- Source: Einstein on the Beach
Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts composed by Philip Glass with libretto in collaboration with Robert Wilson, who also designed and directed early productions. The opera eschews traditional narrative in favor of a formalist approach based on structured spaces laid out by Wilson in a series of storyboards which are framed and connected by five "knee plays" or intermezzos. The music was written "in the spring, summer and fall of 1975.""mostly in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia." Glass recounts the collaborative process: "I put [Wilson’s notebook of sketches] on the piano and composed each section like a portrait of the drawing before me. The score was begun in the spring of 1975 and completed by the following November, and those drawings were before me all the time."
The opera's premiere occurred on July 25, 1976, at the Théâtre Municipal in Avignon, France, as part of the Avignon Festival. The opera contains writings by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs. 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.
The work became the first in Glass's thematically related Portrait Trilogy, along with Satyagraha (1979), and Akhnaten (1983). These three operas were described by Glass as portraits of people whose personal vision transformed the thinking of their times through the power of ideas rather than by military force.
Composition and performance history
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 1979 opera Satyagraha). Albert Einstein was the eventual compromise.
The title appears to reference the apocalyptic novel On the Beach by Nevil Shute. The opera was originally to be titled Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street but was later shortened; neither Glass nor Wilson remember when or why.
= 1976 premiere and first tour
=
Einstein on the Beach premiered on July 25, 1976, at the Théâtre Municipal in Avignon, France, as part of the Avignon Festival. It was performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble and presented by the Byrd Hoffmann Foundation. The opera was also staged that summer in Hamburg, Paris, Belgrade, Venice, Brussels and Rotterdam. The Byrd Hoffman Foundation in cooperation with the Metropolitan Opera held two performances in November 1976. Lucinda Childs, Robert Wilson, pupil Sheryl S. Sutton, and Samuel M. Johnson filled the primary characters. All three would go on to reappear in the 1984 BAM revival.
= 1980s
=
The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) 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, Germany 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. As with the premiere, this version was also conducted by Michael Riesman.
= 1990s
=
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 Theatre at Princeton University. It subsequently toured to Frankfurt, Melbourne, Barcelona, Madrid, Tokyo, Brooklyn (BAM), and Paris.
= 2000s
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In 2007, Carnegie Hall presented a concert version of Einstein in which violinist Tim Fain appeared as soloist. The New York Times wrote about his performance, "And Tim Fain, the violinist, gave the solo passages in the second, fourth and fifth 'Knee Plays' and in the climactic, swirling 'Spaceship Interior' scene an electrifying, virtuosic workout." Fain tours extensively with Philip Glass in duo recitals and they always include the solo from "Knee Play 2" on their program.
= 2010s
=
A revival with the participation of all the original collaborators was commissioned by the New York City Opera (NYCO) to open their 2009–10 season. When General Manager designate Gerard Mortier withdrew from NYCO, the revival, along with the rest of Mortier's programming, was canceled.
The team that had organized the New York City Opera production put together another group to remount Einstein, under the management of Pomegranate Arts. After a month of rehearsals overseen by Glass, Wilson and Childs, the first performance in 20 years took place on January 20, 2012, presented by the University Musical Society at the Power Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Two additional performances that weekend followed. The performance featured Kate Moran and Helga Davis replacing Childs' and Sutton's roles respectively. Grammy Award-nominated violinist Jennifer Koh played the role of Einstein in the preview and alternated with Antoine Silverman for the subsequent tour. The other instrumental performers and solfege soprano for these performances are the current members of the Philip Glass Ensemble without Glass himself performing. The performers in the 2012 production included members of the Lucinda Childs Dance Company: Ty Boomershine, Vincent McCloskey, Matthew Pardo, Patrick O'Neill, Stuart Singer, Lonnie Poupard, Caitlin Scranton, Sharon Milanese, Katie Dorn, Katherine Helen Fisher, Anne Lewis, Shakirah Stewart, and Sarah Hillmon. The chorus for this revival was composed of sopranos Michèle Eaton, Melanie Russell, Lindsay Kesselman; altos Hai-Ting Chinn, Solange Merdinian, Kate Maroney; tenors John Kawa, Philip Anderson, Tomas Cruz; and basses Greg Purnhagen, Joe Damon Chappel, and Jason Charles Walker.
