Philip Glass is a tireless reader; his curiosity knows no bounds. In the early ’80s – as he himself tells us – he stumbled across Oedipus and Akhnaten, a book by Immanuel Velikovsky in which the author claims that the vicissitudes of Sophocles’ King Oedipus were already well known during the reign of the Pharaoh Akhnaten. Glass was so impressed that he wanted to make an opera out of it. As the project developed, the fates of Oedipus and Akhnaten, who was the first Egyptian ruler to sustain monotheism, ultimately took different paths. Glass amassed a plethora of historical, archeological and philological details which he put together to create a work of great and rare allure. It premiered at the Stuttgart Opera House, under the elegant direction of Achim Freyer. The performance slated for MITO SettembreMusica 2015 follows an oratory format and dual-screen imagery based on the collection from Torino’s Egyptian Museum.