"Paris"
by David Stevens
With the home team showing off in the U.S., the
Paris opera season was launched by Robert Wilson's and
Philip Glass' "Einstein on the Beach," given nine
performances at the Opera Comique under the avant-garde
aegis of the Festival d'Automne and the Semaines
Musicales Internationales de Paris.
"Einstein" is an opera mainly because Wilson
and Glass say so, but more convincingly because it has
a score by Glass that runs for the full four-and-a-half
hours plus, contributing powerfully to the work's
cumulative mystical-mesmeric-dramatic effect. There is
no chance for conventional vocal display - the principal
performer, Lucinda Childs, is primarily a dancer - but
most of the seventeen listed actors double or triple as
dancers and choral singers; the eight musicians include
a woman vocalist.
"Einstein" is a dreamlike, almost bubliminal
study of themes from the life and times of the great
scientist. There are some overt references - notably a
violinist (Robert Brown), made up as Einstein, who has
some extended cadenzas to play - but many more are
addressed to the subconscious. The work moves in an
inexorable "lentissimo," animated by a proliferation
of mini-events, a huge theatrical machine propelled by
feverishly spinning inner parts.
The music, played by Glass' own ensemble in
his established idiom of a busy succession of notes
suspended in static and repetetive patterns, had a
quasi-Oriental hypnotic effect that aptly complemented
Wilson's slow-motion time scale. The musicians
occasionally joined in onstage.
The basic structure is of three visual images
seen three times each in various transformations for
a total of nine scenes, divided into four acts and
further separated, or articulated, by five intermezzo-
like transitions that Wilson calls "kneeplays." The
images are a train - a large cartoon locomotive that
appears at the beginning and the end, a rear view of
the train disappearing in the distance, finally its
transformation into a building inside which a character
feverishly does calculations; a trial scene with jury,
wigged judges, witness box and an immense glowing bed
that finally soars slowly into the flies; finally a
field and spaceship - at first the field is full of
dancers whirling dizzily with flower-child exuberance
(choreographer Andrew de Groat) as the spaceship hovers
above, evolving into a dehumanized fantasy interior of
the spaceship. A kind of climax is provided by a drop
curtain that seems to represent a nuclear explosion,
suggesting Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" as a title
reference, but it is softened by idyllic kneeplay.
At the October 6 performance, the Halle Favart
was well filled with a relaxed and attentive audience.
Spectators would walk out for an intermission not
offered by Wilson and Glass, then return, sometimes
applauding one or another of Wilson's stage effects
(some of which severely taxed the Comique's resources)
and rewarding all with a warm ovation.
(
geocities.com/vienna)