Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama

Jelena Novak, John Richardson, Jelena . Novak, John Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317145387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976. During its initial European tour, Metropolitan Opera premiere, and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein provoked opposed reactions from both audiences and critics. Today, Einstein is well on the way itself to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, and it is widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater. Einstein created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking concerning the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression. Reaching beyond opera, its influence was felt in audiovisual culture in general: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theater, and many other expressive, commercial, and cultural spheres. Inspired by the 2012–2015 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as part of the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Essays range from those that focus on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and post-human character of the opera's expressive substance. A further valuable dimension is the inclusion of material taken from several recent interviews with creative collaborators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, each of these sections comprising knee plays, or short intermezzo sections resembling those found in the opera Einstein on the Beach itself. The book additionally features a foreword written by the influential musicologist and cultural theorist Susan McClary and an interview with film and theater luminary Peter Greenaway, as well as a short chapter of reminiscences written by the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega.

Knee chapter 1
Paying attention to Einstein

Philip Glass interviewed by John Richardson¹

1 The interview took place on January 6, 2013 at the University Library of Amsterdam as part of the conference Einstein on the Beach: Opera after Drama. This is an edited and slightly abridged version of the original interview.

Thinking back to last night’s performance, I don’t think there’s any other work that so successfully captures what it felt like to live on the cusp of the digital age, an accelerated world in which ideas about time and space are constantly revised. But Einstein is a piece whose essential elements are more fixed than some of your other operas, where producers can influence how the work is expressed visually. This seems fitting; we want to see it as it was originally conceived. But I was wondering, what it means for an avant-garde piece to be revisited in this way.

Those are all interesting questions. I think we have to be careful when thinking of it as a revival, because it was a piece that was written 37 years ago. Now, it’s surprisingly fresh today. Surprisingly because it’s older than some of you in this room. I think Robert Wilson and I pondered this question: Why? How did that happen? It’s not that it makes reference to the music being made today. Composers, myself included, are working in different ways. What is interesting is that it still feels relevant in some way. The performers we’re working with today are far better than the ones we had in the past. When we began doing this we didn’t have a corps de ballet, we didn’t have a separate group of singers. We had young men and women who could sing a bit and dance a bit. And the performances were amateurish in a certain way. The piece was revised several times. By 1984 we had separated [the performers] into two [groups]: the chorus and those who were dancing. By the time we did it this time, we had a dancing group who could really dance. They have wonderful technique – they all come from ballet. They have that training, and the same with the singers. In terms of the performance, I can’t say that these are the performances we imagined. The thing to remember is that in 1976 there was no known performance practice that went with this form. And as everyone here will know, the performance practice comes with new ideas. If you can play a piece in the same old way that you play everything else it’s incomplete.

Part of [inventing] a new language is finding a way to play it. What has happened is that, in the intervening years the ensemble is pretty much the same, but we’ve actually learned to play the music now. We can actually play it! The first time we did it, at Avignon festival July 1976, the first performance was the first time we played through the piece without stopping. We didn’t even know how long it was. [Audience laughs] We were struggling with Bob [Wilson] and Lucinda [Childs] – there was another [choreographer] at that time, so it was done jointly. Lucinda began by actually doing a pair of individual dances and ended up doing the long dances later on. But we had worked on them for months and months. I’d even say that we didn’t have a really clear idea what the piece was. Over the last 35 years or so, we’ve come to understand how the music has to be played, and the dancers know how to dance it now, the singers can sing it now. People don’t get angry with us anymore when we start to work. So what you heard last night is what we would have done, and could have done, if we knew that that was what we intended … In January of [last] year [2012], I went to the first [performance] of the new production in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had played in all the performances until then. So that was the first time I sat down and watched the whole thing. That only happened in January. We looked up all the recordings first. That’s just to give a little background to it.

Now I want to get back to that essential question, which is, the reason I think the piece is relevant now is not that it has anything to do with what’s going on today. It’s a strange thing that happens to certain pieces of music when we look at them they seem like they were inevitable – like they had to have happened then. Einstein was one of these pieces. That doesn’t speak to the quality of it as [something] transcendental. It just says that, as most of the people in this room will know, that there are social and psychological, and all kinds of factors that bring artforms to a kind of a crisis, which we were definitely at in the 1960s. That was one factor.

