Philip Glass has written that he knew Samuel Beckett had taken theater to a different place when Glass scored Lee Breuer’s 1967 production of Play and found that emotional crisis points occurred in every performance but never in the same places. Ten years later, Glass’ first collaboration with Robert Wilson was a watershed realization of that sensibility (and one of the very few works I would gladly sit for five straight hours to see again). But the emotional nexus of Einstein is always in the same place: the penultimate
scene in which a bar of light resembling the image of a bed appearing in two previous scenes is here shown isolated on an otherwise dark stage lifted to a vertical position during an organ cadenza, and then slowly rises straight up into the flyspace to a scarifying wordless (and almost syllable-less) soprano aria. This was not part of the original plan. One day, somewhat late in the development of the show, Joan LaBarbara, who was vocalist for Glass’ ensemble, demanded that she be given an aria since Einstein was an opera and she was a “soprano diva.” So Glass did. Brecht would not have been Brecht if he had not cheated.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
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