EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH
EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH began ahead of time, though the doors to the theater opened late. While 3,800 people sorted themselves into orchestra and balconies, Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton were already seated on stage, concentrating on work. They were seated behind two tables a little apart from each other. The stage floor below was painted in a white square, as was the drop behind them. Both women wore white shirts, suspenders, baggy pants, and basketball sneakers, as did the rest of the company, costumes modeled on a photograph of Albert Einstein wearing those clothes. The portable microphone concealed in Sutton’s costume was barely audible—one of the few failures in four tons of sound equipment. Everyone in the back rows craned forward to hear. She was counting over and over: “two, three, four, five, six, two. . . .” Twelve chorus members filed into the orchestra pit (later they will file onstage, into a jury box, onto metal tiers). Childs began to speak: “Will it get some wind for the sailboat. And it could get for it is. It could get the railroad for these workers. . . .” The speech, written by Christopher Knowles, was uninflected, the bodies rigid. But the hands, resting on the tables, were expressive.
One of Sutton’s hands was closed in a fist, the other hand palm up, half open. It was a reflective gesture Albert Einstein carried with him throughout his life: photographs from Berne to Princeton show him with thumb touching the tips of first and second fingers. Childs’ fingers were moving on an imaginary grid: horizontally, then vertically, then horizontally back again. She plotted her fingers to touch the second, fifth, and eighth “grids” in each direction.
The chorus had been examining its own hands for some time now; on an invisible signal it began to sing. The music will be continuous for four-and-one-half hours, emanating from chorus, two organ keyboards, wind instruments, violin, and solo voice. The chorus was describing its rhythmic pattern: “One, two, three, four (pause), two, three, four, one, two, three, four, five, six. . . .” The organ joined in with a descending bass line of A, G, C. At the same instant the voices split in two: half the voices continued to count, the other half sang in solfeggio (do-re-mi) describing the music’s harmonic/melodic line (in Glass’ music they are very closely aligned). As the stage lights darkened the organ shifted rhythm and modes, anticipating the first scene.
“He leaves you a lot of space to fill up,” Childs told me, describing Wilson’s staging rehearsals. Wilson began with extremely general visual ideas, and whittled them down to particulars by working with performers. Glass wrote the music over the period of a year before rehearsals began. As he and Wilson discussed the opera—visually still in sketchbook form—Glass built up music by increments, keeping in mind the mood of particular scenes. As a collaboration, Einstein is a remarkable accommodation of two minds to each other’s methods, as well as to additional contributions: the choreography of Andrew deGroat and Lucinda Childs, the sharply varying strengths and weaknesses of the 36-member company, including Glass’ regular ensemble and the technical crew. In the wake of the two Metropolitan Opera performances on the consecutive Sundays of November 21 and 28, 1976, strains smoothed over by the production’s discipline have appeared. But during the making of Einstein differences in temperament were handled as tools, sharpening various angles of perspective to make the opera cohere. (As I’ll discuss later, the difficulties stem from Wilson’s handling of large productions.)
Glass’ first uptown performance was at the Whitney “Anti-Illusion” exhibition in 1969. Ironically enough, this same exhibition defined for Wilson, in a negative sense, what he wanted to do. “I didn’t feel the same way as the artists exhibiting there—those Rauschenbergs coming off the wall,” Wilson told me. “I like illusion, and how it defines space. In Einstein there’s a flat 19th-century stage, with a guy behind the blue drop cranking away to make a train recede.” At that time, in ’69, Glass was performing his austere Music in Similar Motion and Music in Fifths with a highly trained ensemble, many of whom are fine composers in their own right. In the meantime, Wilson’s first large-scale piece, The King of Spain, had its two-night stand in the cavernous old Anderson Theatre on Second Avenue and Fourth Street, with a cast of 63 enthusiastic amateurs.
