ABSTRACT
Einstein on the Beach confounded audiences’ understanding of opera as a musical form when it was first performed at the Avignon Festival in July 1976. Since then it has continued to elude categorization and evade meaning. Glass and Wilson’s own reflections have done much to uphold this notion, with Glass once claiming that: “It hardly mattered what you thought Einstein on the Beach might ‘mean’.” Audiences attending performances of the opera will no doubt impart their own set of meanings upon it. However, this chapter attempts to read the opera through the lens of Glass and Wilson’s own formative experiences of mid-century European theater. Concepts associated with the theater of Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet, such as estrangement, fragmentation, irony and personalization, will be applied to the opera in order to provide the reader with a series of perspectives in which to better understand the opera’s aesthetic and expressive language from the perspective of the creators themselves. Finally, an analysis of the function of the music’s role in the five Knee Plays, which act as scaffolding structures across the opera’s four acts, will serve to support this reading.
