Einstein on the Beach

Richard B. Gibson.
MH352WI Dr. Granade
Einstein on the Beach by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson
As an opera singer I find myself attracted to composers such as Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, Bizet and even Wagner. Needless to say these composers are some of the greatest ever to put pencil to paper. And their music is very well known amongst fellow opera singers. Yet I openly admit my lack of experience in what is called "New Music" simply because it is not in my repertoire. And so, when choosing the music for my final Listening Journal, I thought that Phillip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach would be a good choice for helping me expand my opera vocabulary.
When I listen to a new piece of music I first let my ears search out the texture, timbre, tempo, melody. Once the voice enters I listen for the timbre of the voice, the legato line, phrasing, dynamics, pitch accuracy, diction, placement of the voice and flexibility. In my personal opinion, if all of these elements are in order and executed well, it makes the most beautiful music in the world. Hence my appreciation for all of the great composers of the past. But when I listened to Einstein on the Beach I heard nothing resembling what I would consider good texture, or timbre in the instrumentation. It might have been because the most used instrument throughout the piece is the electric organ. Even when it was just the violin playing I feel that Glass took the beauty right out of the instrument with the lines that he wrote for it. Very fast and choppy most of the time with the same repeated theme over and over and over again. Truly, how long can a person listen to the same six-note theme repeated over and over again until the next scene? And then when the next scene starts the new repeated theme is just a variation on the old repeated theme. It gets very old, very quickly and all I want to do is switch it off, turn it back into the library and try to forget about ever hearing that cacophony of sound.
Glass wrote the four hour and forty minute opera for the electric organ, violin, flute and voice, to include a sixteen-strong chamber choir, soprano and tenor soloists in four acts and five "knee plays."(A knee play being a brief interlude that also provides time for scenery changes.) The electric organ acts as the main source of sound for most of the opera with the flute never playing alone, as to say that there always are more than one flute playing at a time. One of the most interesting features of the instrumentation is how Glass uses the violin. The violinist is actually dressed up as Albert Einstein and Glass openly admits that the violin has the most important musical material, though he never ways why. Personally I think it is because when Glass and Wilson got together to write an opera they wanted to write about the life of a historic figure. They passed up Ghandi, Chaplin and Hitler to finally settle on Einstein. And with Einstein being the main character I think they wanted the most important music to be coming from that character as well.
It is rather difficult to discern the plot in Einstein on the Beach. The opening is the electric organ playing the same six-note theme repeated over and over again. To give you a sense of how redundant it gets Glass originally had the opening scene at forty minutes, but since he was going to put it on LP discs he simply reduced the number of repeats and cut it down to just over twenty minutes. The text consists of numbers and solfege syllables. Cryptic poems are also used; the catch being that they are from Christopher Knowles. Mr. Knowles is not a great librettist. He is a young, neurologically impaired man with whom Mr. Wilson has worked with in the past as an instructor of disturbed children. I am not saying that disturbed children cannot write great works, but when I am used to listening to operas with great librettists I find myself greatly disappointed in the choice of Glass and Wilson to use these cryptic poems. They talk about going to the grocery store and how stealing is a crime, then it switched to robbing a bank is punishable by spending twenty years if federal prison. I find it very difficult to be moved by having this same statement repeated time and again. Also, now is the audience supposed to know that the references made about bank robbery are about Patricia Hearst who was on trail for bank robbery during the creation of the opera? What makes it even more confusing is that just after this Glass brings in the numbers being repeated, no higher than eight though. In the next scene the vocals are now solfege syllables. Not the most brilliant writing as you can tell. In the defense of Glass and Wilson, they do attempt to combine the aural works of Glass with the visual works of Wilson to tell the story of Einstein. I might have gotten more out of my experience if I could have watched it, but something tells me that even if I saw it live I would have walked out after ten minutes.
Listening to the greatest composers of opera I find myself doubting that they had a mathematical system for each theme they used. I personally think that they stayed within the confines of proper musical theory and at the same time pushed the boundaries to create new sounds that still take the audiences breath away. Glass, however, does not use this technique. To write this opera he uses two techniques that he developed during the 1960’s: additive process along with cyclic structures. Additive process is the expansion and contraction of small musical modules (five notes repeated, then six notes repeated, then seven notes repeated, etc.) What this is supposed to do is allow a simple figure to maintain the same melodic idea while at the same time tampering with the rhythm. These are all supposed to arrive back at the starting points all together and that will equal a complete cycle, hence the cyclic structures. To me, comparing the old classics to Glass’ Einstein on the Beach the mathematical structure that he uses simply does not add up. There is no solid continuity, legato is apparently a thing of the past, the singers do not have to use a good vocal technique to be able to produce the sounds, and the texture throughout is very thin. Einstein on the Beach, in no way, should this be allowed into the Classical Music Canon. I do not believe that it even qualifies as music. That is a point that musicians can argue and debate for centuries, but the only moving of the soul that it does is one of confusion and wonder. Not wonder in the awe-inspiring way, wonder in the way that you wonder what was going through his head when he composed this.
Delving more deeply in the structure of this opera Glass and Wilson use three recurring visual themes throughout the entire four acts, the Train, Trail and Field. The first theme is the "Train," and it is based upon the super-imposition of two shifting rhythmic patterns. One is fixed while the other shifts around. There is an addition to the Train, and that is the Night Train. All that Glass does to change it up is reworks the Train a bit and layers more voices on top of it. I’m still wondering what the Trial is referring to, although it does and an actor that plays a judge in it. What the Field refers to a nuclear holocaust symbolizing what could happen, and did happen in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, due to the theories of Einstein that lead to the splitting of the atom. That is the only part of the opera where you can openly see a plot. The rest of it is a bit too hazy, if you will, on what the plot is about.
With all of the aspects of this opera, the weak libretto, the thin texture, the lack of skill needed in the voices and the fact that the main character is a violin it was extremely hard for me to listen to the whole work. I found the electric organ playing the same notes over and over again in my ear to be so distracting that I would put my headphones down and take a breather. Then when I felt like I might miss something I was afraid to put them back on. Expecting, and praying to God, to hear something different I was constantly let down. It was almost as bad a car alarm that won’t shut off in the middle of the night. I do consider myself to be more "old-fashioned" in my musical taste, so this was a completely different project than what I have ever been used to before. If you enjoy the type of music that Phillip Glass is known for, then you might enjoy this. It is different from anything he had done before it. He is quoted as saying:
"In its own way, the pre-Einstein music, rigorous and highly reductive, was more
‘radical’ in its departure from the received tradition of Western music that what I have written since. But as I had been preoccupied at the point with that more radical-sounding music for over ten years, I felt I could add little more to what I had already done. Again, it is surely no coincidence that it was at the moment that I was embarking upon a major shift in my music to large-scale theater works that I began to develop a new, more expressive language for myself."
Although he thought he might be reaching a pinnacle in his expressiveness, I wish he had not. I find it obtrusive to my ear and nowhere near being in the category of "Music." It didn’t take very much skill to repeat the same six-note theme time and time again. The melodic line, well, there was none, and I apologize if this offends but an opera without a melodic line is not an opera. My ears will hopefully never hear this work, Einstein on the Beach, ever again. Furthermore, I suggest that if you see it on a book shelve to purchase or listen to that you run away as fast as you can. This should not be in the Canon and should be stripped of the title ‘Opera.’
Tim Page. ‘Einstein on the Beach’. Grove Music Online, 2008