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Operas
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Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts (framed and connected by five "knee plays," or intermezzos), scored and written by Philip Glass and designed and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson.[1] The music was written "in the spring, summer and fall of 1975."[2] The premiere took place on July 25, 1976, at the Avignon Festival in France. The opera contains writings by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs.[3] It is Glass's first and longest opera score, taking approximately five hours in full performance without intermission; given the length, the audience is permitted to enter and leave as desired.[3]
The work became the first in Glass' thematically-related Portrait Trilogy, along with Satyagraha (1979), and Akhnaten (1983). These three operas were described by Glass as portraits of men whose personal vision transformed the thinking of their times through the power of ideas rather than by military force.[3]
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Glass and Wilson first met to discuss the prospects of a collaborative work, and decided on an opera of between four and five hours in length based around a historical persona. Wilson initially suggested Charlie Chaplin or Adolf Hitler, whom Glass outright rejected, while Glass proposed Mahatma Gandhi (later the central figure of his opera Satyagraha). Albert Einstein was the eventual compromise.[4]
Einstein on the Beach premiered on July 25, 1976 at the Avignon Festival in France, performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble.[1] The opera was also staged that summer in Hamburg, Paris, Belgrade, Venice, Brussels, Rotterdam. In November 1976, Einstein was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.[3]
The Brooklyn Academy of Music next mounted the opera in 1984. A one-hour documentary about this production appeared on public television, titled "Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera".
In 1988, opera director Achim Freyer (who had staged the World Premiere of Glass's Akhnaten in Stuttgart in 1984) designed and staged a reworked version in a highly abstract style, with new spoken texts from the early 20th century, at the Stuttgart State Opera House, Germany. As with the premiere, this version was also conducted by Michael Riesman.[5]
In 1992 a revival was mounted by International Production Associates that included the participation of Wilson, Glass and Childs. The production was re-staged at the McCarter theater at Princeton University. It subsequently toured to Frankfurt, Melbourne, Barcelona, Madrid, Tokyo, Brooklyn (BAM) and Paris.
A revival with the participation of all the original collaborators was commissioned by New York City Opera to open their 2009/2010 season. When General Manager designate Gerard Mortier withdrew from NYCO, the revival, along with the rest of Mr. Mortier's programming, was canceled.[6] This revival was also supported by co-commissioners Chatalet, Het Muziektheater and English National Opera.
The team that had organized the New York City Opera production has put together another group of commissioners and presenters to remount "Einstein". It will be mounted at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in January 2012. It will premiere at Opera Berlioz in Monpellier, France in March 2012. It will subsequently tour to the Barbican in London, England, the Luminato Festival in Toronto, ON, Canada, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Cal Performances' Zellerbach Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and Hetmuziektheater in Amsterdam. Other dates are being explored.[7]
The violin part for the work has been performed by Tison Street, Gregory Fulkerson[8] and Paul Zukofsky.
From the beginning of Glass and Wilson's collaboration, they insisted on portraying the icon purely as a historical figure, in the absence of a storyline attached to his image. While they did incorporate symbols from Einstein's life within the opera's scenery, characters, and music, they intentionally chose not to give the opera a specific plot.[9] Propelling idea of "non-plot" within Einstein on the Beach, its libretto employs solfege syllables, numbers, and short sections of poetry. In an interview, Glass comments that he originally intended for his audience to construct personal connections with both Einstein as a character and also with the music with that he assigns to the icon.[1] For example, the music within the first of the opera's "Knee Plays" features repeated numbers accompanied by an electric organ. Glass states that these numbers and solfege syllables were used as placeholders for texts by the singers to memorize their parts, and were kept instead of replacing them with texts.[1] This numerical repetition, however, offers an obvious interpretation as a reference to the mathematical and scientific breakthroughs made by Einstein himself. Of further reference to the icon's image, everything on the originally staged Einstein set, from costumes to lighting, depicts specific aspects that refer to Einstein's life.[10]
Overall, the music assigned to Einstein demonstrates a circular process which becomes a repeating cycle that constantly delays resolution. This process uses both additive and subtractive formulas. The three main scenes within the opera—"Train", "Trial", and "Field/Spaceship"—allude to Einstein's hypotheses about his theory of relativity and unified field theory.[10] Specifically, themes within the opera allude to nuclear weapons, science, and AM radio.
The opera consists of nine connected 20-minute scenes separated by "Knee Plays". Five "Knee Plays" frame the opera's structure and appear in between acts, while also functioning as the opening and closing scenes. Glass defines a "Knee Play" as an interlude between acts and as "the 'knee' referring to the joining function that humans' anatomical knees perform".[1] While the "Knee Plays" helped to create the necessary time to change the scenery of Wilson's seven sets, these interludes also served a musical function. David Cunningham, a Glass scholar, writes that the intermittence of Glass's "Knee Plays" amongst the opera's four acts, serves as a "constant motif in the whole work".[10]
The opera requires a cast of 2 female, 1 male, and 1 male child in speaking roles (for the Wilson production); a 16 person SATB chamber chorus with an outstanding soprano soloist and a smaller tenor solo part; 3 reed players: flute (doubling piccolo and bass clarinet), soprano saxophone (doubling flute), tenor saxophone (doubling alto saxophone); solo violin, and 2 synthesizers/electronic organs.[3] The orchestration was originally tailored to the five members of the Philip Glass Ensemble, plus the solo violin.
The work is structured as follows:[1]
"I Feel the Earth Move" is the third section in the Trial 2/Prison section of the opera. The section is written in the same style as the rest of the opera, but has an instrumentation of soprano saxophone and bass clarinet, omitting the electronic keyboard used in most of the segments in Einstein on the Beach. A poem by Christopher Knowles is read over the musical soprano saxophone and bass clarinet line and in the poem's meanderings, it mentions such "TV personalities" as David Cassidy. A shortened version of this piece was chosen along with three other selections from Einstein on the Beach to appear on another Philip Glass album Songs from the Trilogy, which also included selections from Glass's operas Satyagraha and Akhnaten. The section's title is a reference to a Carole King song of the same name, from her album Tapestry.
Two "complete" recordings of the opera have been made: the first in 1978, released on the Tomato label (TOM-4-2901) in 1979, and later on CBS Masterworks followed by Sony Classical; the second in 1993, released that same year on the Nonesuch label. The 1978 recording was held to 160 minutes in order to fit onto four LP records, i.e., the opening scene's repeats were considerably shortened. The 1993 recording encompassed 190 minutes, freed by the technology of the compact disc.
Michael Riesman conducted both recordings. In 1978 Childs, Sutton, Mann, and Johnson were the actors, with Hiskey taking the soprano solo. In 1993 Childs and Sutton repeated their roles, while Dolbashian and McGruder took the other two acting parts; Schuman sang the soprano solo.[3] Most of the participants in the Nonesuch recording had performed in "Einstein on the Beach" during its 1992 world tour.