Introduction, Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama book

Introduction John Richardson and Jelena Novak At a recent conference on the issue of the “operatic,” the question arose, is there any opera that is not operatic? This immediately brought to mind Einstein on the Beach. There are many ways in which you could argue that it is not operatic – it includes no conventional operatic voices, no divas, nor is there a consistent narrative to follow; there is no conventional libretto, and the title character appears only as a figure. But what, if anything, remains of the category of “opera” that would justify calling this an opera? There is, of course, the general spectacle of singing, dancing, acting, and talking, which are prerequisites in the traditional opera canon, even though Einstein stretches the boundaries of these categories almost to breaking point. One of the authors (Jelena) once asked Philip Glass if Einstein had changed the world of opera. He responded that it had not, since opera in its traditional forms still exists within its institutions and is probably as vivid an experience as it has ever been.1 What Einstein actually brought about was the drifting away of the world of new opera from almost everything conventional opera represents. Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration was premiered at the Avignon Festival in France in 1976. During its initial European tour, the Metropolitan Opera premiere and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein evinced diametrically opposed reactions from audiences and critics. Embedding repetitive structural principles in a spectacle reflecting the late-capitalist media age, the work problematized commonly held assumptions about opera, music, theater, and dance. Today, Einstein is well on its way to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater, whichever of these terms is considered more fitting, but apparently not – after all – repeatable, at least not in such a way that continuity between this work and what followed in the history of the genre would have seemed unavoidable: the result of a linear progression from one stylistic development to the next. Being sui generis, as some have called this work, would seem 1 Jelena Novak, “Philip Glass tvillingpar – opera och film” in Nutida Musik 1, 2008/03, pp. 26–32. (“Opera and Film as Twins,” Philip Glass interviewed by Jelena Novak, Lisbon, June 24, 2007, unpublished manuscript in English). xxvi Introduction almost by definition to rule out any notion that this was a watershed moment in the traditional sense. Einstein nevertheless created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking about the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression. Its influence was not, therefore, restricted to opera but could be felt in audiovisual culture at large: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theater, and many other expressive, commercial, and cultural spheres. Notwithstanding its powerful impact, Einstein has thus far not been the subject of close critical reflection. Inspired by the 2012–2015 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as belonging to the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Debates about the cultural conditions and politics of reception encourage an examination into how and why Einstein’s status changed over the years. Its resonance with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theater provokes discussion about the work’s place in music theater “beyond opera.” After Wagner’s Opera and Drama and Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama,2 Einstein appears as “opera beyond drama”: postopera that is postmodern and postdramatic at the same time. The shift from the self-reflexive sound structures of Glass’s early minimalist pieces to the representational mechanisms of repetitive music in an opera that makes references beyond circumscribed ideas of the aesthetic – as posited in strict minimalism – provokes new questions. This book mixes together a broad and inclusive range of views of the subject – academic, journalistic, artistic – but here we will take as our starting point the role of memory in an opera that recycles widely known imagery of an historical icon. In our view it is worth contemplating what it means to take this particular man, the scientist Albert Einstein, and his legacy as the subject of an opera at the dawn of the digital age. We reflect on the opera’s surrealist vocabulary of disjunct sights and sounds and how this creates a perceptual divide between the represented past and the unfolding present. We review how the opera’s pulsating music and shapeshifting imagery raise new questions about our experiences of time, in much the same way as the scientific theories of Albert Einstein himself overturned existing knowledge of time and space. A more specific aim of the book is to promote interdisciplinary debate on the questions, how and why Einstein on the Beach still problematizes conventions of the art world; and how this work could be considered a prism through which current performance practice and theory might be seen more clearly. Our contributions range from those focusing on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and posthuman character of the work’s expressive substance. The chapters cover perspectives and frames of reference ranging from the relationship of the