Einstein on the Beach

Philip Glass's "Einstein on the Beach" is a five-hour opera without conventional narrative, story, or intermission — audiences were invited to come and go freely. Composed with director Robert Wilson in 1975 and 1976, it uses Einstein as a dreamlike symbolic figure: the train (relative motion, time), the trial, the spacecraft. The music is relentlessly additive, building structures from small numerical cells in Glass's distinctive arpeggiated organ-and-ensemble style. Vocalists sing solfège syllables and numbers rather than words, the text reduced to its most abstract phonetic materials. The cultural impact was seismic: two avant-garde figures collaborating on a massive scale, touring Europe and eventually performing at the Metropolitan Opera to sold-out audiences who had never attended opera before. The music itself is paradoxically both mechanical in its processes — patterns accumulate and repeat — and emotionally overwhelming in accumulation. Long sections of rapid arpeggiation build to release points of genuine intensity. For listeners new to Glass, it is bewildering and then, gradually, total. It demands a surrender of conventional listening expectations in exchange for an experience of musical time as landscape rather than journey.