire, the Magistrate of a relatively peaceful and unimportant town spends the days working for the well-being of his community and the nights in the company of his lady-friends.
Abruptly, the peace of this seeming idyll is broken by the arrival of a detachment of the government's Civil Guard, headed by the cold, obsessive Colonel Joll, apparently in response to rumors that the barbarians are massing to attack the Empire. As Joll says, "We are forced to begin a short war in order to safeguard the peace."
Joll and his men set out to attack a group of the barbarians, and bring back to town a number of prisoners, whom they interrogate, torture, and, in the case of one old man, kill. The Magistrate protests, at first weakly; Joll then returns to the capital city of the Empire to report and to plan further attacks on the barbarians.
The Magistrate discovers a barbarian girl, crippled and partially blinded, begging in the town. He feels a mixture of pity and, increasingly, attraction to her, and arranges for her to stay and work in the establishment where his female friend the cook works. He spends time with the girl, questioning her about the interrogation and torture by Joll's men which has left her disabled.
Confused by his growing feelings of sexual attraction, pity, and anger, the Magistrate takes the girl on a journey through the wilderness in order to return her to her people, the Barbarians. Upon his return to the town, he finds that Joll has been spreading doubts about the Magistrate's loyalty to the Empire; the populace accuse him of being a traitor and "barbarian-lover", despite his protestations that, far from being a military threat, the barbarians are peaceful nomads who have no interest in occupying the Empire.
The Magistrate himself is now imprisoned in solitary confinement for some months and tortured. Eventually he is released; the Empire's military forces have been routed by the guerilla tactics of the barbarians, and they are being "temporarily" withdrawn to the capital of the Empire, ostensibly to wait for next year's Spring offensive.
The town's supplies have been pillaged by the troops, and the Magistrate exhorts the people to be brave and to work to survive the winter by planting root vegetables, catching and drying fish, and conserving the little food that has been left to them. He goes to visit his old friend the Cook, who rebukes him for having used the Barbarian girl and for not having been able to understand her at all. He is left alone, wondering even more about who the true barbarians are.
On June 3, 2008 a recording of Waiting for the Barbarians was released on the Orange Mountain Music label.
Orpheus is a 1950 French film directed by Jean Cocteau and starring Jean Marais. It is the central part of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, which consists of The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950), and Testament of Orpheus (1960).
Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts, composed by Philip Glass and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson who also collaborated with Glass on the work's libretto. The opera eschews traditional narrative in favor of a formalist approach based on structured spaces laid out by Wilson in a series of storyboards. The music was written "in the spring, summer and fall of 1975". Glass recounts the collaborative process: "I put [Wilson’s notebook of sketches] on the piano and composed each section like a portrait of the drawing before me. The score was begun in the spring of 1975 and completed by the following November, and those drawings were before me all the time." The premiere took place on July 25, 1976, at the Avignon Festival in France. The opera contains writings by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs. It is Glass's first and longest opera score, taking approximately five hours in full performance without intermission; given the length, the audience is permitted to enter and leave as desired.
Galileo Galilei is an opera based on excerpts from the life of Galileo Galilei which premiered in 2002 at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, as well as subsequent presentations at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's New Wave Music Festival and London's Barbican Theatre. Music by Philip Glass, libretto and original direction by Mary Zimmerman and Arnold Weinstein. The piece is presented in one act consisting of ten scenes without break.
Dead Man Walking is the first opera composed by American Jake Heggie, with a libretto by playwright Terrence McNally. Based on the book of the same name by Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., the work premiered on October 7, 2000, at the War Memorial Opera House, produced by the San Francisco Opera.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. First published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th Century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction. American composer Philip Glass has also written an opera of the same name based on the book which premiered in September 2005 at Theater Erfurt, Germany.
Cendrillon (Cinderella) is an opera—described as a "fairy tale"—in four acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Henri Caïn based on Perrault's 1698 version of the Cinderella fairy tale.