opera’s music to the dominant structures of feeling 2 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1988. Introduction xxvii of advanced capitalism; a mode of expression in music and dance that has been compared (by Philip Glass and others) to Baroque aesthetics; work that focus on the music, dance, acting, the quasi-architectural design of the mise-en-scène; work that disentangles the reception of the opera from the myths that surround it; and the responses of contemporary cultural agents (a songwriter, a director of film and stage works, and two composers) who came into contact with the opera when it exploded onto the avant-garde scene in the 1970s. Why Einstein? A hero for the postmodern age? An essential question that some of our authors touch upon is why choose Einstein in the first place as the opera’s protagonist? In an expressive medium and style (minimalist music and theater) that has often been defined as abstract and nonrepresentational, what does it mean to pick a protagonist who is a widely known contemporary cultural icon guaranteed to evoke a wide range of associations in the minds of audience members. Opera is traditionally a setting where one encounters colorful and unashamedly dramatic characters: heroes, villains, and victims. The idea of heroic subjectivity is inextricably bound up these days with Romantic ideas about individuality, bravery, genius, combative masculinity, and a slew of related ideas that postmodernism, which this work is often considered to be an exemplar of, implicitly called into question. However, heroic actions require narrative cohesion in order to be recognized as such. The minimalists are perhaps best known for the break they made in the 1960s with conventional narrative approaches to composition, and since the modes of expression we associate with heroism are often embedded within narratives of conflict and triumph, one might reasonably expect the term to have no relevance to this work. This quotation from Philip Glass demonstrates his determination to steer clear of the quasiprogrammatic agendas of concertos, where the “journey” of the music’s melody is easily mapped onto the life story of an imagined (heroic) subject. [W]hat sets the music apart is the fact that it’s non-narrative, we don’t hear it within the usual time frame of most musical experiences. As I look at most other music, I see that it takes ordinary time, day-to-day time – what I call colloquial time – as a model for its own musical time. So you have story symphonies or story concertos – even the modernist tradition continues that to a certain extent. There’s still almost a compulsion to deal with themes and treatment of themes. The themes become the focus of the listener’s attention, and what happens to the theme happens to the listener via a certain psychological trick of identification. This happens in the great concertos of the nineteenth century, with the tortuous journey of the violin and so forth, with happy endings and sad endings.3 3 Glass interviewed in Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras, Interviews with American Composers, Metuchen, N.J., Scarecrow Press, 1982, 214. xxviii Introduction And yet, those of us who have studied Glass’s postminimalist oeuvre are aware that it is not quite as denuded of these traditional narrative means as some of its more committed commentators have maintained. We can see this most clearly when it comes to the choice of characters in music theater works. Glass rejected several of Robert Wilson’s contenders for “portrait opera” protagonists because they didn’t meet his ethical criteria – Hitler, for example, was too “loaded.” Protagonists in all three portrait operas turned out to be “powerful personalities,” in fact men who changed the world for the better. Rooted in post-Brechtian theater and the experimental Artaudian tradition, Glass’s operas portrayed real historical figures rather than fictitious archetypes. This does not necessarily mean that the characters in question are not every bit as mythical as Orfeo or Tristan; Einstein and Gandhi have both taken on mythical proportions in modern life (channeled by media culture). Indeed, Glass openly admits that “the almost saint-like” inventor of the theory of relativity was “one of [his] heroes” when he was growing up.4 It’s quite apparent when witnessing performances of Einstein, however, that this is no ordinary biographical representation. It is abstract and image-centered, composed from loosely connected materials, resembling the deconstructive iconography found in Andy Warhol’s screen-prints or the absurdist works of the surrealists more than the dominant heroic archetypes of Western culture. Glass’s music arguably works in a similar way. The opera is made up of streaming and mutating eighth- and sixteenth-note figures performed on heavily amplified organs and woodwinds, accompanied by singers who mindlessly (or mindfully?) recite numbers and solfeggio symbols – all of the above are interrupted by coolly recited texts. Underlying these elements are harmonic formulas that toy with listeners’ expectations; shifting eerily between competing tonal centers that don’t resolve as you would expect. This is a far cry from the traditional means of Romantic heroism, although one might equally point to traits the music shares with Romantic music: melodies performed in unison (but also counterpoint); epic scale and an