It would be hard to imagine two more unlikely collaborators. Wilson began by painting and teaching classes in body movement, his first dance/performance pieces influenced by and often performed with artists such as Meredith Monk and Kenneth King. Glass came from Juilliard by way of Paris, tabla studies with Alla Rahka, and gallery-sponsored music performances in New York. But both artists were developing a trait in common which would be of unexpected and vital use: they tended to splice sections of past works onto each other. The first four acts of Wilson’s 12-hour The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin were based on material from The King of Spain, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and Deafman Glance: much of the sixth and seventh acts of Stalin were first developed in the week-long KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE. Glass’ Music in 12 Parts, begun in 1971 and completed in 1974, examined rhythmic structure, which he considers the basis for his music. He dovetailed its final sections onto the first two parts of Another Look at Harmony, which adds its clear harmonic layers to a rhythmic base. These first two parts became, in turn, the basis for Einstein’s first train scene and the first dance sequence, in Glass’ words: “the starting points from which additional material and devices were developed.”
Despite both artists’ sensitivity to the development of work, grafting their work onto another person’s piece in full-scale collaboration was a new experience for both. Previous works by Wilson were largely silent (the French dubbed them “silent opera”), punctuated by screams, words such as “chitter chatter” and speeches written by performers. For Stalin, Alan Lloyd’s piano score was added after the staging was completed; in A Letter for Queen Victoria Lloyd’s string quartet and flute music were largely secondary to the action on stage. Glass has composed Obie-winning music for theatrical productions such as Mabou Mines’ Cascando, The Lost Ones and The Red Horse Animation, but usually composes music only for his own ensemble.
They met at the conclusion of the final production of Stalin. “I liked your work,” Glass told Wilson. Wilson had never heard Glass’ music before, but he invited him over to his Byrd Hoffman Foundation for breakfast. Within a few weeks, they agreed to begin work on an opera. In the same manner Lucinda Childs was invited to join the production. Though Wilson had heard of her, he had never seen her choreography and dancing until she agreed, after much persuasion, to work in Einstein.
First they worked out the opera’s general contours. They agreed it would be, in some loose way, about Einstein; one of Einstein’s most important representations would be as a violinist; and it would have a chorus. “My music sounds to me like the motor of a spaceship,” Glass told me, “so I said I wanted a spaceship in the opera. I liked the idea of a science-fiction opera.” For over a year they met frequently. As Glass composed the music, Wilson began a series of pencil drawings, their rough lines indicating a geometry of form, human figures dwarfed amid sweeping planes of light and dark.
“We didn’t start out with any specific roles for a long time,” Wilson said. “For a long while I’d had the idea of a train, and that was a starting point. But we worked independently. I can’t write music, I can’t even read it. I just listened to it. I made a lot of drawings, and once I had them and the music, I could start to think about design and setting, colors. I showed the performers sketches before we rehearsed the show.” He tacked them onto the wall, Childs told me, and that was what they had to go on.
Along various stages of the collaboration adjustments were made. Wilson proposed a saloon scene, but Glass said he didn’t think that was what their work was about. At one point a waiting platform ended the long serene night train scene, but it dragged on for too long and was taken out. As it stands, the night train scene is devoid of all the people the waiting platform would have required—uncluttered among the crowded—though unhurried—sequences surrounding it. As Wilson came up with general possibilities for scenes, Glass wrote music appropriate to their mood.
