Einstein on the Beach ― Opera Beyond Drama

Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its première at the Avignon Festival in 1976. During its initial European tour, Metropolitan Opera premiere, and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein provoked opposed reactions from both audiences and critics. Today, Einstein is well on the way itself to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, and it is widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater. Einstein created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking concerning the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression more broadly. Reaching beyond opera, its influence was felt in audiovisual culture in general: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theatre and many other expressive, commercial and cultural spheres. Inspired by the 2012-2013 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as part of the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Essays range from those that focus on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and post-human character of the opera’s expressive substance. A further valuable dimension is the inclusion of material taken from several recent interviews with the Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs, each of these sections comprising Knee Plays, or short intermezzo sections resembling those found in the opera Einstein on the Beach itself.

Jelena Novak works in the area of musicology, opera studies, performance studies, dramaturgy and criticism. She is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CESEM, New University of Lisbon with the project Opera beyond Drama?. She has been a founding Committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and founding member of editorial collective TkH [Walking Theory]. In 2013 she won the Thurnau Award for Music-Theatre Studies. Her books include Opera u doba medija (Opera in the Age of Media) and Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body. John Richardson is Professor and Chair of Musicology at the University of Turku in Finland and a specialist in cultural musicology, avant-garde music, popular music studies and audiovisual studies. His publications include An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford University Press 2011), Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (eds. Richardson, Gorbman & Vernallis 2013), The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (eds. Vernallis, Herzog & Richardson 2013), and Essays on Sound and Vision (eds. Richardson & Hawkins; Gaudeamus 2007), His work is widely known and cited, he has given keynote presentations in several countries and held honorary positions including Chair of the Finnish Society for Musicology and Director of the International Institute for Popular Culture (IIPC).