Opera 1
Einstein on the beach
Barbara M. Reise
For more than a week in October, the Opera Comique in Paris was the site of an amazing event : the avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach by the Americans Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. Each evening was sold out to an unusually young and scruffy crowd of operagoers, who not only stayed through the uninterrupted five-hour performance beginning unfashionably at 7 p.m., but also seemed to increase as the evening progressed —cramming into the aisles for a better view and impatiently shushing neighbours. Both Glass and Wilson had individually presented lengthy performance pieces before. Robert Wilson's 'opera' The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (with less integrated music, not by Glass) lasted all night in New York in 1974, and Music in Twelve Parts by Philip Glass lasted seven hours in New York and Paris in 1975. But both those pieces had intervals. Einstein on the Beach did not.
What did its audience see and hear? Certainly not the usual resident orchestra and chorus, divided into pit and stage spaces, as anonymous support for visiting or 'star' conductor and singers. Certainly not a narrative story 'realistically' represented through sets, lighting, or verbal and musical imagery—however fantastic—nor the wooden movements and body-rhetoric, separated from music, in traditional operatic production. Not in this opera.
For Einstein on the Beach redefines all aspects of traditional opera. The total collaboration between Glass and Wilson and their respective expert innovations in music and visual theatre resulted. in a constantly fluid synthesis of extraordinary scale. In this opera every person and image and musical instrument takes on different roles at different times. Meaning is conveyed by minute gestures, slowly moving 'flats' and actors, patterns of lighting, painted back-drops, and dances which seem no more choreographed than the hands of the chorus when it appears as an a capella choir in the pit. The chorus does not sing 'words' but numbers and tonic sol-fa syllables representing the respective musical structures of rhythm and pitch. Other words are texts by the actors' and composers' friends, spoken with varying amplification as part of the musical texture. The one sung solo is by a member of the instrumental ensemble. The solo violinist, made up to look like Einstein, is also a crucial dramatic character who is sometimes spot-lit and spatially isolated between pit and stage. The 'knee plays'—as much like joints in a body as traditional entr'actes— are as interesting as the main scenes and more important than the acts. And the opera has begun when the audience arrives— although in such a discreet manner that this
is not noticed until the opening 'knee play' is augmented by additions in the musical and visual area, and the increased amplification focuses attention, naturally.
From that point on, one is swept into an experience of almost hypnotic repetitions so intricately modified and interwoven that it is never boring—even if one does not know
what 'it' is. Intuitive changes and freedoms in each newly created performance are easily
accommodated by the almost mathematic rigour of the structure which underlies both music and visual drama. Basic to this is a tripartite structure, repeated and expanded, and offset by divisions into five and four. There are nine main 'scenes' divided into four roughly equal 'acts' by five 'knee plays' which begin and end the opera and form a self-contained sequence reflecting upon what is to come or has passed in the main scenes. The scenesare themselves divisible into three sets of three, repeating the following sequence of visual and dramatic themes: 1) a train, which has been transformed into a building by its third appearance; 2) a courtroom with a 'bed', which evolves into a court/prison scene then a scene featuring only the luminous side of the 'bed' ; 3) the 'spaceship' which twice hovers as a disc over dancers in an invisible 'field', but whose interior forms the fantastic setting of its third scene which is also the 'finale' of the opera.
That this scene is the opera's finale is not simply because it is the last of the nine main scenes. More important is its musical character, as fantastic as the visual setting but also clearly re.ated to the opera's musical beginning and continuity. For the loudly amplified cadences that swirl through the compulsively regular beat and complex rhythmic permutations in this scene are clearly based on the rhythmic and harmonic structures of the opera's first scene ('train') augmented by the major cadential material which has appeared between. And throughout the opera the numerical basis of the musical structure is more continuous and complex than its parallel articulation in visual drama. Overall the music is based upon progressions of from five chords to one chord, presented in cadential, chordal, arpeggio, chorale, and simple scale forms (or themes) which repeat themselves in regularly additive, fragmented or permutated expansions and contractions of phrases. There are separate rhythmic and harmonic structures for each of the thematic sets of scenes, each structure (like each visual theme) progressively modifying itself in association with others. A separate (and parallel) structure also links the 'knee plays', and introduces the new musical material for the main scenes. And the first
and last 'knee plays', which open and close the opera, have essentially the same musical structure.
All of which is very classical in the asymmetric and syncopated balance both within the music itself and between music and visual drama. But this structure is not what is most immediately apparent in the opera. Rather it is the sensuous richness and surprise emerging from the regular discipline of abstracted movements; the hypnotic experience of the interweaving of sets and actors with the music's metrical, rhythmical, and instrumental character; and the variety of sheer scale between solos and large groups, articulated musically by a sophisticated manipulation of amplification and visuallY by a spectacular system of lighting. One is amazed at how effective meaning grows through associative imagery that builds, almost subliminally, through repeated similarities of minimal incidents—and at the sheer wit and irreverence in these associations' historical nostalgia, science-fiction. dreams, and children's world-view.
For finally, Einstein on the Beach is a fabulous dream of a journey through time, dancing from the nineteenth-century world of the steam-engine train into a future whose movement is no more governed by three dimensions than it is by its own electronic 'control boards': a fabulous romance which can bear any amount of intellectual analysis. No wonder that its premiere this summer was the star attraction at the Avignon Festival and that it has also been performed in Italy, Germany, Holland (but not Britain), and that it will be featured as a solo evening at New York's Metropolitan Opera on 21 November.
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