Satyagraha: Gandhi's search for truth. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore/AFP
• Listen to the conversation with Philip Glass and view images from Satyagraha and Glass's other works.
He has composed so many operas now - 20 to date, with a new one about the American Civil War due to be unveiled in San Francisco in October - that it must be hard for Philip Glass to think back to a time when it was all a new experience. Satyagraha was his first real opera, the first work he'd composed specifically for the vocal, orchestral and theatrical resources of a conventional opera house. Einstein on the Beach, which preceded it, had been presented in opera houses, Glass says, only because such buildings seemed the most appropriate places in which to stage it. When I interviewed the composer onstage at the English National Opera a few weeks ago, it was fascinating to hear him recall that period in his career so vividly. He revealed how important the project to compose a work around Gandhi's experiences in South Africa had been to him in the 1970s - and how the idea had taken root long before he had any notion of becoming a composer of operas.
Engaging and immensely talkative, Glass turned out to be a wonderful subject. Our conversation at the London Coliseum could have lasted twice as long. He offered an intriguing account of the way in which he developed the idea of the portrait trilogy, consisting of his first three stage works as a composer: Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten. He also came up with some wonderful anecdotes: his revelation that director Robert Wilson's first idea for the collaboration that became Einstein was a work based around Hitler could have come straight out of a Mel Brooks movie.
What emerged, too, is how immensely practical a musician Glass has always been - a prerequisite for being a successful composer in the opera house, where adaptability is a necessary survival skill. It's often forgotten that before he became such an iconic figure in the American avant-garde of the 1970s, Glass had not only received a thoroughly orthodox academic musical training - the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School in New York and two years in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger - but had also served his apprenticeship in the theatre, composing incidental music for many plays.
By any standards, the ENO staging of Satyagraha has turned out to be an exceptional event, a fabulously imaginative presentation of a work that is one of Glass's greatest achievements and a wonderful re-imagining of the traditional elements of operatic form. Anyone who has been lucky enough to see it will perhaps understand why, as Glass says in this interview, "opera is not a form of history, but a form of poetry".
• Find out more about this production of Satyagraha. (Remaining performance dates: Sat 21 April, Wed 25 April, Thu 26 April, Mon 30 April and Tue 1 May.) Music excerpts in this podcast are used by kind permission of Sony Classical.