emphasis on spectacle; strong rhythms briskly articulated; “massive, simple sonorities that eschewed intricate polyphony or complex structures”; constant pulsing rhythm, and so on, all of which Michael Boyles lists among the conventional musical means of the heroic in Beethoven’s influential middle period.5 Eero Tarasti similarly lists the following characteristics of the heroic-mythical style: grandiose scale, long crescendos (albeit in steps and plateaus in postminimalism), rhythmical sharpness and vigor, the use of bright sonorities, unison in instruments, and so on.6 Some of these traits are admittedly not relevant to the present discussion, but some do seem to resonate in unexpected ways with postminimalist aesthetics. It might seem perverse to view 4 5 6 Philip Glass, Music by Philip Glass, Cambridge, Harper & Row, 1987, 11. Michael Boyles, Beethoven: The Emergence and Evolution of Beethoven’s Heroic Style, New York, Excelsior, 1987, 123–125. Eero Tarasti, Myth and Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, Especially that of Wagner, Sibelius And Stravinsky, Helsinki, Suomen Musiikkitieteellinen Seura, 1978, 91–97. Introduction xxix Glass’s Einstein in reference to principally Romantic theories of the heroic, but is the scientist’s depiction in this opera really the antithesis of traditional heroism, in the same sense as John Adams’s Nixon (Nixon in China) might be understood as being? Are more complex negotiations perhaps going on here, in which heroism is not discarded altogether; it is simply rendered opaque; it is rendered. Several writers have followed the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in classifying Glass’s style during this period as representing a non-representational sublime or “countersublime” – another Romantic concept going back to Kant and Burke that is closely related to heroic sensibility.7 Anyone who has attended a performance of Einstein will perhaps recognize that there is something heroic about this opera, even if it is mediated through a powerfully constructivist sensibility (happening in quotation marks or by negation); and even if heroism is ultimately located in the audience, who, if they stay the full course of the opera, will end up sitting for almost five hours. Glass himself has displaced the heroic on to the performers, who are required to undergo rigorous training in order to memorize all of the vocal lines coupled with Wilson’s elaborately synchronized mimic gestures. This is a common narrative that emerges in the accounts of performers: the element of endurance bonding performers with peers, signaling a transcendence of their ordinary circumstances. Perhaps the specter of the composer as hero, too, has some relevance, although this is undoubtedly something different to the Bohemian heroic artist of Beethoven’s time. We can recognize this perhaps in the almost mythic figure of the downtown avant-gardist composer, challenging the modernist establishment and famously driving a cab in order to pay his debts while Einstein was being performed at the Met. Postmodern neosurrealism When Einstein was first performed in the mid-1970s, it was celebrated among critics, some academics, and performers as crystalizing emerging postmodernist aesthetic. Even Glass has described the work using this term. This notion gained attraction through the advocacy of leading thinkers on poststructuralism and postmodernism, such as Julia Kristeva, following the first European tour, and later, Fredric Jameson.8 When Glass writes of postmodernism, he refers in particular to the work’s open-endedness; a work after the decline of the work concept – the post-Cagean idea that our experiences are not fully determined by compositional intentionality. The reflexive relationship of Einstein to Romantic spectacle, to the Wagnerian “total art work,” to consumer culture, and the contemporary technoscape are all features that resonate with ideas about postmodernism. Einstein’s 7 8 For more on the sublime in Glass’s music and minimalism, see John Richardson, “Resisting the Sublime: loose synchronization in La Belle et la Bête and The Dark Side of Oz,” in Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick (eds.), Musicological Identities: Essays in Honour of Susan McClary, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008, 135–48. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, London, Pluto Press, 1985, 111. xxx Introduction post-Brechtian constructivism is a further feature that Linda Hutcheon strongly emphasizes in her writing on postmodernism.9 Among the most productive ideas is Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodernism as “surrealism without the unconscious”,10 although that formulation could be modified so as not to rule out the unconscious altogether (or perhaps the idea of collective memory, which is entangled with the unconscious). We might also bring in the prefix “neo” to form “neosurrealim,” which serves a similar function to the prefix in Peter Bürger’s idea of the neo-avant garde.11 Neo not only denotes a reflexive awareness of the shortcomings of previous avant-garde projects, but it also signifies a difference that allows us to view the opera in the light of the dawning information age and the rise of global capitalism. A problem with postmodernism is arguably that the concept blinds us to alternative genealogies and periodization, while overemphasizing the uniqueness