Philip Glass - 1978 - Einstein On The Beach

Philip Glass

1978

Einstein On The Beach

01. Knee Play 1

02. Act I, Scene 1: Train

03. Act I, Scene 2: Trial

04. Knee Play 2

05. Act II, Scene 1: Dance 1 (Field With Spaceship)

06. Act II, Scene 2: Night Train

07. Knee Play 3

08. Act III, Scene 1: Trial/Prison

09. Act III, Scene 2: Dance 2 (Field With Spaceship)

10. Knee Play 4

11. Act IV, Scene 1: Building/Train

12. Act IV, Scene 2: Bed

13. Act IV, Scene 3: Spaceship

14. Knee Play 5

First in a Glass Trilogy of operas about men who changed the world through the power of their ideas, “Einstein”‘s sub-text is science. The opera is non-narrative in form, and the producer has two options: to reproduce the original Robert Wilson production (which exists on videotape), or to create a new series of stage and dance pictures based on themes relating to the life of Albert Einstein.

Voice – Iris Hiskey

Voice Actor [Actors] – Lucinda Childs, Paul Mann, Samuel M. Johnson, Sheryl Sutton

Alto Vocals [Small Chorus] – Dora Ohrenstein

Bass Vocals [Small Chorus] – David Anchel

Soprano Vocals [Small Chorus] – Iris Hiskey

Tenor Vocals [Small Chorus] – Marc Jacobi

Chorus [Large] – Bruce Burroughs, Connie Beckley, Dana Reitz, David Woodberry, Forest Warren, Frank Conversano, George Andoniadis, Grethe Holby, Jeannie Hutchins, Marc Jacobi, Marie Rice, Richard Morrison, Ritty Ann Burchfield, Ronald Roxbury

Alto Saxophone, Flute – Richard Peck

Flute, Soprano Saxophone, Bass Clarinet – Richard Landry

Organ – Philip Glass

Organ, Synthesizer [Bass], Keyboards [Additional] – Michael Riesman

Soprano Saxophone, Flute – Jon Gibson

Violin – Paul Zukovsky

This recording of "Einstein on the Beach" contains all the music, lyrics and speeches from the original production of "Einstein on the Beach" as performed in Europe in the Summer and Fall of 1976 and at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in November 1976.

Opera in four acts by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass

Premiered on July 25, 1976 at the Festival d’Avignon, Avignon, France

Premiered on December 11, 1984 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York

Premiered on July 24, 1992 at the McCarter Theater, Princeton, New Jersey

Premiered on March 17, 2012 at the Opéra Berlioz - Le Corum, Montpellier, France

Widely credited as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century, this rarely performed work launched its director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass to international success when it was first produced in Avignon, France in 1976 with subsequent performances in Europe and in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. It is still recognized as one of their greatest masterpieces. Nearly four decades after it was first performed and twenty years since its last production, Einstein on the Beach was reconstructed for a major international tour including the first performances in the United Kingdom and the first North American presentations ever held outside of New York City. The international tour of Einstein on the Beach began in Montpellier in the spring of 2012 and concluded in South Korea in the fall of 2015, bringing this ground-breaking work to new audiences and an entirely new generation.

Einstein on the Beach breaks all of the rules of conventional opera. Instead of a traditional orchestral arrangement, Glass chose to compose the work for the synthesizers, woodwinds and voices of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Non-narrative in form, the work uses a series of powerful recurrent images as its main storytelling device shown in juxtaposition with abstract dance sequences originally by Andrew de Groat, and for the 2012 version by American choreographer Lucinda Childs. It is structured in four interconnected acts and divided by a series of short scenes, or "knee plays". Taking place over almost five hours, there are no traditional intermissions. Instead, the audience is invited to wander in and out at liberty during the performance.

“Einstein was like nothing I had ever encountered. For me, its very elusiveness radiated richly, like some dark star whose effects we can only feel. The synergy of words and music seemed ideal...Einstein on the Beach, perhaps, like Einstein himself, transcended time. It’s not (just) an artifact of its era, it’s timeless... Einstein must be seen and re-seen, encountered and savored...an experience to cherish for a lifetime.”

— John Rockwell, Art Critic for The New York Times

Easily the most important opera of the last half century, “Einstein on the Beach,” at least at first, meant far more to those who witnessed it than to the art form itself, which couldn’t have cared less. Almost nothing about what composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson put onstage was opera.

“Einstein” has no narrative. “Einstein” has no Einstein, even though a great many onstage are dressed in the iconic image of frizzy-haired scientist. “Einstein on the Beach” has no beach. Glass’ relentlessly fast and loud score is four hard-driving hours of Minimalism. Spoken text comes from the sputtering of mid-1970s New York AM radio, cut up. Sung text consists of a chorus counting rhythms or the solfège syllables of pitches. Wilson’s images revolve around a train/spaceship, trial/prison and field, although at one inexplicable point, a revolutionary Patty Hearst, rifle in hand, finds herself in the action.

At the summer 1976 premiere in Avignon, France, Glass likened the feeling in the theater to the euphoria that accompanies childbirth. At the time, Glass brushed off questions about whether he and Wilson really intended “Einstein” to be an opera, given that music, imagery, stage decor, lighting, dance and other movement had little, if anything, to do with one another. In his autobiography “Words Without Music,” the composer insists that “Einstein” neither asked for nor needed an explanation. “And we never tried to make one.”

