Philip Glass - Einstein on the Beach (Geneva, 2019)
Grand Théâtre de Genève, 2019
Titus Engel, Daniele Finzi Pasca, Jess Gardolin, Stéphane Gentilini, Andrée-Anne Gingras-Roy, Evelyne Laforest, Francesco Lanciotti, David Menes, Marco Paoletti, Félix Salad, Beatriz Sayad, Allegra Spernanzoni, Roland Tarquini, Micol Veglia, Melissa Vettore
GTG Digital
You don't see a new production of Einstein on the Beach in an opera house programme very often but it's always an exciting prospect, even if you imagine that it's going to have a hard time to live up to its original visualisation and collaboration between its creators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs. Glass's most experimental and original opera has already proven it is still a force to be reckoned with in revival, but if Einstein on the Beach is to ever have any kind of extended life - and despite the lasting impression it has made so far its legacy is by no means assured - it needs to be seen whether it can stand up on its own merit without the hand of its creators involved.
Knowing how to approach a new production is an unenviable task because one of the more unusual characteristics of Einstein on the Beach as an opera is that it doesn't exactly have a plot to follow. Despite its unconventionality and lack of adherence to almost any of the rules of what we consider to be essential to opera, it does however have most of the basic components in their purest form. It offers up music as purely music with no relationship to any dramatic or emotional context, it provides drama without a narrative, the words operating as mere text that convey little in the way of meaning, while the stage design and dance are there to provide a visual reference for the space and movement to add another dimension to the music. Einstein on the Beach is intended to be a spectacle for the eyes and the ears, a five-hour flow of rhythm and repetition, the audience invited to enter and leave as they liked. As this was something Philip Glass and his Ensemble were quite used to people walking out of some of their earliest performances, it made sense to make this an acceptable part of his first opera.
Somehow, whether it was the mere fact of hanging this all onto a title like Einstein on the Beach, or some of the imagery that Robert Wilson provided to work in conjunction with the music, the work seemed to acquire a significance of its own. Glass's music does have the ability to establish a strong bond with images, as evidenced by his collaborative efforts with Godfrey Reggio on the soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi, which this opera is closer to in conception than the other operas in what would become known as the Portrait Trilogy (with Satyagraha and Akhnaten). It captures the pace of modern life, the rhythm of life itself, science, technology, progress, time, the repeated rhythms measuring out the idea of life changing gradually and almost imperceptibly over time but very much changing and gathering pace.
Since there are many ways of expressing that idea, Daniele Finzi Pasca and his company obviously find their own way to explore what Einstein on the Beach means and how it can be developed. The long ten minute opening Prologue, played as the audience are still entering the theatre and taking their seats, consists of three descending notes on an electronic organ repeated with slightly variations in the length, while a woman recites random numbers between 1 and 3000. You can find yourself searching for a pattern, and maybe even find one, but more than anything it creates a trance-like state where the mind is gradually cleansed of any such attempts at rationalisation or search for meaning. It just expects you to accept and appreciate the simplicity of three notes played together with random numbers recited and it is indeed utterly entrancing. A figure dressed like Albert Einstein then joins the woman during the first Knee Play (one of the connecting pieces between scenes) reciting meaningless cut-up text, the chorus then taking up a one-two-three-four repetition that speeds up to Glass's racing rhythms while a red shiny curtain billows behind them.
It sounds completely pointless in description yet utterly entrancing to watch and enter into a receptive rather than passive state that the music creates. This first scene hints that the director Daniele Finzi Pasca is following in the simplicity of Improbable, the production company of Phelim McDermott, a director with a strong affinity for Glass's music who often finds inventive ways of representing it on stage. Finzi Pasca creates a visual language of his own that reacts to the music and sets off other associations rather then rely on Robert Wilson's. There's no 'Train' scene, instead we have Einstein at a desk, dancers, a remote controlled toy plane, and possibly in reference to Vittorio de Sica's Miracle in Milan and Bicycle Thieves there's a floating bike on a wire, a woman in a wedding dress and a groom in white. All of this builds a loose visual narrative that the audience are free to bring together into a meaning of their own.
There's no 'Trial' scene either and some of the libretto monologues are cut or reduced to take the opera down from five hours to four. The 'Mr Bojangles' monologue is recited by a performer within a flickering glow of a rotating spiral array of neon pillars against a deep blue background (the closest this gets to iconic Wilson imagery) with figures moving walking across in slow rhythmic movements, the floating bike reappears as the scene transitions into a badminton game on beach with deck chairs for the 'Paris/All Men Are Equal' scene (although the 'Paris' text is moved to Act 4). A mermaid floats above and it is all observed on the beach by Einstein, which is as close to literal as this interpretation comes, but it also shows that this is a work that has imagery and ideas that are infinitely adaptable.
Any further description of the differences and disconnect between what we might expect to see is rather pointless, as you're doubtless beginning to grasp, since it doesn't illuminate any kind of narrative or conceptual coherence, employing images inspired by the music with no rhyme or reason. Cutting evidently has no real impact on any narrative or meaning, merely swapping some of the irritating nonsense texts for irritating ideas and nonsense of its own. There's no 'House', 'Spaceship' or 'Train' but there are Bullfighters and Buddhist Monks. The Compagnia Finzi Pasca production is what it is; music and visuals, shadow plays, projections, acrobatics, trompe d'oeil and fantastical images with a few recurrent themes mostly involving a kind of transcendental levitation, flying and floating (gravity?). It's not always gripping but that's the nature of this work, you are free to make up your own connections or not as you choose, and you can always (in theory) walk out during the bits when nothing much happens for ages (I zoned out at the appearance of bullfighters in Act 4 'Bed/Aria' here).
Familiarity with the music actually adds another level of fascination as you are anticipating the length of each repeated phrase waiting on the next change to kick in. It still holds you rapt, which when you consider that there is no narrative or meaning to grasp and a lot of repetition, is quite an achievement. That's a testament also to conductor Titus Engel, the orchestra made up of music students of the Haute école du musique de Genève and the indefatigable efforts of the chorus that they are able to keep this together for four hours without a pause. The challenges posed by Einstein on the Beach are like no other and seeing it performed like this really does underline what an incredible achievement it is.
But does the opera have the capacity to be renewed beyond its 1970s origins and outlive its creators? Well, personally I don't think the Geneva production is a patch on Robert Wilson's original, but evidently going ahead it's Wilson's contribution as co-author that is always going to be left behind. Whether there's any life left in Minimalism is a matter in the hands of posterity, but there seems to be little doubt that, as Phelim McDermott has demonstrated for his other operas, Philip Glass's music is capable of inspiring new and creative responses. It's the largely unchanging force behind this enormously original and still totally absorbing work of opera, and yes it still remains opera. Great opera endures and 45 years haven't been bad to Einstein on the Beach.
Links: Grand Théâtre de Genève, GTG Digital
