This is Where Time Lets Go:

Ritual, Love, and Temporality in Siddhartha, She

By Jane Forner

What would happen . . . when the lyrics of your being were unbound? (Act I, Scene I)

Music drama is just as attracted as any artform to probing the mystery that is human existence and behaviors. The representation of a personal path to spiritual enlightenment that weaves through Siddhartha, She brings together a kaleidoscopic array of cultural influences, but taps into a universal urge to find meaning in existence. The rich and multifaceted title character is a figure we come to adore for her charm, her pursuit of a higher purpose, her wit and openness, but also, as the libretto notes, for her role as a “vessel for the human story.”

Although the piece is only loosely based on Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, the legacy of the German author’s writing throughout the half-century after his death in 1962 offers insight into a broader cultural and artistic context for Theofanidis and Studdard’s work. Reading this novel, which was published in parts between 1919 and 1922, one can readily imagine how the devastation of World War I impacted Hesse’s approach to a narrative that deeply probes the nature of human existence and an individual’s quest for self-understanding and enlightenment. Siddhartha was the result of Hesse’s many years learning about Eastern philosophies, including Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. His was a profound, sincere interest that was also unavoidably steeped in the legacy of the German Romantic tradition, where the nineteenth-century European perspective on (and often, fetishization of) the “East” frequently led to skewed Orientalist portrayals. But this philosophical pull also represented a deep need to seek understanding, knowing, and being in alternative ways.

But beyond that, Hesse’s Siddhartha went on to become intimately important to later generations through its influence among countercultural artistic movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which drew widely on Eastern philosophies and art for inspiration and fulfillment. After he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, Hesse’s literary oeuvre gained considerably wider attention, finding a cult following helped along by a popular 1972 film adaptation of Siddhartha directed by Conrad Rooks. Its themes of Eastern mysticism—not to mention Siddhartha’s resistance to authority—resonated strongly with the Woodstock generation, which was in the throes of anti-Vietnam War protests and seeking alternative forms of spirituality and living. The Who’s Pete Townshend even incorporated an extended reference to Siddhartha into his song “The Ferryman” (1978), which depicts an always-flowing river.

The somewhat archaic, allegorical mode in which Hesse writes is considerably updated for a modern audience in Melissa Studdard’s libretto, which switches between witty banter and dialogue and a lush, elevated poetic style, allowing space for language to breathe even if it is not structured around traditional recitatives and arias. But by far the most important twist in this twenty-first-century Siddhartha is the gender switch of the title character, and consequently the nature of her relationships with other characters; Govinda, Siddhartha’s best friend, is also cast as female, shifting the mode of their interactions. But all roads seem to lead in and out of the scenes between Siddhartha and Kamala the courtesan, where the overall dramatic frame of a spiritual journey and path towards understanding is suffused with queered inflections. Siddhartha’s sexuality and relationships form a central part of her winding path of self-discovery.

In Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha encounters familiar, even classic heteronormative archetypes: a profound, serious male thinker is faced with sexual temptations that he must overcome in order to pursue his higher purpose. The power dynamic between man and woman is not simple: Kamala teaches him about intimacy and pleasure, but she is also represented as a habit he cannot break: “again and again, he came back to beautiful Kamala, learned the art of love, practiced the cult of lust.” But Siddhartha comes to feel that he has lost his way, that the world is passing him by as he succumbs to lust, sloth, greed. His relationship with Kamala is skewed by the same materialism that ultimately afflicts the operatic couple—a need for beautiful things, for money and clothes, as a prerequisite for love.

Lust for Hesse’s Siddhartha is a “vain, fleeting pleasure,” and the love that he experiences with Kamala is not one that equates with true happiness—quite the opposite. But the relationship that blossoms between Kamala and Siddhartha in Melissa Studdard’s text takes on a different tone altogether. Although the operatic Siddhartha ultimately decides to leave Kamala, feeling, like Hesse’s protagonist, that she has lost herself in love and greed, the queer love we witness flourishing is suffused with tenderness and reciprocity, lacking the intense frustrations and nebulous possessiveness of the novel.

While Scene V traces their meeting, it is in Scene VI that the central substance of their relationship unfolds in two wordless montages spinning out the passage of their life together in all its chaos and intimacy, domesticity and luxury. Its subtitle, “Break Until You Open,” evokes how a fuller sense of sexuality and connection can be liberated through a breaking down of the self, even if the path of pleasure that Siddhartha chooses with Kamala proves not to be her final destination. Yet while Siddhartha’s initial meeting with Kamala is based on her wish to “learn the art of love”—falling into their respective archetypes of Samana (a wandering ascetic) and powerful courtesan—their ensuing relationship is rooted in a kind of mutual transformation, an openness to a love that comes as a surprise—that is, as the chorus sings, “growing . . . passing . . . flowering . . . blossoming . . . ripening.”

Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider that “for women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered.” In the scenes between Siddhartha and Kamala we witness this drive to nurture the other, which does not yield even as they must decide to separate. The complexity and messiness of queer love in all its beauty is rendered in Studdard’s sensual lyricism:

Chorus I: If you’re looking for dark all night, and the moon gets in the way, it’s asking you to run into the Pleasure Grove and kiss the fingers of the trees. Say yes.

Chorus II: Say yes.

Kamala: I am the grove.

Siddhartha: I am the trees.

While feminist and alternative productions of canonic operas abound these days, opera generally suffers from an enormous lack of representations of same-sex relationships. It is not the only focus of Siddhartha, She by any means, and this subtleness allows a listener to absorb the queer overtones of Kamala and Siddhartha’s journey as they wish.

