ABSTRACT
This chapter will discuss how the spectacle of singing and speech in the opera Einstein on the Beach generates anonymous voice and an affective sense of indifference. I propose that the following aspects of the opera constitute the spectacle: (1) narrations and speech clusters mingling with the obsessively sung numbers and letters, (2) voices distributed to and manifested by various bodies of sound, image, and movement, and (3) a surface effect, which brings all of the previous aspects to the foreground. The spectacle and surface effect leads both to an exhaustion of a sensible order and to a loss in the accountability of narrative in the opera. I argue that such exhaustion and loss evokes a sense of indifference, a sense which emerges not as a case of apathy or numbness but as a case of hyper-attentiveness and attunement to precariousness of various forms of language, be it verbal, musical, and visual. Engendering this attunement, the opera mobilises Einstein as an anonymous voice before and beyond any given name or discursive attribution. That is to say, the spectacle of singing and speech gives a way to hearing serial, textural, and performative instances of multiple voices.