They had one vocabulary in common: the vocabulary of numbers. They blocked out the amount of time each scene would take, and agreed the acts’ and scenes’ development would be governed by permutations of the number three. Precise equations, both visual and musical, for the scenes were expressed in prologue, entr’actes, and epilogue; these were given the handy name of knee plays. Aside from the knee plays, three major structures governed the opera’s development; the sequences ran as follows:
Knee Play 1
Act I
Scene 1: Train (1)
Scene 2: Trial (2)
Knee Play 2
Act II
Scene 1: Field with Spaceship (3)
Scene 2: Night Train (1)
Knee Play 3
Act Ill
Scene 1: Trial/Prison (2)
Scene 2: Field with Spaceship (3)
Knee Play 4
Act IV
Scene 1: Building/Train (1)
Scene 2: Bed (Trial/Prison) (2)
Scene 3: Spaceship (3)
Knee Play 5
Each of the sequences was assigned a number: the three train sequences are (1); the three trial sequences are (2); the three spaceship sequences are (3). All possible combinations have been made: 1, 2; 3, 1; 2, 3; 1, 2, 3. Of course, the sequences’ familial connections are kept loose. For instance, the building/train of Act IV Scene 1 is connected to its predecessors chiefly by music. The second musical theme, introduced in the opening train sequence, is developed in Act IV Scene 1 as a translucent curtain of voices and wind instruments in front of the organ’s rhythmic figures. A drop of a solid boxcarlike building is the scene’s sole image—on the same diagonal as the preceding trains.
On the whole, Glass underscores threesomeness not only by repeating musical themes congruous with repeating images. Three themes are explored at various times in each sequence. What is more, the patterns of harmonies often involve chords grouped in various patterns of three. And chords on a keyboard are, of course, usually expressed as triads. I will trace some examples of this process further on.
Suffice it for now to qualify this as “aural architecture,” which is no more rigidly adhered to than are Wilson’s images. Kurt Munkacsi, Glass’ sound engineer, mixes sound to achieve the highest amplitude possible without distortion. The three groups of speakers he placed above and on either side of the proscenium played the Met’s very live room nodes to their echoing limit. The thick overtones generated by the organs and saxophones typical in Glass’ scoring provided further resonance. Flute, clarinet, violin, and soprano solo wove clear lines through vertical Harmonies. Glass chose to use mostly untrained voices in the chorus; he feels their thin tones give precision to their articulation.
Precise articulation has always been inherent in Glass’ process. Monodic pieces such as Music in Similar Motion composed in the late ’60s added and subtracted units from clearly defined rhythmic structures. Around 1970 he began adding harmonic layers to the rhythmic structure, leading to the vertically stacked notes of Music in 12 Parts and further developed in Another Look at Harmony. He has given consideration to a new development in his music in Einstein. He has chosen traditional 19th-century chordal patterns, moved by the additive rhythmic structure developed previously. But the chords’ modulations have been slightly twisted, subverted. Their harmonies never quite resolve, they turn over and over again, searching for an unobtainable balance, but without the anxious haste cropping up in the last few centuries’ quick dissonances and resolutions. At times the themes melt into each other without any particular relationship to activity onstage. The stage action takes the same liberty with its internal references, sudden and inexplicable movements and visual puns. (Childs, in her “character for three diagonals,” holds a smoking pipe, the stage furniture is made out of conduit-type pipes, Richard Morrison chalks invisible calculations with his back to the audience and a big red plumber’s wrench sticking out of his back pocket.)
Wilson, who was trained at Pratt as an architect (after studying business administration at the University of Texas), holds Einstein together through architectural tensions. In designing the opera he mentally divided the stage’s plan and elevation with three lines, creating a network of cubes stacked four deep horizontally and vertically. People and things tend to relate in three-dimensional space in Einstein, just as would an architect’s building. They also tend to move along angles of 45 and 90 degrees.
The 45-degree angles stem from the number three. Sailing, along with playing the violin, was a hobby of Einstein’s. The sailboat Childs mentions in her opening speech in the first knee play is taken as an idealized image for the opera. From the sail Wilson got his triangles and diagonals (often at 45 degrees) repeated throughout in patterns of light, objects, and people. “Once you start looking for triangles in Einstein,” Wilson said, “you find them everywhere: from the train’s cowcatcher to the triangular light coming down in the courtroom scenes to the light streaming up in a triangle from an elevator shaft in the spaceship scene.” He considered the sailboat’s hull as a rectangular platform, the basis for the architectural grids’ precise delineation of movement.
Wilson finds most critical groping for catch phrases and antecedents irrelevant to his work. He expanded on this point to John Gruen in The New York Times: “I hate being quoted. The fact is, I don’t really understand my own stuff. . . . My work is a mystery. . . . I don’t wish to mystify people. . . . It’s better to remain silent.”
