A Pharaoh Goes to Oxford

The star of the opera Akhnaten takes his role so seriously, he’s been offered a fellowship in Egyptology

The first time Richard Bruce Parkinson saw Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten, in 1985, he left unimpressed. The tale of Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s father and his doomed quest to change Egypt’s belief system from polytheism to monotheism struck him as “quite a romantic, quite an idealistic view.”

Thirty years and one production later, Parkinson, a professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and a former curator at the British Museum, is now a superfan. So much so that he’s made Anthony Roth Costanzo, the opera’s star, a visiting fellow at Oxford’s Research Centre in the Humanities.

The current steampunk-inflected version of Akhnaten, from director Phelim McDermott with sets by Tom Pye and costumes by Kevin Pollard, has been running since 2016. It will be back at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on May 19 after a season’s hiatus, returning with a Grammy win in April for best opera recording. “As an Egyptologist, I should probably be a bit shocked at the liberties it takes,” Parkinson says. “But it’s done with such imaginative conviction, it’s a brilliant approach.”