and temporal isolation of phenomena and artistic movements. When we talk about postmodernism, the writers of this chapter contend, that we’re often talking about traits that might be subsumed under neosurrealist aesthetics. There is plenty that is surrealist about Einstein: most notably the opera’s reliance on non-connective, dream-like logic where metaphorical associations replace narrative exposition. As Glass has put it, the entire opera could have been a dream that Einstein had. Indeed, one of the opera’s key scenes focuses on a bed, which some commentators have understood as commenting obliquely on the role that imagination played in Einstein’s life-work (others have highlighted gender issues).12 The scientist was known to be a lateral thinker: he used metaphors and visual imagery to circumvent established ways of thinking about scientific problems. He is said to have been dyslexic and, more surprisingly, number blind. These aspects come out in Glass and Wilson’s treatment. Academic readers will be familiar with formulations of postmodernism as a kind of collective “schizophrenia.”13 Yet the association of psychological conditions with artistic sensibility and revolution goes back further than this. André Breton, the founder of the surrealist movement and writer of several manifestos, was infatuated with his psychologically unstable lover Nadya, whose random observations seemed, in his eyes, somehow symptomatic of Parisian cultural life in the interwar years. Other leading surrealist thinkers suffered themselves from psychological illness, including Bataille and Artaud. In fact, Freud characterized the whole surrealist movement, which he partly inspired, as pathological because it denied the reality 9 10 11 12 13 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd edition, London and New York, Routledge, 1989. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991, 67. See also John Richardson, An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011, 34. Peter Bürger, “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde,” New Literary History, 41, 4, Autumn 2010, 695-715. On the role of dream logic in surrealism, see Richardson 2011, 39–40. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, London, Pluto Press 1985, 118-20. Introduction xxxi principle. In Einstein we have Christopher Knowles, whose disconnected stream of consciousness reflections form the verbal center of Wilson’s conception of the opera – and Wilson himself worked as his therapist. Artaud’s theater was similarly a theater of pre-linguist signs, enigmatic hieroglyphs, and pulsing noises whose inspiration came largely from non-Western (Balinese) theatrical forms. Its direct descendent was Richard Foreman’s ontological hysterical theater and the idea of theater as embodied movement that came out in the dance moves of Balanchine and Cunningham – this inspired Wilson in particular. Other surrealist elements include the use of collage techniques in written texts and projected images, and something resembling automatic writing in the libretto. All of these aspects are found in the various manifestos and other writings on surrealism (although popular definitions typically hinge almost exclusively on the unconscious and sexuality).14 Fundamentally, surrealism is about diverting attention away from conventional ways of thinking and being through acts of displacement and disjunction that reshuffle reality. On another level, it is about attending to the disjunctive nature of reality and elevating experience over narrative substance and meaning. Experience and temporality In comments from the time of Einstein’s making, Glass differentiates the “everyday” or “narrative” time of symphonies from the extended timeframe of his music and music theater. Narrative time is classified as “everyday time” presumably because it resembles or imitates classical realist modes of representation. This can be seen in Glass’s sarcastic comments about the “tortuous journey” of the violin in the above passage. This is the mode of narrative exposition familiar to us from symphonies, novels, and popular entertainment, including film and television. But Glass’s music (and equally, Wilson’s staging and the choreography of Einstein) steps outside of classical narrative-based modes of framing experience as temporalized. Instead it directs attention towards the unfolding present. More than that, the constant pulse and temporalized buzz of Glass’s music imply a continuous flow that is embodied in actions, even while it intimates patterns that extend beyond the present moment towards a potentially infinite past and future. This dreamscape which extends beyond the present moment is indexical of eternal time. Merleau-Ponty’s writes: Eternity is the time that belongs to dreaming, and the dream refers back to waking life, from which it borrows all its structures. Of what nature, then, is that waking time in which eternity takes root? It is the field of presence in the wide sense, with its double horizon or primary past and future, and the infinite openness of those fields of presence that have slid by, or are still possible.15 14 See Richardson 2011, 32–53. 