Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass’ 2007 live poetry/music collaboration Book of Longing revived for Hong Kong stage
- Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass co-created Book of Longing in 2007, a live show with musical backing in which Cohen read aloud poems he wrote at a monastery
- Hong Kong director Mo Lai Yan-chi, conductor Vivian Ip Wing-wun and violinist Nina Wong Sin-i talk about their adaptation of the show
In 2000, Leonard Cohen met Philip Glass and showed him a collection of more than 100 unpublished poems and artworks he had made in the 1990s, a period of intense self-reflection and contemplation.
Plagued by depression, the Canadian artist had spent much of that decade in a Zen Buddhist monastery in California, having been ordained as a monk, named Jikan.
Glass, the American composer known for his minimalist style, was so moved by the words and images that he immediately asked for permission to set some of the poems to music.
The two men were both in their sixties then, and Cohen, a failed monk who had returned to secular life, agreed to work on a stage production that was part chamber opera and part cabaret, interjected with the voice of Cohen reading out his own poems.
The result was Book of Longing, a Glass x Cohen crossover that premiered in Toronto, Canada, in 2007.