Waiting for the Barbarians is an opera composed by Philip Glass on a libretto by Christopher Hampton and based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee. This project has been on the back burner for a long time; Glass first contacted Coetzee about adapting his book in 1991 and outlined a treatment of it that year, but the finished product wasn't delivered until 2005. This is a recording of the premiere, held September 10 of that year at the Theatre Erfurt in Germany; in a way, it is appropriate that this work ...
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Waiting for the Barbarians is an opera composed by Philip Glass on a libretto by Christopher Hampton and based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee. This project has been on the back burner for a long time; Glass first contacted Coetzee about adapting his book in 1991 and outlined a treatment of it that year, but the finished product wasn't delivered until 2005. This is a recording of the premiere, held September 10 of that year at the Theatre Erfurt in Germany; in a way, it is appropriate that this work should be heard in Germany first, as it bears a kinship with the kind of ruthless efficiency that typifies Weimar-era German works such as Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Der Jasager. However, its story is set in South Africa, where a local official in a small town finds himself at a moral crossroads as an invading, governmental military unit conducts a series of torturous interrogations as a prelude to a tactical strike against a locally based tribe. Glass must pick his projects with...
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