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Translated by Colin Smith, London and New York, Routledge, 2005, 492. xxxii Introduction What happens, then, when you mark out clock time and divide it additively into loops and cycles? One way of apprehending such experiences is to submit to the relentless flow of materials. In this mode of apprehending, the perceiver focuses constantly on the unfolding now: experience as pleasure. Another mode is more selective and involves dipping in and out of the temporal flow. Glass himself in his comments in the interview transcribed in the volume, chooses to emphasize attention, suggesting a mode of focused listening in which the overlapping temporalities that surround us are suspended in favor of musical and dramatic actions. This would lend support to the idea of Einstein as “formalist” and “literalist” in its principal modus operandi. Another possibility is to conceive of the experience of time as overlapping layers, temporal frames of reference that alternate or take shape in different ways depending on the orientation of the viewer-listener. On the one hand, this is a musical and presentational style that encourages attentiveness; on the other, this attentiveness is formed within layers of experience, memory, and anticipation. What seems clear is that experiences of Einstein are not without affective resonance. Memories and prior experiences play a part. If there’s a dominant mood or tone in Einstein, it might be called “neutral” or “mechanical” – perhaps implying something hidden behind the carefully controlled exteriors that remains unexpressed or which cannot be expressed. Meaning or meaninglessness in this understanding derives from the depersonalized character of the music, physical movements, and vocalized texts. This depersonalization results from the stalwart imperviousness of the music’s temporal and design, and from corresponding dance gestures. Relentless and unyielding, these carry the listener on a wave of pure energy that finds allegorical support both in the plot of the opera and in society at large. The notion of the posthuman is perhaps best epitomized in the numerous carbon copy Einsteins who inhabit the stage in performances. Einstein is in a very real sense unknowable; in the absence of actual information, audiences at some point are compelled to confront their own lack of knowledge concerning the opera’s protagonist, or to bring to the work speculative or real knowledge concerning the historical person that was Einstein, or of the intentions of the opera’s creative team. Incomplete memories and collage aesthetics Because of the opera’s juxtapositioning of incomplete fragments, memories, and images that are affective more than informative, Einstein again approaches surrealist aesthetics. The opera is haunted with images that never quite connect to the originating spirit or historical contexts that first generated them. These images combine to form loose assemblages that do, however, tell us something about the life and experiences of the creative parties involved in the production (see Robert Fink’s discussion of radio playlists and how these influenced Christopher Knowles’s texts), and might resonate with the fragmentary experiences of audience members too. The cultural theorist Walter Benjamin was intrigued by how the French surrealists would frequent the flea markets of their native Paris in search of disjunct objects – objects that had been cast adrift from the consumer culture Introduction xxxiii that had created them decades earlier. Such objects were invested with a new uncanny afterlife by the very act of repositioning them in contemporary culture, resulting in a sense of enchantment, but also loss as the objects’ original functions and meanings. Einstein is on one level a work of collage – an assemblage of objects and images that loosely reference prior experiences. Their detachment from the culture that once nourished them gives them a resonance that resembles how we connect with objects recognized from more distant history. The historian Jan Assmann calls such objects “figures of memory”;16 memories that trigger associations but nevertheless carry with them a ritualized sense of detachment and transcendence, simultaneously elevating the performative present of actions while poignantly drawing attention to the distance between actions and historical origins. This “mnemonic energy,” as Assmann calls it, activates and enlivens the imagery of Einstein, even while we are left to speculate why and how exactly the imagery affects us. When Glass and Wilson speak of the participatory role of audiences, this comes close to Assmann’s notion of “cultural memory.” The emphasis on participation admittedly comes across more strongly in Wilson’s comments than in it does Glass’s. It is present above all in the quasi-ritualized use of images of Einstein himself, in the image of the Patty Hearst character, in textual allusions to popular songs. But it is present in the music, too, in Glass’s “archaeological” approach to musical materials when working on the portrait opera trilogy. Glass’s music of this period started to re-sound with the echoes of earlier styles – Baroque ground bass and chaconne figures would emerge in Einstein, although they are more transparently present in his second and third portrait operas, Satyagraha and Akhnaten; Mozartian Alberti bass, harmonic procedures that resemble root movement harmony but work differently. All of these elements are clearly present in the music and dance of Einstein, counted out in gestures that leave little doubt about the constructivist tenets of this new aesthetic