Well, maybe, but a number of artists in the very fertile realm between dance and performance art—from Simone Forti to Allan Kaprow—have been exerting influence on Wilson’s theater throughout his career, and I wish he’d admit it. Even if the ’70s don’t end up with art administration documenting itself as an art form in galleries, its by-blows are everywhere. Wilson has a gift for business: he has a foundation behind him, he goes to the right parties, is charming to the right people. If he had become a professional architect all this would be part of running a successful firm. I don’t object to Wilson’s success, but few successful architects would get away with playing the primitive among their colleagues. For my palate, Wilson’s bland false modesty is as difficult to swallow as Christo’s, and the ingredients are the same: they don’t think anyone else’s work or opinion or ideas can touch them.
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me,” Isaac Newton wrote. Another analogy is John Maynard Keynes’, who described minds such as Newton’s as possessing sustaining “muscles of intuition” moving consciousness to divert itself with clarity. I think Glass and Wilson would like their opera to present audiences with sensory translations of such clarity. In its finest scenes—the train sequence and the knee plays in particular—Einstein attains that incandescence.
But the opera’s tone slowly changes. The first trial collects words, people, and triangles, circles, lines and squares in the form of everything from a 13th-century Persian bowl representing the sun to the horizontal bar of a window, courting punish status in a trial. It is as dryly ironic as a Diderot dialogue, and sufficiently annotated in the momentary descent of a drop representing a lithographed 1776 Versailles lit de justice. As things begin to drift offstage left in the second trial, self-importance begins to infiltrate self-consciousness. In the final two scenes, technical effects second nature to the Met’s repertoire, or for that matter to Max Reinhardt’s repertoire, are curried as something special in an avant-garde vehicle. Incandescence is literalized in banks of light. Glass got his science-fiction opera all right, and I’ll bet he thoroughly enjoyed pulling out all the melodramatic stops on his carefully rationalized musical structure.
Wilson originally founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, known to its habitués as the Byrd Loft, as an educational institution. “At that time,” Wilson said, “it was like an open school, a free school where things could happen on an open ground. Not that classes were taught, necessarily. I wanted to gather people from different areas. New York is so different in areas just a few miles from each other—it’s almost tribal that way. I saw Byrd Hoffman as a sort of elevator stopping at different floors: anyone could get on and off at any point. But I’ve changed since then. The way New York is no longer bothers me: I enjoy it.”
Earlier Byrd Hoffman productions flaunted a diversity of performers. Stalin had eight or nine Stalins, as well as performers from Iran, Denmark, France, Brazil, Argentina, and a four-month-old-baby from British Columbia: 144 people, along with students from P.S. 47, New York City’s school for the deaf.
Einstein’s performers were selected from auditions, advertised in Variety and the Village Voice. DeGroat asked people to execute dervish turns, Glass had them sing, Wilson had them express “I love you,” then “I hate you,” by voice alone, then by body alone. Samuel M. Johnson, a 77-year-old retired civil servant, who co-appeared with great distinction as judge (along with seven-year-old Paul Mann) secured his part by reciting Patrick Henry’s “liberty or death” speech. Only four of the final performing cast were Byrd Hoffman veterans: deGroat, Sutton, Dana Reitz, and Charles Dennis. No one had to claim professional ability in all three areas of dancing, singing, and performing, but they did have to be competent (and interesting) in all of them.
The form of the rehearsals has changed from Byrd Hoffman’s earlier days. Sheryl Sutton, who has been working with Wilson since a Deafman Glance production in Iowa City in 1970, noticed the altered atmosphere in Einstein. Formerly people worked for a role somewhere between the forces they saw in the production and the tendencies they discovered in their own personalities. Einstein rehearsals felt to her more like exercises; Wilson selected from them the movements he thought would fit well into the opera. Undoubtedly one reason Wilson gets such good work out of theatrical amateurs is the attention he lavishes on bringing out qualities of movement particular to them.
