Philip Glass interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg
In September of last year the Melbourne Festival showcased Philip Glass's and Robert Wilson's 'music theatre' master· piece, Einstein on the Beach: for many, the most important piece of postmodern avant-garde theatre since Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Premiered at the Avignon Festival in 1976, Einstein has been revived only twice by the original cast-first, in 1986, in New York, and in 1992, as a world-wide tour including Melbourne, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Barcelona and Madrid.
An epic four and a half hour spectacle, informally prefaced by contemplative solos by Glass during the half-hour before its performance formally begins, Einstein is propelled in all directions by Glass's music; by Wilson's dazzlingly hallucinatory panoramic sets; by the hyp· notic physical and verbal precision of dancers Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton (both original cast members of Einstein and veterans of Wilson's other productions); and by the breathtakingly choreographed movement and articulation of Einstein's other assorted dancer· singers, as gesture, song, music, monologue, dialogue and scenic detail glow together in slow motion, or abruptly unfreeze in intervals of maximum momentum.
At first glance, it is tempting to think of Einstein as a precursor of much of the rapid, illusionistic editing of MTV's increasingly sophisticated video clips. But as Philip Glass suggests in the following interview, one of the most singular qualities of Einstein is not so much its indiscriminate acceleration of image flow, as its subtle deceleration of action and pace, and its overall sense of coherent wholeness and unrushed continuity-qualities seldom envinced by the commercial, three-minute logic of MTV. Still more tellingly perhaps, if Einstein still retains its freshness of impact six· teen years after its first performance, then as Glass suggests, this... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline