By Shirley Apthorp [Financial Times, 14 September 2005]

"Normally speaking, we would never approve of torture," sings Colonel Joll. "But I think it's generally understood that this is an emergency."

Philip Glass's newest opera is an allegory for our times. Waiting for the Barbarians tells a cautionary tale about the evils of imperialism, the moral quagmire of war and torture, about injustice masquerading as law and order, about individual responsibility. The work, a tidy 2½-hour music drama, received its world premiere in the Thuringian capital of Erfurt on Saturday.