Königskinder is a stage work by Engelbert Humperdinck that exists in two versions: as a melodrama and as an opera or more precisely a Märchenoper. The libretto was written by Ernst Rosmer, adapted from her play of the same name.
Theodora is a dramatic oratorio in three acts by George Frideric Handel, set to an English libretto by Thomas Morell. The oratorio concerns the Christian martyr Theodora and her Christian-converted Roman lover, Didymus. It had its first performance at Covent Garden Theatre on 16 March 1750.
Barbarian Queen is a 1985 American-Argentine fantasy film starring Lana Clarkson, directed by Héctor Olivera and written by Howard R. Cohen. The film premiered in April 1985 in the United States. It was executive produced by Roger Corman, and it was the third in a series of ten movies that Corman produced in Argentina during the 1980s.
The Martyrs of Abitinae were a group of 49 Christians found guilty, in 304, during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, of having illegally celebrated Sunday worship at Abitinae, a town in the Roman province of Africa. The town is frequently referred to as Abitina, but the form indicated in the Annuario Pontificio is Abitinae. The plural form Abitinae is that which Saint Augustine of Hippo used when writing his De baptismo in 400 or 401.
Austin Opera, formerly known as the Austin Lyric Opera, is an opera company based in Austin, Texas. The company was founded in 1986. Its key personnel include Annie Burridge, the General Director, and Timothy Myers, Artistic Advisor.
The Io Passion is a chamber opera with music by Harrison Birtwistle and a libretto in English by Stephen Plaice. It was commissioned jointly by the Aldeburgh Festival, Almeida Opera and the Bregenz Festival in Austria.
La statue is an opera in three acts and five tableaux by Ernest Reyer to the libretto by Michel Carré and Jules Barbier based on tales from One Thousand and One Nights and La statue merveilleuse, an 1810 carnival play by Alain-René Lesage and Jacques-Philippe d'Orneval.
"The Dreamscape" is the ninth episode of the first season of the American science fiction drama television series Fringe. It centers on a Fringe investigation of a Massive Dynamic employee who, after believing himself to be under attack by a swarm of sharp-winged butterflies, jumps out of a window. Meanwhile, Olivia continues her visions of the deceased John Scott, and discovers how he related to a deadly psychoactive drug synthesized by Massive Dynamic.
Amelia is an opera in two acts by Daron Hagen to a libretto in English by Gardner McFall based on a story by Stephen Wadsworth. It had its world premiere at the Seattle Opera on May 8, 2010.
"Reversals of Fortune" is the 44th episode of the CW television series, Gossip Girl and the third season premiere. The episode was written by Joshua Safran and directed by J. Miller Tobin. It originally aired on Monday, September 14, 2009 on the CW.
The Perfect American is an opera in two acts composed in 2011–12 by Philip Glass. It is an adaptation of the Peter Stephan Jungk novel, Der König von Amerika, a fictional work that re-imagines Walt Disney in his later years as a power-hungry racist. It was commissioned by the Teatro Real in Madrid in co-production with the English National Opera in London.
The Trial is an English-language opera in two acts, with music by Philip Glass to a libretto by Christopher Hampton, based on the 1925 eponymous novel by Franz Kafka. The opera was a joint commission between Music Theatre Wales, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Theater Magdeburg and Scottish Opera.
La Belle et la Bête is an opera for ensemble and film, composed in 1994 by Philip Glass based on a libretto in French by the composer according to the script of the film by Jean Cocteau released in 1946. This is the second part of a trilogy in homage to the French poet after Orphée (1993) and before Les Enfants Terribles (1996). The world premiere of the work took place on 4 June 1994 in Seville, with Michael Riesman conducting.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a 2019 action drama film directed by Ciro Guerra in his English-language directorial debut. The film is based on the 1980 novel of the same name by J. M. Coetzee. It stars Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson, Gana Bayarsaikhan, and Greta Scacchi.
Authority control  |
|
|---|
