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| In the time machine forty years later Margarita Zieda, Theatre Critic | |
| Einstein on the Beach, the four-and-a-half-hour long opera without intermission by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson is one of the major and almost mythical theatrical events of the 20 century that can be found in books and recordings, but which younger generations have never experienced for themselves. That all changes this year, as the American avant-garde theatre icon Wilson turns the time machine both backwards and forwards by restaging the sensation of the 1976 Avignon Festival for a completely new audience. Naturally the performers also are new, since neither the original cast nor the work’s creators are immune to age: with the revival of this mega performance, minimalist music master Glass celebrates his 75 birth-day, and both director Wilson and one of his choreographers Lucinda Childs turned 70 last year. The 2012–2013 season of Einstein on the Beach will premiere in France, before travelling to London, Amsterdam and New York. An opera of images Einstein on the Beach is a revolutionary opera whose innovative influence has been compared to Wagner. It was created not by setting a libretto to music, but rather by writing music for visuality, to images. Wilson firstly made a picture book of sketches for the opera, which Glass then set to music. This later led to problems with copyright authorities in the US, who rejected Wilson’s applications for copyright for Einstein on the Beach three times on the grounds that a sketch book could not be considered a libretto. Einstein on the Beach also took a radically different approach to operatic forms of expression. There is a complete absence of the emotionality expressed through music and singing – the heart and soul of opera. Instead, there are a series of mathematically calculated, functionally clean, staged actions devoid of emotionality, with the soloists and choir singing notes and numbers. The opera begins and ends with a cascade of numbers sung by the choir and continuing ad infinitum: 1234/123456/12345678/1234/123456/12345678/1234/123456/2345678/1234/123456/2345678/1234/23456/12345678/1234/23456/12345678/234/123456/12345678/234/123456/12345678... The audience’s emotions are engaged by the psychedelic magic of the images and the meditative drawing power of the music. The opera runs for four-and-a-half hours without a break, and members of the public can leave at any time and return without missing any key scenes. Einstein on the Beach has no script or clearly defined storyline, rather it is a hypnotic network of music and images formed by recurring but changing motifs. It is opera as an abstraction which changes the notions of time and space of the people experiencing it. “In Wilson’s opera, science becomes an imaginary space, as art, as dreams,” wrote The Village Voice, after Einstein on the Beach was performed for two nights at the New York Metropolitan Opera, following an immensely successful tour of Europe. | |
 Einstein on the Beach. View from the opera. 1992 Photo: T. Charles Ericson | |
| Einstein on the Beach is an opera born of images. But the images didn’t just appear from nowhere. They stem from many lively conversations in New York restaurants. Wilson, who was an avant-garde director, stage designer and lighting artist but not a composer, wanted to create an opera, and chose the minimalist Glass as his creative partner. The only clear idea Wilson had about the opera he wanted to create was that it had to be about a major 20 century figure. The collaborators considered Charlie Chaplin, Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi. The key factor was that the opera had to be centred on someone the audience would know, and that the person had had an impact on their time. “Chaplin is known and loved by all. Hitler’s funny moustache and weird gestures interested me. But instead we chose Einstein. What interested me was the man himself, rather than his scientific work. I liked him. I liked how he dressed; he always wore light grey or brown clothes, light colours, and almost never appeared in dark, formal attire. He was a free man who lived simply, especially as he got older. He was an unpretentious man and you can easily identify with him. He was popular and the papers always wrote about him. He was open, friendly, he talked to everyone, and he never saw himself as special. Einstein was a dreamer and a genuine revolutionary amongst the scientists of his era. And he loved sailing. He was a dreamer and a sailor,” Wilson explained his choice to German magazine Die Zeit in 1976. “I think of Einstein as a god of our times. People will come to the theatre already knowing Einstein’s story, so we won’t have to retell it. I’m fascinated by the attraction of polar opposites in him. Einstein was a pacifist and a dreamer, a time traveller and also father of the atomic bomb. I really wanted to create a work that was a product of its time. The mid 1970s saw an escalation in the nuclear arms race, and it was also a time of social upheaval.” They gave the as yet unwritten opera the working title ‘Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street’. This was later shortened, but neither Wilson nor Glass remembers why. The beach reference comes from On the Beach, a film that Wilson had seen about the atom bomb and the destruction of humanity. In addition, Wilson recalled that as an old man Isaac Newton liked to go for walks along the beach collecting stones. Einstein’s and Wilson’s difficulties in communicating There is another aspect mentioned only in passing by Wilson, but which connects him to Einstein at a deeper level. Both men suffered from difficulties in communicating early in life. From early childhood, Wilson stammered so badly that no one wanted to play with him, and this created a deep isolation and loneliness. “Try to take your time speaking,” a teacher told him. So Wilson started speaking more slowly, and the stammering disappeared. In its place he discovered a remarkable talent for communicating. As an adult Wilson was able to talk to people that others had been unable to help, such as children with various developmental disabilities, deaf-mutes and sufferers of autism, because instead of following the communication conventions of “normal” adults, he entered into a world where communication took a different form and tried to understand its rules. In one legendary case, he communicated with people hooked up to artificial respiration equipment in hospital, addressing them all at the same time using light signals, through energy. Einstein didn’t talk at all until he was three, and when he did start, it was such an effort that it took him an inordinately long time to answer a question. When Einstein’s parents asked his teacher what their son might grow up to be, the teacher replied that it wouldn’t matter what profession he chose, because he would never achieve anything. In later years, Einstein said that his learning difficulties helped him to develop the Theory of Relativity. In his book Einstein, the Life and Times, Ronald W. Clarke quotes the mathematical