As in his second opera, Gilgamesh (1971-2), Per Norgard chose an ancient, legendary figure as the central character of his third, the Indian prince who ultimately became the Buddha. Siddharta (1974-9) opens at the court of the childless King Suddhodana, where his doleful queen, Maya, dances in order to conceive a child – Siddharta. The birth has dire consequences: the Queen dies, and a ritual horoscope predicts that the prince will abandon the kingdom. Against the protests of Maya's sister, Prajapati, Suddhodana decides to protect his son from life so that he will never be tempted to leave. Only the young, the healthy and the beautiful may see Siddharta; the rest are interned. Only in Act 3 is the deception revealed, when a dancer falls dead at the prince's feet. Prajapati then reveals the horde of aged, infirm and ugly whose rebellion is duly – and brutally – suppressed. In a mixture of trauma and disgust, Siddharta leaves home, wife and family to set out on the painful road to enlightenment.
The story of a prince so shielded from real life is an intriguing one, especially given the disturbing resonances of mid-twentieth-century Central European history in the King's 'cleansing' of undesirable elements. Yet the tragedy of the First Act finds no real expression in the music, nor does any tension accumulate in the Second: while it could be argued that this reflects the unreality of Siddharta's existence, I remain unconvinced – Henze would have made of this a much more compelling, if less mystical, experience. Norgard's music itself is partly to blame, the thematic material being derived (as with Gilgamesh) from the 'infinity' series, the inexhaustible, self-perpetuating stream from which themes are extracted by choosing every, say, third, fifteenth, or even seventy-fifth, note. In Gilgamesh the series's euphony acted as a correlative of the action; in Siddharta it is at odds with it.
Ironically, the most satisfyingly dramatic music on these discs occurs in the percussion concerto For a Change (1982-3, inspired by the Chinese I Ching and an arrangement of a solo percussion work of that name, recorded by Mortensen on BIS), the four movements of which take up where Siddharta left off. Nor is this just a testament to the blistering account by Gert Mortensen, since the performance of the opera is a fine one; rather, it is that the innately abstract drama of the concerto elicited the more cogent response from the composer.'