But there was another thing: the way that opera was done at that time. In the world of theater, and I had worked a lot in the theater. I had been working in the theater since I was 20, so by the time I began working on Einstein, I’d been working in the theater for about 15 years, but I was working in experimental theater. The theater that we were the godchildren of, Peter Brook and The Living Theater. We were the generation that came after that. [In] experimental theater, a work’s authorship can be shared between numerous people. One company that I belonged to for a long time, The Mabou Mines, did new work and that was like a religion for us at the time. We did new works of Genet, who was also alive at the time. That kind of work was unknown to people in the opera world. They didn’t even know that it existed.

Bob came out of that world too. Bob didn’t come out of the world of opera. He came from a completely different place. He was an architect; he also worked as a therapist with deaf people, retarded people. He had a whole other [background]. What was surprising to the opera people was that there was a whole form of theater that had gone on for decades, and this was unknown to people in the opera world. What was shocking was that we were in opera houses, so everyone’s thinking it’s going to be an opera. But we didn’t care whether it was an opera or not. He said, and we had different answers, the word opera meant “work” in the Italian sense, in that it’s just a work. My view was somewhat different. It looked to me like you needed a flat space, wing space, you needed an orchestra pit, you needed people that could sing, people that could dance, people that could play. You could call it anything you wanted to, but the only place you could ever perform it was in an opera house. It’s the only place it would fit. Since then, when I look at the music theater pieces I’ve done, I define them now as operas because that’s where they’re done. So pieces that are done in opera houses are called operas. The first tour we did was all in opera houses. The only places we did it were opera houses, even when it was part of international theater festivals. But when it came to Einstein we had to find places it would fit into, so that’s how it worked.

This idea of the inevitable – of course, it’s absurd. There’s no such thing. However, part of the job of the people in this room is to make things appear like they’re inevitable. That’s part of what we do. Composers not that much older than us, like the whole group at IRCAM. They were shocked and totally dismayed that we were taken seriously at all. Because we were not part of that plan. But that was part of the crisis that happened. And when I say that it was inevitable, well look at it this way, John. I first began working in this way in 1969, and there are pieces from that time that we still play. Seven years later we’re at the Metropolitan Opera House. In order for that to happen so quickly, it must have been waiting to happen. If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have done it differently. And people did do it differently, like here in Holland, Louis Andriessen, all kinds of people were doing things. For reasons that I don’t completely [understand], my work ended up being more prominent. But when you think that my first concert in New York was at the Queens College auditorium and there were six people in the audience and one was my mother – I didn’t know whether to count her as an audience member or not. She had to come all the way from Baltimore to see that piece and get back on the train straight home. Seven years later, she goes to the Metropolitan Opera House to see the opera there. For that to happen so quickly, it must have been matters that were so urgent that they couldn’t be put aside at all.

This is actually a joint work and [that] became a very important part [of it]. As you can see the dancers are …, it was our intention that there were two big poles holding the tent up. That’s the dancers, holding up the piece. But it wasn’t always like that. When we first did it, the dancers were considered less important in parts of the work. It became important when we entered into the collaborative work with Lucinda Childs. So the piece is really a joint work by three people at this point. Bob and I started work on it and we haven’t changed that [part of it]. Now a very well-known German director, Achim Freyer, did do an Einstein, and there have been a few done. Bob and I agreed to that because we wanted to see it happen. I was less disturbed by it than Bob. Bob didn’t like it very much. If you were to ask Bob Wilson what he thought of that version, he probably wouldn’t say very much. But we have a problem with this piece. Until this year it wasn’t even filmed [as a whole]. The present version, Pomegranate, Linda Brumbach and Alisa Regas were a part of it; they made sure it was going to be filmed. And I don’t know what’s going to happen to that film. To me it doesn’t really matter what happens to it because I’m not going to be here anyway. I think that actually there could be other productions, and they may make reference to the structure that we articulated in this piece or maybe not. My feeling is that we’ve done it as well as we can and now we’ve done the thing.

So, is it important to have a document of it now that you’re all involved?

Now here’s the thing. Operas are usually associated with composers. This is not really like that. You know who the composers are because it makes a great difference to the work. This has been a process that it’s been difficult for film makers and theater people to really come to terms with. The impact of the music is so compelling that the authorship shifts over to the composer at some point. Though, in fact, this piece didn’t begin like that at all. It didn’t begin like many other operas, where I begin with an idea, I pick a director and it works like that. This really began with a very level playing field for Bob and I. However, at one point we had to decide what we would do about the rights. There are two ways to do this: we can say that both of us need to agree to have it done, or we can say that only one of us has to agree. We chose the latter. By doing that there were greater possibilities for what would happen. And we didn’t even know who would be invited. For example, I can license it and someone else can do it, and Bob can do the same. It actually didn’t happen that way. We saw an openness in terms of the future, and I’m not sure if we’d be able to participate in that future. What happens very often with writers is that when they die the estates take over and they usually ruin the chances for new productions. That happened with Becket and Jean Genet. It was very difficult to do those works, because nephews and nieces, people not connected with the work at all, began having control over the work which nobody else would be able to have. We’re not going to let that happen.