From December to March 1976 daily rehearsals took place from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.: dance in the morning, music in the early afternoon, and staging from late afternoon to the evening. Often deGroat and Wilson could leave after conducting their rehearsals, but Glass’ playing was usually needed throughout the day. Arranged in numbered segments, the music was a palpable elastic metronome, the timepiece clocking all action onstage. During the actual performances Julia Gillet, production stage manager, was linked by headphones and walkie-talkie with assistants, to provide visual cues from a 59-page chart. Even so, all action was predicated by the sound. During the second trial scene, the jury is holding up its hands without their usual symmetrical style (in the first trial scene Wilson had the women jurors doodle circles and the men jurors doodle straight lines). The asymmetry stemmed from Wilson having granted them permission to use their fingers in helping them keep count of their complex singing patterns. Everyone, Wilson noted with satisfaction, moved fingers in different arrangements while keeping count of identical music.
Childs, who hadn’t worked in association with other performers since Judson Church collaborations in the ’60s, liked the stimulation of working with others. “The rehearsals left you open,” she said, “without putting a weight on you to produce something to be used.” Wilson talked with everyone about the sets—ideas on how the staging might ultimately look. Einstein’s life and ideas, kept in mind if not systematically discussed, were glossed lightly in performance. Clocks, compasses, a shout of “Berne 1906,” a couple of re-creations of the famous 1919 solar eclipse, whose starlight displacement supported the general theory of relativity, and even a demonstration with three, dancers and a triangular string of Lorenz transformations—all had their brief moment. Always, phenomena superseded formulae. “He kept everything active,” Childs told me. “He had a way of approaching things from different angles.” As she choreographed her “character on three diagonals” Wilson structured her movements into his stage scheme, having her move on certain parallel diagonal lines.
One of the opera’s finest images is the static pose of Marie Rice, who crouches on one foot at stage right, holding a conch shell to her ear. “Phil played the music,” Wilson said, “and everyone standing around said, ‘What do you want us to do?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I stood there for a long time, and that is how she naturally responded to the music. The first time she heard the music she went over and stood there on one foot. Marie had never seen my work before.” As rehearsals progressed, Wilson watched the performers refining particular gestures. When he saw one he liked, he asked them to add it to their gestural vocabulary. In the second train scene—the night train—the conch shell rests on the stage alone. Partway through the scene the stage lights dim. Among other alterations, Rice is now standing by the conch shell. She isn’t holding it; she is crouching with her hands by her ear. Much later in Einstein, the chorus is visible: as they sing they are again making gestures as directed by Wilson. The women are “holding a compass,” the men “steering a spaceship wheel.” Rice is, except for the seven-year-old Paul, the shortest member of the cast. But her motion, reflecting her pose of the early train scenes, stands out among all the activity onstage.
Rehearsals ended when Wilson flew to Italy to supervise scenery and prop construction by Broggi Brothers. A few performances were presented without sets: the knee plays at MoMA, Glass’ score at the Kitchen, and a benefit performance in late March at the Video Exchange. The cast flew to Avignon in July. There they rehearsed for several weeks to jog memories and grow accustomed to the sets, then gave five performances. Everyone took a vacation in August, toured Europe in September and October, and arrived back in New York to perform—thanks to some fortuitous connections—at the Met.
Edwin Denby once commented on an earlier Wilson production: “You can describe three images or four, or you can describe 30 or 40 of them if you have the time. . . . But what you can’t describe is the logical narrative connection. And the psychological connection.” Einstein’s tighter construction is slightly more accessible to description’s compression than Wilson’s earlier pieces. A few scenes, briefly:
The train sequences are staged largely on the diagonal bias. But in the same scene, Dana Reitz dances on the perpendicular, half crouched, followed by Sutton holding before her an unfolded newspaper. They zigzag along the floor’s invisible grid, as Childs executes a frenetic and fascinating series of paces, arm and hand movements on three diagonal lines, each further stage right, as plotted on the floor’s grid. Paul Mann, on a tower, tosses paper airplanes as Rice listens to her conch shell below. A train enters three times from stage left. It encroaches one-fourth, one-half and three-quarters across the stage.
