In the mid-1970s, when the country was in a deep malaise over Watergate, Vietnam, the failure of most of the late-60s protests, artists for theatre and film were producing some of the most outstanding works of art of the century. Somehow, in the midst of political upheaval, artists are a little more electrified. Hence, we have fewer great plays and films from the ‘80s than we do the ‘70s. In that latter decade, if you could find gas to get to a theater, there was a new film almost each week by Scorcese, Bogdanovich, George Roy Hill, etc. In the theatre, there were the musicals by Sondheim and Prince and plays by fresh, engaging playwrights in a time when a play still had a following. Today, a play makes almost no large cultural impact.
The world of opera, however, was stagnant and staid with largely middle-aged and elderly crowds attending the standard repertory of Puccini, Verdi, and Wagner. Films were drawing a new generation; opera, however, was strictly for the uptown and wealthy. That is, until an experimental stage director from Waco, Texas, Robert Wilson, and an experimental composer, Philip Glass, collaborated on the monumental music-theatre work Einstein on the Beach.
Though a stage director, Wilson had come out of the world of painting and dance. Language was not his strongest suit as he was a stutterer from a very young age. So, many of his early “operas” (he was already using the term since it simply translates as “a work”) were largely silent, sometimes using abstract language often provided by an autistic poet named Christopher Knowles and using canned music for scant scenes. His operas moved at a glacial pace and lasted hours. One of his early works, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, lasted for a full seven-day period. He was mostly well-known in Europe, where his magnificent Deafman Glance, a silent opera, caused a sensation and he was crowned the new torch-bearer of the surrealists.
Glass virtually had no early audience except for friends in SoHo and young people, who were more receptive to his work due to their interest in hallucinogenic drugs, rock and roll, and Eastern-oriented music. Glass used amplified instruments for his self-named ensemble and had studied both traditional Western music at Julliard and with Nadia Boulanger, but also Eastern music with Ravi Shankar. The result was an extended period of additive, minimalist music which was shunned by critics as one work could be performed based on two simple notes or an additive piece of repeating notes. Glass cut his teeth theatrically with Mabou Mines, an Off-Off Broadway troupe who largely created pieces based on the works of Samuel Beckett. Glass and Wilson would inevitably work together because of the small pool of experimental theatre artists in New York.
As Wilson typically named his theatrical pieces after historical figures (even if they only had to do with the work incidentally), their piece became centered upon Albert Einstein, the central figure of science during the 2nd World War. Their work would not be autobiographical, but a series of stage pictures, dance, and music that were tangentially connected to Einstein: his clothing, the swift change of technology in the 20th century, the atomic bomb age, etc.
Einstein on the Beach is possibly the first opera where the libretto consisted almost exclusively of Wilson’s sketchbook where he planned what his stage pictures would look like. Glass wrote the score to these drawings rather than to a traditional libretto. Eventually, text would be included in the opera, though all spoken. Knowles contributed pieces in addition to two of the actors, choreographer/dancer Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson, who contributed two of the best moments of the opera—a monologue in one of the Trial scenes and the exquisite, tear-inducing finale. The only sung lyrics were numbers and solfege syllables.
The work would eventually be four- and three-quarter hours long with no intermission. The piece would already be in progress when the audience entered the opera house and people were free to come and go as they pleased. After all, a single stage action in a Wilson piece could take a half an hour to perform.
I once saw Wilson speak in New York. He is as interested in the movement of a single finger as he is the entire stage picture. Actors may be asked to take fifteen minutes to walk from one side of the stage to the other both in auditions and the final product. It takes complete control of the body and tremendous stamina. That should give you a sense of the suspended time in which his works exist.
I suppose I first encountered Einstein when studying the work of my mentor, Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. Hwang and Glass had met after Glass had seen the former’s Sound and Beauty in New York (which he eventually adapted into the chamber opera The Sound of a Voice). Glass felt Hwang’s spare writing would lend itself well to the operatic stage and he has enlisted him in writing several libretti for him, including the innovative 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and, a rare commission from the Met, The Voyage in 1992, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World.
From there, I found a book in the library, Music by Philip Glass (by Philip Glass) which is my favorite book about the theatre. It is the telling of the creation of his trilogy of portrait operas, which includes Einstein as well as a work on M. K. Ghandi, Satyagraha, and the world’s first monotheist, Akhnaten. The Trilogy concerns itself with men who changed the world in the realms of science, politics, and religion. That led me to borrow from the library the initial recording of Einstein—the music was originally difficult for the untrained ear, but now has become so much a part of our musical culture that nearly every documentary score sounds like a plagiarism of Glass’ repertoire: the repetition, the tone, the timbre, the ambience. His musical vocabulary is now ingrained in the American arts. And he has become the most prolific composers of opera in the world.
While I could marvel over pictures from productions of Einstein and listen to the music (I once held the actual score in my hand and wept), the opera was rarely performed due to its immense performance costs, length, and general difficulty. Finally, in 2014, the opera’s second revival was forever preserved on DVD. That production, filmed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. What a gift! Scenes I had only read about in narrative reports came alive through stunning videography.
When I think about a work of art that stands out as the singular achievement of a decade or a century, I mostly can only do this with theatrical works. It is all subjective, of course, but such works typically emulate that century—both its horrors and its glories. The 20th century saw the greatest failure of human civilization (the Shoah), but also saw spectacular industrial and technological growth. I call Einstein the greatest 20th century work of art not only because it accomplishes that feat (in showing, in its final scene, the horrors of the atomic age, but also the hope in our continuing to dream up new ideas), but it also encompasses all the arts: visual, dance, music, writing, and drama.
But, perhaps its best asset, is that it is also open to as many different interpretations as there are people in the audience. The work was created with the intent that the audience completes the meaning. That was a dictum of Wilson and Glass’ early work and one that I wish more artists would take on. It elevates the opera and theatre itself: the audience as collaborator.
Immerse yourself in Einstein on the Beach and more of Glass’ operas. Reach out and try harder works, works that make you work more for it.