What do you think about the idea of Einstein on the Beach as a kind of tipping point, about it changing the nature of opera or music theater?

Well, I think that’s sometimes misunderstood. Nobody copied it. People did their own things.

It didn’t then change the state of the art in music theater in the way that people thought it might have at the time?

What happened is that the theater became progressively more conservative. And what no-one anticipated, which turned out to be true. The overwhelming effects of television and movies, and video games for that matter, had become more important influences on people than any works we might have completed. That’s a fact. There are no imitations of Einstein and maybe there didn’t need to be. I think we might have been a little bit disappointed about that, but in the end, I said, well, I guess it’s suis generis or a one-of-a-kind work. And yet, the history of music is full of works like that. They’re not necessarily done by great composers or artists. Think of the works of César Franck. There are three important pieces. But no-one really cares about them all that much. The D minor symphony, the piano quartet, and the choral piano. There are about three pieces for him. And for many composers there’ll be two or three pieces. The lives of Bach and Beethoven are a different matter. With them we know everything. But those are very rare. Then again, writing an important work, you don’t necessarily have to be a great genius to do it. You really have to have enough talent and to be in the right place and the right time to figure out what needed to be done. And with some clarity, a lot of work and a bit of luck, which counts, it’s possible to do an important work, but whether it will become part of history is another matter. I would say that it’s even too soon to talk about that. The rule generally is, that in order for the work of a musician or a painter or a writer to be fairly evaluated in history, every person that he [sic] knew has to be dead. It’s very simple – it’s a very simple mathematical formula, and that hasn’t happened for a lot of people we know. And as long as there’s a publisher making a nickel off of somebody else’s work, you’re not going to know them. The works have to stand alone totally, and if they’re still standing, then you can talk about it. And not many pieces will be like that.

You mentioned the influence of film, video games, and digital culture. Einstein seems quite prescient in that respect. The extended timescale but also how the dances and the live action are synchronized to the music, sometimes tightly, sometimes quite loosely. This mode of interaction is common today in cinema, gaming, and new media, but it wasn’t in the 1970s. When you began working on non-literary theater, did it seem inevitable the music would drive the visuals, or did it just happen that way?

It’s the mixture of the piece and the way it works. Anyone on the television circuit can also figure that out. If you change the music and leave the same pictures, the music doesn’t change. It’s a very simple experiment and anyone can do that. And, of course, this is very distressing to people in the film world, because usually the composers are assigned to a very low place in the process. And it turns out to be so important. I see this happening to so many contract victims, there’s almost nothing that can be done about it.

For some reason music has a hold on us. We respond very directly to music and less directly to images. Images are surprisingly neutral in terms of their emotional content. We can change them very easily by changing the music, but it doesn’t work the other way around. And that’s why I think we’re involved in music front-running. I have to apologize for saying this, but you can’t really talk about this in Hollywood. People really get extremely distressed. And yet, if you spend your life working in collaborative forms, as I have done and many people have done, people are very concurrent of what’s going on.

Could I ask you to expand on why you think it is that the musical language of minimalism had such an impact on cinema and visual forms in general?

There are several other angles to this that have to be mentioned. One is, and we should talk a little about John Cage now, and the precepts that he felt were so important, the main one being that the completion of the work happened with the audience – that it was incomplete until the audience to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of music examples
• Series editor preface
• Foreword by Susan McClary: Music and culture in the wake of Einstein
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Knee chapter 1 Paying attention to Einstein: Philip Glass interviewed by John Richardson
• Part 1 Einstein on the shores of culture
• Knee chapter 2 Einstein on the Beach is not radical, it is classic: Robert Wilson interviewed by Bojan Djordjev
• Part 2 From repetition to representation
• Knee chapter 3 Stay out of the way of Bob Wilson when he dances: Lucinda Childs interviewed by Jelena Novak
• Part 3 Beyond drama: Surfaces and agencies of performance
• Knee chapter 4 Artists recall and respond
• Part 4 Operatic machines and their ghosts
• Knee chapter 5 Critical excavations
• Appendix 1: Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach, storyboard drawings
• Appendix 2: Einstein on the Beach, spoken texts
• Bibliography
• Index