form. Assmann evaluates the underlying motivations for deployments of cultural memory as follows: “One group remembers the past in fear of deviating from its model, the next for fear of repeating the past … ‘Those who cannot remember their past are condemned to relieve it,’” Assmann writes, quoting George Santayana.17 In this act of remembering there is surely an element of reflection that allows the person remembering to deviate from the model of past actions, and perhaps to recognize these actions for what they are; a move that resembles what Benjamin has called a leap into the “open air of history.” Einstein occupies a reflective halfway point between remembrance and amnesia. We remember or half remember opera history, music history, the actions of the opera’s protagonists, but at the same time we are jolted into the unfolding present where actions can be reconceived. 16 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, 65, Spring– Summer 1995, 125–133. 17 Assman, 133. xxxiv Introduction The structure of this book pays homage to the structure of its theoretical object – Einstein on the Beach. As in Einstein, there are knee plays that serve as “portraits”: five of them, where attention is directed towards speaking dancers. Knee Chapter I is a kind of prologue, ongoing already before the audience enters the hall. Further knee chapters separate acts, and the final one functions as a kind of epilogue. The book refers to the portrait function of Einstein’s knee plays, and knee chapters accommodate non-academic texts: interviews, portraits, and reviews, which frame the remainder of the book’s structure. The first knee chapter includes material taken from a recent interview with composer Philip Glass, where he reflects on his intentions when writing the opera, his views on how it turned out (what it “means” and how it is experienced), and how it has changed in its various incarnations in different productions. The second knee chapter is a conversation between Robert Wilson and theater director Bojan Djordjev. Lucinda Childs’ talk with Jelena Novak is Knee Chapter 3. Knee Chapter 4 provides five instances of fellow creative artists who reflect on the influence of Philip Glass and Einstein on the Beach on their own creative work in a series of short essays and interviews. The influential singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega discusses in a beautiful yet characteristically succinct (in some ways minimalist) essay how she was not only influenced by Glass, including Einstein on the Beach, but went on to collaborate with him in several projects and now considers him a valued friend. The two contemporary Finnish composers Petri Kuljuntausta and Juhani Nuorvala show how this influence was not only close to home, in New York City, but how it also fundamentally changed how musicians thought about their craft, even in geographically and culturally remote locations where Einstein was not performed; one of the pioneers of minimalism in music and written word about it, composer Tom Johnson, remembers the unique atmosphere in which Einstein was created and rehearsed; the director, artist, and creative visionary Peter Greenaway, for his part, uses his early encounters with Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, and minimalist and postminimalist music as a springboard for reflections on the aesthetic premises of his own work, which because of its emphasis on structure, manneristic style and immanence, non-narrative exposition and historical reference (Baroque, Rococo, Renaissance), has a great deal in common with Glass’s approach in Einstein. It seems that the trajectory of many lives and careers were irrevocably altered as a result of contact with this opera and compositional style. In Knee Chapter 5, the architect and art critic Pieter T’Jonck undertakes a close reading of Lucinda Childs’s choreography for Dance, a piece that was Glass and Childs’s first collaboration after Einstein. T’Jonck throws light on how the opera influenced Dance, but also how later productions of Einstein choreographed by Childs were influenced by Dance in certain respects. Knee Chapter 5 closes with an overview of reviews of Einstein. Amsterdam-based music critic Frits van der Waa offers a historical portrait of critical responses that were and still are changing. The longer chapters of this volume form different “acts,” beginning with one called “Einstein on the Shores of Culture.” This section of the book shows how Einstein can be understood as being “stranded” on the shores of different cultures, Introduction xxxv whether that culture is North American, West European, or East European. Robert Fink, in turn, investigates the world of Christopher Knowles and the pop references he used in Einstein’s spoken texts. In his chapter, “Einstein on the Radio,” Fink arrives at a surprising discovery: that Knowles’s interest in listening to the radio mirrors itself significantly in the texts he typed for Einstein on the Beach, which were then incorporated in the opera’s tissue as spoken monologues. Fink’s musicological discussion shows that Knowles had literally memorized some of the spoken texts in Einstein from radio broadcasts. Fink discusses new layers of meaning that this discovery brings to Einstein. Johannes Birringer, in his chapter “Sous les pavés, la plage,” reads Einstein from the context of French Situationist theory, his own