Einstein on the Beach, like all of Philip Glass’ early works, is difficult music to perform. Very difficult. Like particles in a super collier, the whirling loops rush at an apparently superhuman speed, augmenting incrementally, note by note. The implacable flow is real edge of the seat stuff for the musicians involved. One slip, one fraction of a second’s lapse in concentration, and the whole thing falls apart. Rehearsing with his small band (saxophones, flutes, Farfisa organs) in the early 1970s, Glass borrowed a wry term for these musical meltdowns: “trainwrecks”. Adding to the mental toughness is the issue of stamina – infamously, Einstein runs continuously for five hours without a break.
Originally staged in 1976, it has taken till now for the work to reach Britain. It is testament to the piece’s trickiness that 36 years after its world premiere it still presents some challenges. The first night of the first London production featured, if not any full-blown trainwrecks, a few near-miss derailments and an unscheduled consignment to the sidings for some malfunctioning scenery. It is testament to the piece’s brilliance that it is nevertheless an unforgettable experience.
Einstein is Glass’ first opera and his most notorious. It has a radical, uncompromising quality that speaks of the time and place of its composition. In post-1960s New York the influence of John Cage and his followers had given artists of all media the permission to push and stretch the boundaries of their work and the old constrictions around the worlds of performing and visual arts began to dissolve. It became rather more difficult to pin down and categorise the work of, for example, the choreographer Trisha Brown, whose work sometimes more closely resembled sculpture or installation, or the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work strayed into performance, demolition and even opening a restaurant in the name of art. In this milieu, Einstein on the Beach was free to ditch many of the conventions of opera and theatre. The decision to let the work run continuously, for example, comes with the still unusual invitation to the audience to wander in and out as they wish.
Glass’ collaborator on this project was the director Robert Wilson, the renaissance man routinely described as a theatrical visionary. In 1976, he had already made a name for himself through his ambitious, often very lengthy productions (sometimes running to days on end), fusing his artist’s eye for lighting, his architect’s perceptions about set design and his dancer’s feeling for abstract movement. The most radical aspect of Wilson’s concept for Einstein is its plot. Or rather its lack of plot.
Wilson recently said, “you don’t have to understand anything… that’s the idea”. Rather than a linear narrative, Einstein presents a sequence of recurring, shifting, archetypal images: a puffing steam train pulling imperceptibly slowly onto the stage, a trial, a spooky, wordless midnight tryst (‘Night Train’), a towering building around which a crowd gathers and finally the glowing interior of a spaceship. Rather than a libretto, Wilson presented Glass with drawings of these images. The telling of any kind of tale goes out the window and the spotlight is thrown on the abstraction of Glass’ music, Wilson’s set design and the choreography of the dancers who stand in for the usual operatic soloists.
I said, “Chris, who is Einstein?”, he said, “I don’t know”.
I said, “Chris, who is Einstein?”, he said, “I don’t know”.
I said, “Chris, who is Einstein?”, he said, “I don’t know”.
Above all, Einstein on the Beach is not about Albert Einstein. In Wilson’s words, “We all know stories about him. We come to the theatre sharing something, so in a sense there was no need to tell a story”. Einstein appears, sure enough, in the form of a virtuoso violinist dressed in a disheveled white wig, moustache and braces, who periodically emerges from the orchestra pit to play Glass’ spiralling patterns, but the audience is told nothing about him. Instead, Einstein is an emblem, a mascot.