The official tour began on March 16, 2012 after a single preview the previous evening with the premiere at the Opéra Berlioz in Montpellier, France. This was followed by performances at the Teatro Valli in Reggio Emilia, Italy; the Barbican Centre, London; the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto; the Brooklyn Academy of Music Brooklyn, New York; Zellerbach Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, California; the Teatro del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City: in 2013, at Het Muziektheater/De Nederlandse Opera, Amsterdam; Hong Kong; Arts Centre Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles: and, in 2014 there were performances in Paris and Berlin. In October 2015 this production came to an end with performances in Gwangju, South Korea.
This touring production of Einstein on the Beach was commissioned by: BAM; the Barbican, London; Cal Performances with the University of California, Berkeley; Luminato – Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity; De Nederlandse Opera/The Amsterdam Music Theatre; Opéra national de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon; and the University Musical Society of the University of Michigan.
Carolina Crown's 2013 Drum Corps International Championship production "E = mc2" included selections of the opera.
Culturebox, a digital production dedicated to cultural content for French Television, streamed a live performance from Théâtre du Châtelet on January 7, 2014, and made it available as streaming video for the next six months only. This was the first time the opera was filmed.
A new staging of Einstein on the Beach premiered at the Opernhaus Dortmund, Germany, in April 2017. It was directed by Kay Voges and was the first production without Glass or Wilson personally involved. The opera was also staged at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in 2019 as part of La Batie performing arts festival. That production was directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca.
Synopsis
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. This is in accord with Wilson's formalist approach, which he asserts creates more truth on stage than naturalist theater. Wilson structured Einstein on the Beach as a repeating sequence of three different kinds of space. Between major acts are shorter entr'actes known as "knee plays," a signature technique that Wilson has applied throughout his oeuvre. Propelling idea of "non-plot" within Einstein on the Beach, its libretto employs solfège syllables, numbers, and short sections of poetry. In an interview, Glass comments that he originally intended for his audience to construct personal connections with Einstein as a character and with the music that he assigns to the icon. 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 solfège syllables were used as placeholders for texts by the singers to memorize their parts, and were kept instead of replacing them with texts. This numerical repetition, however, offers an 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 set of Einstein on the Beach, from costumes to lighting, depicts specific aspects that refer to Einstein's life.
Overall, the music assigned to Einstein demonstrates a circular process, 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 his unified field theory. Specifically, themes within the opera allude to nuclear weapons, science, and AM radio.
The opera consists of nine connected 20-minute scenes in four acts 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". 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".
The opera requires a cast of two female, one male, and one 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; three reed players: flute (doubling piccolo and bass clarinet), soprano saxophone (doubling flute), tenor saxophone (doubling alto saxophone and flute); solo violin, and two synthesizers/electronic organs. The orchestration was originally tailored to the five members of the Philip Glass Ensemble, plus the solo violin.
Structure
The work is structured as follows:
Prologue (solo electric organ)
Knee Play 1 (electric organ, SATB chorus)
Act 1
Scene 1 – Train (piccolo, soprano and tenor saxophones, solo soprano and alto voices, SATB chorus, two electric organs)
Scene 2 – Trial
Entrance (three flutes, soprano and alto chorus, electric organ)
"Mr. Bojangles" (solo violin, two flutes, bass clarinet, SATB chorus, two electric organs)
"Paris"/"All Men Are Equal" (solo electric organ)
Knee Play 2 (solo violin)
Act 2
Scene 1 – Dance 1 "Field with Spaceship" (piccolo, soprano and alto saxophones, solo soprano and alto voices, two electric organs)
Scene 2 – Night Train (solo soprano and tenor voices, two flutes, bass clarinet, SATB chorus, electric organ)
Knee Play 3 (SATB chorus a cappella)
Act 3
Scene 1 – Trial 2/Prison
"Prematurely Air-Conditioned Supermarket" (SATB chorus, electric organ)
Ensemble (three flutes, two electric organs)
"I Feel the Earth Move" (soprano saxophone, bass clarinet)
Scene 2 – Dance 2 "Field with Spaceship" (solo violin, solo soprano, SATB chorus, electric organ)
Knee Play 4 (solo violin, tenor and bass chorus)
Act 4
Scene 1 – Building/Train (two electric organs, improvisatory woodwinds and chorus, solo tenor saxophone)
Scene 2 – Bed
Cadenza (solo electric organ)
Prelude (solo electric organ)
Aria (solo soprano, electric organ)
Scene 3 – Spaceship (flute, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, solo violin, solo soprano voice, SATB chorus, two electric organs)
Knee Play 5 (solo violin, soprano and alto chorus, electric organ)
Recordings
Three "complete" recordings of the opera have been made: the first in 1978, initially released on the Tomato label (TOM-4-2901) in 1979, and later reissued by CBS Masterworks, followed by Sony Classical (both M4K 38875); the second in 1993, released that same year on the Nonesuch label (79323). The 1978 recording was held to 165 minutes in order to fit onto four LP records, i.e., the opening scene's repeats were considerably shortened. The 1993 recording encompassed 200 minutes, freed by the technology of the compact disc, although it was released on three CDs instead of the original's four.