revolutionary youth, and Western European theater. The slogan of the Situationists “Sous les pavés, la plage” resonates with the beach in Einstein, providing a fascinating sense of friction. Following those two North American and West European perspectives, an East European perspective is offered in the writing of aesthetician and art theorist Misko Šuvaković, who is the only contributor of this volume to have attended a performance of Einstein in 1976. This took place in Belgrade (Yugoslavia) during the first tour. Šuvaković embraces his position as witness when considering the geopolitics of the East in a unique reading of Einstein which bears witness to the relevance of cultural context in interpretations of this work. The book’s second act, “From Repetition to Representation,” opens with Kyle Gann’s detailed analysis of Einstein’s score, where he argues that the rigid repetitivity of Glass’s early minimalistic style transformed into something more intuitive and even romantic, an argument that elaborates on a claim Tom Johnson made some years ago.18 Musicologist Pwyll ap Siôn investigates how Einstein’s universe could be understood in the light of theory on musical affect, which he undertakes by analyzing the experimental theater scene represented by groups such as the Mabou Mines company, with a particular focus on the knee plays and their role. This act of the book closes with Avra Sidiropoulou’s chapter, “Creating Beauty in Chaos: Robert Wilson’s Visual Authorship in Einstein on the Beach.” Her discussion concentrates on the authorial role of director Robert Wilson, especially his idea of “beauty” and the impact this has had on the work and its aesthetic. In the third act, “Beyond Drama: Surfaces and Agencies of Performance,” Zeynep Bulut’s chapter, “Anonymous Voice, Sound and Indifference” delves into the intriguing realm of Einstein’s vocal sphere and captures through various perspectives from the field of voice studies what the opera’s voices tell us beyond the words and bodies involved in its staging. In “Heavenly Bodies: The Integral Role of Dance in Einstein on the Beach,” Leah Weinberg provides an exciting account of two of the opera’s choreographies: one by Andy de Groat, the other by Lucinda 18 Tom Johnson, ”Maximalism on the Beach: Philip Glass”, February 25–March 3, 1981, See: http: //tvo nm.ed ition s75.c om/ar ticle s/198 1/max imali sm-on -the- beach -phil ip-gl ass.h tml, Accessed: August 22, 2017. xxxvi Introduction Childs. Elucidating the roles of De Groat and particularly Childs in different productions, Weinberg describes how the whole opera has changed through time and how the role of dance and choreography has evolved in this piece. The book’s final act is “Operatic Machines and Their Ghosts.” This part of the book offers an analytical listening of Einstein, as well as a critical glance at a possible “afterlife” of the opera beyond and after Wilson’s staging. In the chapter “Leaving and Re-entering: Punctuating Einstein on the Beach,” Sander van Maas writes about how strategies of listening are changing in relation to different performances of Einstein, but also how the opera itself is affected by those strategies. Van Maas analyzes the inaudible in Einstein: the series of intentions and decisions that made the opera sound and be heard in a unique way. He pays attention also to how these strategies are audible in Einstein’s video recording. Closing the volume with the chapter “Einsteinium: From the Beach to the Church, via Theater and State Bank,” Jelena Novak reviews the different realms of productions mounted by directors other than Wilson: Achim Freyer (1988), Berthold Schneider and Veronika Witte (2001, 2005), Leigh Warren (2014), and Kay Voges (2017). She discusses Einstein’s inevitable transformations, keeping in mind other directors’ perspectives. Novak analyzes Einstein’s climactic scene, The Space Ship, attempting to capture how different authors read it and how their visions of the end of the universe as we know it might illuminate Einstein on the Beach’s future. It is as if two parallel opera worlds exist today. The conventional one with opera houses, subsidies, traditional operatic voices, a star system of singers, and another, in a sense alternative world, with performances that often take place outside of opera houses – on streets and highways (Hopscotch conceived and directed by Yuval Sharon in 2015 in Los Angeles), in botanical gardens (Operrrra is a Female, conceived and directed by Bojan Djordjev in Belgrade in 2005), in dismantled factories (De Materie [1985–88] by Louis Andriessen, directed by Heiner Goebbels in Duisburg in 2014), galleries (The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures by Marguerite Humeau, 2012), and other unofficial spaces. Those two worlds of course sometimes intersect. More and more frequently, it is possible to encounter unconventional stagings in opera houses, or, on the other hand, sometimes traditional operas are staged or imagined in new innovative ways (like La Monnaie/ De Munt 2014 production of Orfeo e Euridice by Christoph Willibald Gluck, directed by Romeo Castellucci). While this first, mainstream world maintains and cherishes opera history, the second is preoccupied with opera’s present and future. Einstein on the Beach stands proudly as a denominator for the beginning of opera’s future, a foundation stone for a different type of musical theater.