Einstein on the Beach

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June 2013

Peter Tregear

Towns which lie at the end of train lines tend to get a bad rap – indeed the very phrase ‘end of the line’ has become a common euphemism for decline or death.

For a brief moment in the late 1950s, however, just such a town became the toast of Australia when Frankston was chosen for a day’s filming of Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach. The then sleepy seaside suburb could boast the presence of Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Gregory Peck, among other Hollywood luminaries. Ironically, the film they were shooting was in fact about the end of the world, even if Ava Gardner appears never to have exclaimed (as a persistent urban myth would have it), that the city of Melbourne and its outskirts were the ideal setting for such a subject. The film was based on a 1957 novel of the same name by British author Nevil Shute and deals with the after-effects of a catastrophic nuclear war, the omnipresent apocalyptic fear that gripped the world in the Cold War years (and before the rise of popular consciousness about global warming).

Almost fifty-five years later, Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) is returning to Melbourne for a season of five performances between July 31 and August 4 (the work received its Australian premiere in Melbourne in 1992). The allusion to the film in its title is deliberate as the opera is inspired in part by the same historical and cultural context, recast to focus upon one of its most iconic figures. ‘As a child, Einstein had been one of my heroes,’ the composer reflected in his book Music By Philip Glass (Harper and Row, 1987). ‘Growing up just after World War II, as I had, it was impossible not to know who he was; at the same time, the ‘emphatic, if catastrophic, beginnings of the nuclear age’ which his ideas heralded ‘had made atomic energy the most widely discussed issue of the day.’

Unlike On the Beach, however, the opera is conceived in a radically new way. Simply put, it is essentially without plot as we might commonly understand it and, performed without interval, audiences are welcome to leave their seats for a break at any time during its roughly four-and-a-half hour running time. Indeed Wilson has argued that its character amounted to a complete break with how traditional theatre is usually conceived, declaring that ‘we put together the opera the way an architect would build a building. The structure of the music was completely interwoven with the stage action and with the lighting. Everything was all of a piece.’

This was in part the outcome of a creative process that from the very outset intensely collaborative, not just between Wilson and Glass but also involving some of the original performers, such as choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs (who also provided some of the script). One result is that, unlike traditional opera, Wilson’s staging, and Childs’ dance movement have become nigh inseparable from the work itself. Indeed, Einstein on the Beach is a piece for which Richard Wagner’s term Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’) seems particularly apt.

Glass, Wilson and Childs are all returning to Melbourne for these new performances, although Childs has now retired from stage work to concentrate entirely on the choreography. In conversation her speech reflects elements of her choreographic style – ideas are expressed in short staccato phrases that yet invite deep reflection. While she has no problem with the term ‘minimalist’ to describe her work, she rejects the idea that the effect should be the induction of a trance-like effect in the audience. Instead, her concise physical forms ask us to recalibrate our normal ways of understanding movement and time. The minimalist frame simply provides the temporal context that makes this possible.

“When push comes to shove,” she says, “the whole choreography is inspired by the music, the systemic additions and subtractions of the score are perfectly matched by the addition and subtraction of dancers.” By the same token once seen in the theatre, the music of Einstein on the Beach seems equally to be inexorably tied to the sequences of images and movements that accompany it.

The sung and spoken texts typically take the tiniest of units – a sequence of numbers, or solfege syllables, and seek to draw our attention to their abstract ‘thing in themselves’ quality – something we might imagine could be mirrored in the way a mathematician/musician like Einstein might have actually thought. Numbers and patterns are, after all, the basic working material of theoretical physics. In any event, the theatre that results is surprisingly powerful. The sequence in Act IV, Scene 2, for instance, where a large bar of white light on a black background slowly ascends into the air, received a standing ovation at the first performance at the Metropolitan Opera in November 1976.

Ultimately, abstract intellectual endeavours cannot avoid engaging with the everyday world we inhabit and the same is true for Einstein on the Beach which, in this respect, is not just ‘minimalist’ but also ‘post-modern’. The style of music itself can’t but allude to the repetitive forms common to some popular music. Spoken texts draw on material from the trial of Patty Hearst (underway during the period of the work’s genesis) as well as works of the savant poet Christopher Knowles, and the song Mr. Bojangles. And then there is the figure of Einstein himself, represented on stage as a violinist (which indeed he was), who may well have been the founder of a new branch of theoretical physics, but he was also a pop cultural icon. Ultimately Einstein’s ideas opened up not just new fields of scientific endeavour, but also new ways in which we could annihilate each other.

Whatever we might think of the ‘great man’ thesis of history, it continues to inspire great art. For Glass himself, the opera signalled the start of a trilogy of works that celebrated world-historical figures: Satyagraha (1980) which explored the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and Akhnaten (1983) which charted the rise and fall of the Pharaoh who first tried to introduce monotheism to the world. The composer has since declared that ‘should the three operas be performed within a fairly narrow time span (within the same week, for example) I believe their internal connection will become increasingly obvious and provide the audience with a coherent musical and theatrical experience.’

That, however, would be a truly mammoth undertaking, one that would dwarf the challenges confronting Melbourne in mounting Wagner’s Ring. We can though, consider ourselves still fortunate that we’re getting to see a production of Einstein on the Beach only a few weeks after Victorian Opera’s new production of Nixon in China. These are certainly no ‘end of line’ works; both are ultimately, indeed, about journeys to new places. For the former, this was the epochal visit of President Richard Nixon to communist China in 1972. For the latter it was about a journey of the scientific imagination, but no less influential for that. The Melbourne season of Nixon in China was a justly deserved critical and popular success. If the return of Einstein on the Beach to the Arts Centre in July/August gets close to the power of the performances that occurred there twenty-one years earlier, I’d confidently predict it will be too.

Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach is performed at Arts Centre, Melbourne, from July 31 to August 4.

artscentremelbourne.com.au