Einstein on the Beach

Einstein on the Beach
Opera by Philip Glass
A 2012 production
Premiere	July 25, 1976 (1976-07-25) Avignon Festival

Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts (framed and connected by five "knee plays" or intermezzos), composed by Philip Glass and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson. The opera eschews traditional narrative in favor of a formalist approach based on structured spaces laid out by Wilson in a series of storyboards. The music was written "in the spring, summer and fall of 1975." Glass recounts the collaborative process: "I put [Wilson’s notebook of sketches] on the piano and composed each section like a portrait of the drawing before me. The score was begun in the spring of 1975 and completed by the following November, and those drawings were before me all the time." The premiere took place on July 25, 1976, at the Avignon Festival in France. The opera contains writings by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs. It is Glass's first and longest opera score, taking approximately five hours in full performance without intermission; given the length, the audience is permitted to enter and leave as desired.

The work became the first in Glass's thematically related Portrait Trilogy, along with Satyagraha (1979), and Akhnaten (1983). These three operas were described by Glass as portraits of people whose personal vision transformed the thinking of their times through the power of ideas rather than by military force.

Glass and Wilson first met to discuss the prospects of a collaborative work, and decided on an opera of between four and five hours in length based around a historical persona. Wilson initially suggested Charlie Chaplin or Adolf Hitler, whom Glass outright rejected, while Glass proposed Mahatma Gandhi (later the central figure of his opera Satyagraha). Albert Einstein was the eventual compromise.

Einstein on the Beach premiered on July 25, 1976, at the Avignon Festival in France, performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble and presented by the Byrd Hoffmann Foundation. The opera was also staged that summer in Hamburg, Paris, Belgrade, Venice, Brussels, Rotterdam. To realise a staging in New York, Glass and Wilson agreed to rent the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to hold two performances in November 1976. Lucinda Childs, Robert Wilson pupil Sheryl S. Sutton and Samuel M. Johnson filled the primary characters; all three reappeared in the 1984 BAM revival.