Like Einstein himself, “Einstein on the Beach,” the iconic collaboration between Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, was a radical departure from everything that came before it. When the work debuted in 1976, it inspired an alteration in the perception of performance that was as groundbreaking as atomic energy. This Friday, the first staging of “Einstein on the Beach” to be produced in 20 years returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it was previously performed in 1984 and 1992. The event brings back the dream-like tableaus directed and designed by Wilson that slowly morph beneath dance choreographed by Childs set to Glass’s mesmerizing score.
Last night at BAM, Glass engaged in a discussion with his former editor and fellow composer Nico Muhly. The talk was often lighthearted, with Glass opening by saying, “We’re going to do what we usually do, except in front of a lot of people.”
The talk featured screenings of archival footage of Glass’s work, leading the audience through the composer’s long history at BAM. Clips included “Geologic Moments” from 1986 and “Hydrogen Jukebox” from 1991, all the way to “Galileo Galilei,” staged in 2002, exploring his experimentations with the language of music and how it can communicate ideas and narrative without words, through performance.
The current revival of “Einstein” is an international touring production, and Glass, Wilson, and Childs — along with members of the Philip Glass Ensemble — are all reprising their involvement. The opera premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in France, which Glass said was the first time they had actually played through the piece without stopping — up until then, they weren’t even sure how long it was. It has now “settled” into about four-and-a-half hours, during which the audience can come and go as they please, engaging as much as they wish with the plays on time and space that characterize “Einstein.”
Because it has been so long since a full production of “Einstein” has been staged, it’s become something of a mythic experience. Glass also discussed how returning to a monumental work at this point in his career is a rare opportunity. Glass and Wilson were both involved in the experimental New York arts scene of the 1960s, and as the composer celebrates his 75th birthday this year, there have been several restagings of his work, including “Another Look at Harmony — Part IV” (1975) at the Tune-in Music Festival at the Park Avenue Armory.
“As composers, we don’t really write for posterity, we’re writing for right now,” he said. “There are a lot of things we don’t get right the first time — it’s kind of a luxury, a rarity, that a composer would live long enough to hear his early work, and hear it as someone who’s 40 years older.”
The Tune-in Festival also included the groundbreaking “Music in 12 Parts” from 1974, which Glass called “a compendium of the techniques that were to be used within the language I was creating.” That language was the basis for “Einstein,” in which the “music is very simple, the procedure of the music is really radical.”
“For music to be truly new, there has to be a new way to play it,” he said. “By the time we got to ‘Einstein,’ we had learned how to play it.”
The only words that the audience can understand in “Einstein” are spoken over a chorus repeating numbers and solfège syllables (do, re, mi, etc.), which Glass said were originally used as a way for the performers to memorize the music — it was later decided to keep them as the singing text. The rhythm and structure of the repeated lines can still feel shockingly new, and multiple listenings only bring out more details of the subtle variations that coil through each phrase. Combined with the spectacle of dance and light, it becomes a transformative tidal wave of a performance. “I was really thinking of the work in terms of image and movement,” he said. In the opera’s world, “music is a template in terms of time, and stage is a template in terms of space.”
“Einstein” moves the audience through the production without story — it is a dreamy, abstract representation of the ideas of Albert Einstein’s theories on relativity and time.
In a 1984 documentary on the opera, Einstein’s quote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” is repeated as a reference for this poetic experience. The revival of “Einstein” finally lets a wider audience in on this mysterious experience, in all its mind altering glory.