The third, a 270-minute recording from January 2014 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris was released on DVD and Blu-ray in October 2016.
Michael Riesman conducted both recordings. In 1978, Lucinda Childs, Sheryl Sutton, Paul Mann, and Samuel M. Johnson performed the opera's texts, with Philip Glass Ensemble performer Iris Hiskey taking the soprano solo. In 1993 Childs and Sutton repeated their roles, while Gregory Dolbashian and Jasper McGruder replaced Mann and the late Mr. Johnson's roles respectively; Patricia Schuman sang the soprano role. Most of the participants in the Nonesuch recording had performed in Einstein on the Beach during its 1992 world tour. A 77-minute highlights CD from the 1984 Brooklyn Academy of Music performances, accompanied by a DVD documentary, was released by Philip Glass's personal label Orange Mountain Music in early September 2012, and an extended recording, 217 minutes long, was released at the same time but available only by download from the iTunes Store. In October 2013, Pacifica Radio released a two disc set of a 1976 interview with Glass and Wilson conducted at The Kitchen and excerpts from a rehearsal of some excerpts from the opera, also performed at The Kitchen on March 19, 1976.
The violin part for the work has been performed by Robert Brown (in the live 1976 production), Paul Zukofsky (in the 1979 recording), Tison Street (in the live 1984 production), Gregory Fulkerson (in the live 1992 production and 1993 recording) and an interchanging performance of Jennifer Koh and Antoine Silverman during the 2012/16 production.
A shortened version of "I Feel the Earth Move", along with three other pieces from the opera, were chosen to appear on the Philip Glass album Songs from the Trilogy.
Anton Batagov recorded 3 transcription pieces (Scene 2 – Trail 1 from act 1, scene 2 – Night Train from act 2 and Knee Play 5) from this work on solo piano in his album Prophecies (2016, on Orange Mountain Music label).
In popular culture
The title was used as inspiration for the 1994 Counting Crows song "Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)".
Excerpts were used as background music for several shots in season 3, episode 5 (2017) of the Mr. Robot television series.
In the episode "Out with Dad" of the TV series Frasier, the title character, an opera lover, says, "You see, there's a stunning woman who comes to the opera on the same nights we do. She has the box right across from ours. We've flirted a bit from a distance. I have laughed with her during Figaro, cried with her during Tosca. I even had a dream about her during Einstein on the Beach."
Excerpts from the movement "Knee Play 1" are played during a montage sequence in the 2005 Alex Gibney documentary film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
An edited version of "Knee Play 1" was also used in the launch advertisement for Orange S.A. in 1994.
At the 2013 Drum Corps International World Championship, the first-place winners, Carolina Crown, earned a perfect score in the brass section when they performed parts of "Knee Play 3", "Trial/Prison", "Spaceship", and "Knee Play 5".
Among the works of Peter Schickele's fictitious alter ego P.D.Q. Bach is one called Einstein on the Fritz (S. E=mc2). Schickele was a friend of Philip and was a Juilliard classmate of his.
Helen Pickett's 2012 When Love created on the Dance Theatre of Harlem uses Knee Play 5.
Notes
References
External links
Work details, philipglass.com
Analysis Archived 2007-01-07 at the Wayback Machine by Nicolas Sceaux, 2002
Photographs from the world premiere of Einstein on the Beach, Avignon Festival, 1976
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