Opera behind the Myth: An Archival Examination of Einstein on the Beach.

Abstract

The celebrated 1976 European tour and sold-out Metropolitan Opera House performances of director Robert Wilson’s and composer Philip Glass’s opera EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH heightened its artists’ reputations and amplified public awareness of American musical minimalism. Previous studies have assumed EINSTEIN’s artistic value, focusing on technical aspects of its music and staging. This study instead examines the discursive construction of that value, drawing on European and American archival evidence, as well as oral history, to demystify the process by which an interdisciplinary “downtown” New York work became an internationally acclaimed avant-garde opera.

Primary and secondary documentation in the Robert Wilson Papers, New York University’s Downtown Collection, the New York Public Library, Metropolitan Opera and Brooklyn Academy of Music Hamm Archives, Bibliotèque nationale de France, and Maison Jean Vilar reveal the cooperative networks behind EINSTEIN’s 1976 production, 1984 New York revival, and 1992 and 2012 international tours. Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory and Howard Becker’s Art World method provide frameworks that address the social dimensions of art, offering new insight into the roles that SoHo-based artists like Lucinda Childs, Andrew de Groat, Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson, the Philip Glass Ensemble musicians, and Mabou Mines actors, organizations like the Byrd Hoffman Foundation and Performing Artservices, Inc., and French administrators like Michel Guy, Paul Puaux, and Ninon Tallon Karlweiss played in the work’s creation and success.

This dissertation tracks the promotional and critical use of the word “opera” to refer to the work, Glass’s and Wilson’s strategic deployment of avant-garde aesthetics, EINSTEIN’s collaborative creative process and authorial negotiations, and the cultural, political, and economic ramifications of its European (especially French) patronage. By focusing on the discursive dimensions of EINSTEIN’s early production and reception, this study investigates the social construction of canonicity. It also examines arts festivals as vehicles of cultural exchange, and the role of the avant-garde in cultural diplomacy between the U.S. and Europe during the American Bicentennial. In so doing, this study explores EINSTEIN’s substantial contribution to the cultural accreditation of the 1970s Lower Manhattan performing-arts scene, which continues to influence global vanguard art in the twenty-first century.