The train’s entrances signal the introduction of the three musical themes which will appear in the train sequence. The third theme is a five-chord cadence, which also comprises much of the second, third, and fourth knee plays and the final spaceship scene. It modulates from the key of F-minor to the key of E-major by way of the third chord, which is a B^^bb^^-major in the key of F-minor and an A-major in the key of E-major. This ambiguity causes the phrase’s resolution to take place a half-step lower than the leading tone. Not truly “resolved,” the cadence moves across the spark gap between the two keys, a musical perpetual motion machine.
The night train, in the second scene of the train sequence, is on a diagonal aligned with the grid line on stage right. Though performers enact various rituals, the major stage action in 30 minutes is the slow pulling back of the train along its diagonal, until it is transformed, in the momentary darkness while the moon is eclipsed, into a smaller prop. In the final train scene, the train is actually a building, large, pink, painted on a drop in great detail. High up, behind a windowlike scrim, Rice is scribbling calculations on an invisible blackboard, as Richard Morrison had on the stage floor in preceding train scenes. Paul Mann skateboards across the 100-foot-wide stage, and stops stage center to gawk up at Rice. Eventually the other cast members join him to stare upward. Nothing happens and eventually they drift offstage left. Some more time passes and she descends out of view on an elevator platform. These three train scenes are the simplest in the opera, and their detail, which would require a catalogue for a full account, by far the most subtle.
The trial sequence accumulates images in its first scene, half of which drift offstage left in the middle of the second trial/prison scene, which opens Act III. Childs, alias debutante Patty Hearst, alias media revolutionary Tanya, delivers, sprawled on a giant lit de justice, a splendid soliloquy on bathing caps and supermarkets. And lo, in the final scene of this sequence the bed now glows with fluorescent light in velvet blackness. Suspended on hoists, it takes about 10 minutes to ascend to the fly space, assuming for a perilously long period of time a diagonal pose.
The first theme of the trial sequence is played by violinist Robert Brown, distinguished by an Einstein wig and mustache, and elevated in the orchestra pit to a level with the stage. He is playing a figure in 7/8 time; in Glass’ words, he “outlines an A-minor-seventh harmony. A simple additive process begins as each successive figure adds an eighth note. . . . The figure later contracts when the process is reversed, returning finally to its original form.”
This theme, and another, are extensively developed in the trial sequence (a third theme appears briefly in the trial/prison scene). The second theme accretes notes without reversing the process: growing to take up a long period of time for each held note. The theme’s chords are F-minor, E^^b^^-major, C-major, D-major, and they float in an ambiguous modulation. F-minor and E^^b^^-major are in one key; C-major is in another key; and D-major in a third key. As each chord succeeds the other, the organ’s bass pedal holds one long sustained note. The contradiction between shifting chords and sustained bass confuses the ear: are the chords in one key or three? It doesn’t clear things up that the four chords’ grouping is lopsided, ungainly. Though I suppose some people in the audience were overwhelmed by the bed’s ascension, I couldn’t figure out if the flying mattress was funny (Patty Hearst’s ultimate dream) or merely inflated theater. The music, anyway, keeps its sense of humor, if not proportion.
DeGroat’s two dance sections, the first two “fields,” differ in speed and geometry from the rest of the opera. Circular steps and arm movements extend from deGroat’s interest in dervish twirling (he and Julia Gusteau spun slowly throughout the entire A Letter for Queen Victoria). As none of the dancers have had similar training (quite a few no formal training at all) they each express the same movement very differently. They jump in place, make quarter turns, step in circles forward and backward, spin alone and spin each other around, with the individual energy deGroat encourages.