It is a relationship perhaps cursed by an excess of pleasure, and Siddhartha’s choice to leave comes from the feeling that she has over-consumed: ultimately, “it’s a life that’s full of love, but also material excess, and it stands in contrast to the spiritually-centered life that Siddhartha had previously lived.” She feels disgusted at herself, “soiled with greed . . . filthy with sloth.” Yet the parting with Kamala is not a violent rejection, but a mutual recognition rooted in a shared understanding that their life together is no longer happy, no longer serving either of them. They are “agonized,” “destroyed,” resisting the separation, but they are also both relieved to voice what they know to be true:

Kamala: I feel you drifting . . . sometimes it’s almost like you were never really here.

Siddhartha: I was here, and I lost myself in love for you.

Kamala: And I lost myself for you.

The opera makes no authoritative pronouncement on sex and love, but guides us through considerations of universally relevant aspects of human relationships: What do we relinquish of ourselves? How do we love without losing ourselves? As the chorus summarizes, “What is love but a voice across the waters of time? . . . Like a wild wind we move through joy and sorrow.” As we emerge from the Siddhartha-Kamala love drama and Siddhartha returns to the river, we wonder whether it has happened at all, or if it was just a feverish dream of pleasure. Siddhartha indeed remarks to Dharuna that she feels she has been asleep for years. But this question, indeed, is a central conceit of the opera: past, present, and future are collapsed, shaken loose from tethers of linearity, but not obliterated altogether. Time passes, yet is not rooted clearly; when Govinda and Siddhartha see the Buddha in Scene III, the overwhelming impression it makes on them is intimately linked to a conception of time and existence, as Govinda remarks that “this must be where time lets go.”

Described as a “ritual music drama,” Siddhartha, She adopts many dramatic strategies that sidestep traditional forms of plot and storytelling; as Siddhartha herself states plainly in Scene VII, “Time is an illusion.” Within the opera’s multilayered narrative, time is not rejected, but its illusory nature is manifested by a powerful sense of impermanence and cyclicity. Opera scholar Márta Grabócz has noted the presence of ritual, stasis, and initiation journeys in contemporary operas, suggesting that a preference for non-linear narratives intersects with renewed interest in myth as both subject matter and format. In avoiding teleological or conventional plot structures, a great deal of contemporary theater since the 1960s has looked to expand the dramatic possibilities of opera through experimental approaches to time and to personhood. The question is not about the relationship of the dramatic world to the “real” world of us, the audience, but how temporality is made elastic within the fabricated world of the drama onstage. Things that “happen” may be understood as purely symbolic. Similarly, characters may lack individuality, instead emerging as archetypal representations of human qualities, behaviors, or ideas—much like in myth or in the prologues of seventeenth-century opera, which took inspiration from ancient Greek drama.

Siddhartha’s trajectory could be understood as purely symbolic, without any supposition of literal movement through space and time within the drama. In this understanding, all characters, experiences, and events take on a wholly metaphorical nature that surpasses the normal register of representational drama. Whether we accept this framing or attempt a fully literal interpretation, Siddhartha, She urges us away from either extreme: its narrative is neither entirely symbolic nor literal, but is perceived fluidly: “What was and what will be are points along the ever-present river of what is.”

Deeper meanings are infused throughout the opera, amplified by the presence of ritualistic choreography and gestures. Aarti is a ritual performed in which a lamp or flame is waved in front of a deity as a gesture of devotion, as the chorus does at the beginning and end of the opera, carrying candle arrangements and setting them into the river. Mudras (literally meaning “seal,” “brand,” or “gesture” in Sanskrit) are symbolic gestures used in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, mostly with the hands. In a scene with her father, for instance, Siddhartha performs Abhaya Mudra, which conveys fearlessness, protection, and peace. It is made with the right hand raised to shoulder height, the arm crooked, the palm of the hand facing outward, and the fingers upright and joined. Depicted on some images of the Buddha, it’s said to forbid relatives from fighting. Just as passages of the libretto slide into deeply philosophical, lyrical poetry, so too does the opera’s choreography illuminate aspects of the symbolic, of stepping out of (or into) time.

Because music necessarily possesses a temporal dimension, it is difficult to divorce it from its forward-unfolding path. Composers interested in disrupting linearity deploy various techniques to construct a more fluid sense of time. Return to the experimentalism that paralleled the flourishing of interest in Hesse’s novel in the 1960s; think of Fluxus-style experimentalism in New York City lofts, powered by hours of drones; think of the Beatles’ White Album. Theofanidis’s score mirrors the drama’s ambiguous presentation of time: in many passages, instrumental cross-rhythms weave around singers constantly, while choral parts establish a wash of tonal sound. In others, a vast stillness radiates through extended chords and immersive percussion, sometimes akin to drones, sometimes rippling gently. In sum, the richly-layered textures of the score suggest both continuous advancing motion and a circularity that evokes the elastic shifts between the narrative’s forward-driven passages and those that are more ritualistic and symbolic. The orchestra’s surging rises and falls, and moments of tranquility, also evoke the central importance of the river, something that is honored and revered, and that symbolizes transition, journey, and truth; it is steady motion but also a weightlessness, a still, full being.

In its bringing together of a mosaic of spiritual, cultural, musical, and literary influences, Siddhartha, She stands alongside a growing corpus of contemporary operas and new music works that reflect intercultural practices. In another instance, W. Anthony Sheppard described composer Tan Dun’s practice as a form of “cross-cultural operatic experimentation”; composer George E. Lewis, meanwhile, has in recent years applied the idea of “creolization” to contemporary music, drawing from the literary movement of créolité originating in Martinique. In other words, listening to a twenty-first century opera like Siddhartha, She asks us to open our ears beyond postmodern collage to experience a new form of immersive, intercultural music drama. As is sung as we progress into the Om: “every person a note.”

— © Jane Forner

Performers and Creatives Biographies:

August 2

Siddhartha, She Biographies