It’s an opera. That is, if you take opera to be theater that trusts music. In a sense, “Einstein on the Beach” is even more musically trustworthy than traditional opera, being all but unstageable without Wilson’s production. What lasts is the score. And the trust, which makes “Einstein” essential in 2022, our fateful year when trust has become among our most desperate needs.

In her essay “Against Interpretation,” published a decade before “Einstein,” Susan Sontag contends that “to interpret is to impoverish.” Interpretation turns the world as it is, “the world,” as Sontag puts it, into “this world,” the dimmer one of our making. What is needed, she concludes, is to recover our senses. “We must learn to see more, hear more, feel more.” That is “Einstein on the Beach” in a nutshell, an opera that is all container and no content.

The work consists of three iterations of its basic scenic elements. A slow-moving train is followed by a trial scene lorded over by two judges, one an older Black man, Mr. Johnson, who was also the engineer of the train, the other a child. Then comes the field, an empty stage used for dance.

The second time around, two lovers stand at the back of a night train, entranced, until the woman suddenly takes out a gun and shoots the man. The trial set is more elaborate, with a prison attached and Patty Hearst’s appearance. The field is the same except a small flying saucer that glided by the first time is now larger and thus getting closer.

The third time is different. The train has become a building, and Glass makes space for a wailing saxophone. The trial is a bed represented by a horizontal beam of light that ever so slowly rises like a giant clock hand and then lifts into space, accompanied by a rhapsodic organ cadenza. The train turns into a spaceship, and the opera’s spectacular finale is a riot of lights and movement, characters flying and transported in transparent tubes.

In the five entr’actes — Wilson calls them Knee Plays — two women, dressed as Einstein, stand or sit in a square of light and recite the radio text, which is by Christopher Knowles, a remarkable poet who was Wilson’s ward. Samuel M. Johnson, the actor who played Mr. Johnson, wrote his own texts about life and love that can move a listener to tears. Lucinda Childs, who appeared in the Knee Plays and danced in the first production, also added a text about bathing caps in a “prematurely air-conditioned supermarket” that she repeats 30 times. For the first revival of “Einstein” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984, Childs became the choreographer of the brilliant dances and a full-fledged third partner of the production. A solo violinist is a key figure, as well, and also Einstein. The instrumental ensemble is winds and electric keyboards.

The original title was to have been “Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street.” On some level, interpreters, of which there have now been many, have reason to see the opera as a comment on the emptiness of commercialism and an antiwar, post-apocalyptic statement. Nevil Shute’s bestselling novel, “On the Beach,” is a warning about nuclear war. In the 1960 movie version, Fred Astaire, a disaffected, alcoholic scientist who worked on the bomb, is asked who caused World War III, the radiation of which is emptying the Earth of humanity. “Einstein,” he answers bitterly.

The spectacular spaceship scene in “Einstein,” a wow moment like few I’ve ever witnessed onstage, ends with an atomic explosion, but the opera’s epilogue is Mr. Johnson describing lovers on a park bench, their lips pressed “in fervent osculation.”

Everything about “Einstein on the Beach” seemed new and revelatory in 1976. It was the U.S. bicentennial. American opera was moribund. When the Metropolitan Opera presented the touring production that fall after an ecstatic European tour, in which every seat at every performance was sold out, the company hadn’t performed a new American work in decades. Here was a new beginning for opera in America.

Audiences everywhere spoke about “Einstein” changing their lives. Sontag, an opera lover, once told a reporter she was mystified by it in 1976, not so sure that this wasn’t against “Against Interpretation.” But a couple of years later she asked Wilson if he might suggest an actress for her upcoming film project. He recommended Childs, which led to the two women’s love affair and their profound influence on each other.

Yet the great irony, and great revelation, of “Einstein” turned out to be that this opera about the relativity of time was as much an ending, not a beginning. The culmination of the work that Glass and Wilson had been doing individually for a dozen years in the avant-garde fringes, “Einstein” launched their hugely influential careers in more mainstream opera.

For Glass, that has meant more than 20 operas, beginning with portraits of Gandhi and the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaten and then widening into all manner of subjects, be they Columbus, Galileo or Walt Disney, or adaptations of literary works by the likes of Poe and Kafka. Wilson has spent a good part of his career re-imagining the standard operatic repertoire of Gluck, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Weill on the world’s great opera stages.

Opera after “Einstein” is consequently traditional. New American opera flourishes like never before, but nearly all of it relies on narrative, as if “Einstein” turned the clock backward, just as Einstein said time could. An event opera, “Einstein” stands apart. But its ethos of operatic re-imagining has stuck. The very notion that opera matters is “Einstein” bound.

This is the closest music can get to expressng love. Love that is impossible to express, with no limits and no bounds. This sentiment is embodied in the simple yet profound minimalist style. The music doesn't try to project a firework to prove love. Instead, to me, it surrenders to the idea of love and lets the sincere minimal music speak for itself. Time stops, then feel the love at the moment. Don't rationalize it, the heart knows what it wants and you can't beat it as love needs no logic or words. This is the ending to Philip Glass's 5 hours-long opera, Knee Play 5. I felt all things must come to an end, except for love.

I mean, think about it. In this world there is a 4-hour opera of choral electronic music called "Einstein on the Beach" conceived by a New York composer, and a Texan theater director with a cast of non-professional actors, and choreographers, and a teenage autistic poet, and it is EVERY SECOND GOOD. THINK ABOUT IT. Humans are really something.