A spaceship (flying saucer variety) hovered over the first field dance. A larger (translation: closer) spaceship looms over the second dance. About 10 minutes into the scene the dancers begin about 11 minutes of improvisation. Like Wilson, deGroat defines improvisation as people using the vocabulary of gestures they have built up through rehearsal. The dances are not particularly related to the rest of the opera: their cheerfulness is a welcome bar of color.
In any decent space opera machines have to run amok, and Einstein is no exception. The spaceship’s interior provides the final scene’s set. Three tiers of lights silhouette the cast “working” the machine. The lights are patterned on a design Childs created for the rectangular drop behind the third knee play. The set closely resembles the Becks’ Frankenstein set made in the ’60s, though Wilson says he’d never seen the set. A tiny Flash Gordon spaceship ascends on a diagonal. Horizontal and vertical transparent elevators carry performers, a clock, and a compass. Sutton, then Wilson, both dressed in black clothes and carrying flashlights, perform a danse macabre on the diagonal. A performer leaps down on a rope. Tiers of lights flash in gorgeous geometry. Sutton and Childs climb out of bubbletop trapdoors. A scrim of an atomic explosion descends in front of everything. Glass’ organ plays chromatic scales,running up some queasy halftones between the sixth and seventh degrees. Then back to a knee play, the final one. It is set, as almost none of the other action is, in far stage right. From stage left Johnson enters in a bus. As Sutton and Childs sit on a bench, Johnson recites: “Two lovers sat on a park bench, with their bodies touching each other, holding hands in the moonlight. . . .”
Now and then in Einstein a quick movement is repeated more slowly later on. Three bars of light shoot down the back of the stage in the first train scene; in the bed scene the bar of light slowly rises. As Wilson has often repeated, when actions are slowed down, our spectrum of perception is radically altered. Einstein’s knee plays take this reduction to another dimension: developments elaborated in the scenes are honed in the knees to their simplest working parts. As Glass has written, the knee plays form a play in themselves.
Along with their function of connecting the opera’s parts, each knee’s internal actions articulate different kinds of connections to be found in Einstein. The first knee places Childs’ linear movements in contrast to Sutton’s expressive static gestures. In the second knee play Childs and Sutton sit, kneel to the floor, then sit again—all on the diagonal. The third exhibits movements upon a backdrop of diagrams designed by Childs of the wrists’, elbows’ and extended arms’ dimensions. In the fourth knee both performers dance lying horizontally on glass-topped tables. The entire stage is exposed in the fifth knee play; the two women are seated stage right, Johnson enters in his bus and makes a speech on stage left.
Musically the same strong interconnection takes place. The highly recognizable figures of the cadence theme, the chromatic scale passages, and the descending bass line are precisely and quietly arranged for violin (often solo), chorus (often a capella) and organ. Glass mentioned to me that the music for the knees was composed after all the other music for the opera was completed. I particularly enjoy that in the light of Glass writing of the knees: “They can also be seen as the seeds which flower and take form in the larger scenes.” As in all natural cycles, in science and in fiction, the time paradox provides in advance for its own fruition.
Ben Jonson wrote a splenatic satire on his former collaborator, Inigo Jones, with whom he had made many splendid masques. “Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque/Pack with your peddling poetry to the stage,” he put in Jones’ mouth. The huge sums royal patrons were willing to pay for a masque staged in their honor, with fabulous props and scenery, amateur (but noble) actors, and lots of music and dance, celebrated, as does Einstein, the joy of sheer invention. Jonson grew disgusted with Jones’ increasing reliance on special effects rather than subtle construction. Einstein’s pretentious brilliance has no objection to both sides of the coin, and neither, in the end, do I.
Barbara Baracks is a 1977 CAPS Fellow in fiction.
I’d like to thank Daryl Chin for his insights into Wilson’s work in relation to theater and dance, expressed in conversation with me and in his unpublished essay Let Us Now Praise. . . ., co-authored with Larry B. Qualls. I’d also like to thank Peter Gordon for his emergency musical consultation.