genius: “Sometimes I ask myself how it came about that I discovered the Theory of Relativity? I think it is because adults never think about the problems of space and time. They thought about such things as children. But since my intellectual development was delayed, I started wondering about space and time when I had grown up. And naturally, I was able to approach this problem more deeply than children with normal abilities.” Wilson also employed his talent for another kind of communication and sharing the mental landscape of those who think differently in his work, creating a radically different form of theatrical communication with audiences. After growing up in Waco, Texas, he moved to New York, where he was horrified by the theatre he discovered there. “The intrusive intensity of the actors reminded me of teachers who constantly want to teach and impose their will. I found this offensive and unpleasant. It wasn’t until many years later that I encountered a form of theatre that met my aesthetic demands – classical Japanese Noh theatre. It grants the audience dignity by not being intrusive or pushy, but by giving the viewers space.” Wilson’s theatre entirely rejected the psychological mechanisms of Aristotelian theatre, in which the action on stage is arranged so that the audience identifies and empathises with the characters. Wilson’s theatre demanded a different approach: instead of promoting identification with the events depicted, it required active participation, the involvement of all of the viewer’s emotional and intellectual experience to expand the work through their own interpretation. Wilson preferred to draw on contemporary ideas in the visual arts more than theatre. Audiences described Wilson’s works as dreams; his productions completely replaced the dominance of text with an unprecedented flow of images, surprising combinations of events and unexpected developments. And they had a completely different sense of time. | |
 Einstein on the Beach. View from the opera. 1992 Photo: Lucie Jansch | |
| After seeing Wilson’s almost eight-hour-long silent opera ‘Deafman Glance’ in Paris in the summer of 1971, Louis Aragon published a letter in Les Lettres Françaises to his deceased friend the Surrealist Andre Breton, in which he stated: “We have experienced the future,” marking Wilson as an heir to the Surrealists. In France, a land that worships the written word, Wilson’s visual theatre received a 45-minute standing ovation. Deafman Glance played to packed houses for almost a month in a hall that seated more than 2,000. In fact, it was due to France that Einstein on the Beach was ever staged. The French Minister of Culture gave financial support for the mega work begun in New York, where there weren’t the funds to stage it, to be premiered at the Avignon Festival and then presented again at the festival d’Automne à Paris (‘Autumn in Paris’). The Venice Biennale then took an interest, and although it was not prepared to put up money, it did promise to make all the stage props and background paintings. Thus Einstein on the Beach was handed over to the world’s best makers of stage scenery, the Italians. The opera by Wilson and Glass became the event of the year in Europe. Despite their enormous success in Europe, as Americans Glass and Wilson greatly desired to see ‘Einstein on the Beach’ staged in their homeland. An opportunity arose for two nights at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Robert Wilson shuffled the entry tickets, so that two dollar seat holders sat next to patrons paying thousands. The house was sold out and the opera enjoyed enormous success – with a $10,000 loss for each evening, as is routine in large opera theatres. The difference with Einstein on the Beach was that the house refused to absorb the loss, leaving Glass and Wilson heavily in debt. In his book Music Glass recalls: “I was earning a living as a plumber and one day I went to Soho to install a dishwasher. As I worked I heard a noise, and looking up I saw ‘Time Magazine’ art critic Roberts Hughes staring incredulously at me. We had met earlier and he recognised me instantly. “But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?” It was obvious that I was installing a dishwasher, and I told him the job would soon be done. “But you’re an artist!” he protested. “I can’t let you mess around with the dishwasher!” I explained to him that I was an artist but sometimes I had to work as a plumber, and would he be so kind as to go away and let me get on with the job.” An opera of time Einstein and Wilson shared a childhood stammer, but also sensitivity to time, the sense that time takes different forms and is not frozen into monotony. In Robert Wilson’s productions, time passes in radically more slowly than in any other theatre. But he categorically rejects critics’ accusations that he relies on slow motion: “I don’t use slow motion in my works, I use natural time. In the theatre time is usually speeded up, whereas I employ natural time. This is the time needed for the sun to set, a cloud to transform, or a day to begin. I give viewers time to ponder and meditate on things besides what they see on the stage – I give them time and space to think. Einstein on the Beach consists of four acts and five brief interludes which I call “knee plays”. The opera is interwoven with three themes, each of which is repeated three times: a train, a court room and a time machine above a field. The first time the train is viewed from the front. The second time it is seen from the rear at night, in another time and dimension. At the third repetition, the train is a house with the same perspective lines as in the previous angle. The second visual theme is a courtroom with a giant bed in the middle of it. On the second repetition we see just half the room and the bed with the gap filled by a prison – another time and dimension. The third time only the bed is visible, and it is flying away. The third theme is a field full of dancers, with a space-time machine floating above the dancers like a clock. The second time the machine has become bigger, and the third time we are already inside the machine.” In Einstein on the Beach, Einstein is seen on the stage as a violinist, a mathematician solving equations and a dreamer. Although the opera is an associative abstraction on the subject “Albert Einstein”, at its most fundamental level Einstein’s participation is invisible, as he assists Wilson in creating an unusual experience of time and space. According to Glass, “The work developed as a time structure devoid of any stories. It never entered our minds that we should begin with a story. The main theme was how to make use of time. Both music and theatre use time. We discovered that this is a territory where we can develop ideas together.” This territory presented opera goers in the mid-1970s with a significant new experience. It is difficult to forecast how this time adventure will affect people four decades later. There’s a lot of talk these days about how time has speeded up. In any case, time has changed once again. /Translator into English: Filips Birzulis/ | |
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