The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · an opera in four acts, music by Glass, design, direction and the scheme of images by Wilson, with texts by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs · nine scenes framed and joined by five knee plays, played without an interval; music, texts and staging scored as one work · about four and a half hours in the theatre
Mode
Opera without plot or characters; music, image, movement and spoken text on equal terms, built of repetition with slow change
Mythos
Einstein as the century’s figure: the scientist as fiddler beside a train, a court, a bed and a spaceship; ascent and catastrophe
Phase
Nine scenes in four acts, framed and joined by five knee plays; three families of image, train, trial and field, each given three times and transformed the third time
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in four acts, music, texts and staging scored as one work, played without an interval, the audience free to come and go
Register
From a chorus counting and singing solfège to a wordless soprano over organ, a solo violin, found speech, a judge’s speech and the full ensemble at its fastest
Scale
An amplified ensemble of organs and winds, solo soprano, solo violin, small chorus, actors and dancers; about four and a half hours
Governing Proposition
Four acts of trains, trials and a field, joined by five knee plays and played without an interval for about four and a half hours while the audience comes and goes: no story, no characters, a chorus counting, a violinist dressed as Einstein. The wager of the work is that attention has a shape in time, that the same thing heard and seen for long enough becomes a different thing, and that a century of relativity and the bomb can be given as images rather than argued.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins before it begins. While the audience is still finding its seats, the first knee play is under way: the chorus counting, number after number, over a slow three-note bass in the organ. There is no overture, and there will be no interval. What follows runs about four and a half hours in the theatre, and the audience is free to leave and return as it likes. The convention is part of the work. It admits that no listener will hold every minute, and asks instead for attention of another kind, the kind that drifts and comes back and finds the thing changed.
The architecture is exact. Nine scenes stand in four acts, and five knee plays frame and join them: one before the first act, one between each act and the next, one after the last. Knee play is Wilson’s term, the joints of the body lent to the joints of an evening. Across the nine scenes three families of image recur: a train, a trial, and a field where dancers move under a distant spaceship. Each is given three times, and the third time it is transformed. The train becomes a building, the trial’s bed becomes a beam of light, the field becomes the inside of the machine.
The forces are an amplified ensemble of electric organs or synthesizers with flutes, saxophones and bass clarinet, a solo soprano, a small chorus, actors and dancers, and a solo violinist dressed as Einstein, who plays between the stage and the pit. He is the work’s one figure, and he is not a character. He plays; the century goes past him. The chorus sings numbers and solfège syllables, and the texts, spoken, were made by three people who were not librettists: Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs.
Movement II
Act I opens on the train. Lucinda Childs crosses the stage on a diagonal, back and forth, for the length of the scene. Shortened, it would be a dance number. At its length it becomes a span of time spent watching one body turn, and the turn, repeated, changes as attention changes: what was a gesture becomes a measure, then a landscape, then simply the scene. Her monologue tells of being in a “prematurely air-conditioned supermarket”, a phrase from ordinary life set loose inside the image.
The trial follows: a courtroom with a bed in it and a clock, a judge’s speech by Johnson, and Knowles’s text on “Mr. Bojangles”, the song turned into word-pattern. Knowles’s texts are made of found phrases from radio and song, cut and permuted the way the music cuts and permutes its cells; one, “These are the days”, recurs across the evening. The trial is of nobody for nothing. There is no defendant and no verdict, only the forms of judgement and the comedy of speech running on.
This is where the work is loosest. The trial scenes, the one in Act I and the trial and prison of Act III, run long in text play that adds little after its first turns, and their verbal comedy keeps a looser rule than the music beneath it. Johnson’s speeches are narrative, even sentimental, in a work that otherwise refuses narrative. They are given as repeated material, like everything else here, and that answers most of the strain. Not all of it.
Movement III
Act II opens in the field, and the field is where the music shows its law most plainly. A cycle of closely related minor and major chords turns and returns on itself, and over it the additive and subtractive processes lengthen and shorten the figures a note at a time. After so much sameness, a change of one chord registers as an event. Childs’s choreography, made for the revival of 1984 and kept since, sets the dancers spinning and crossing on the cycle in a rigorous geometry, and the height here is kinetic: joy by motion alone.
Above the dancers, small and far off, hangs a spaceship. Then the night train. In Act III the field returns, and the spaceship is nearer. Nothing is said about it, and nothing needs to be. The image is set like a note held under a melody, and its approach is the plot the work does not otherwise have. Each family moves across the evening in its own time, and the knee plays between the acts keep the whole articulated: a body with joints, not a row of pieces.
The fourth act turns the families. The train stands up as a building, and over the pulse a saxophone plays, a grandeur cold and industrial. The music’s processes and the stage’s slow transformations are one procedure in two media: a cell repeated with slow change, an image returned with slow change. Played in the concert hall, the score becomes a suite of minimalist pieces, which is what the recordings are. In the theatre it is a single form, and the form is what it knows.
Movement IV
The trial’s bed becomes the work’s quiet summit. The organ plays a solo cadenza, and then a soprano sings an aria without words, while a horizontal bar of light, lying where the bed lay, slowly rises to the vertical and then ascends. It takes minutes. Nothing else happens, and that is the point: duration made felt as an event, a rising so slow that the watching of it becomes the drama.
Then the Spaceship, from inside. The full ensemble plays at its fastest, the chorus at its loudest, light and machinery fill the stage, and the field dances’ joy, carried on the same chord cycle, turns into catastrophe. The catastrophe arrives as exhilaration. It is widely read as nuclear, and the Einstein of the title makes the reading hard to refuse, but the work names nothing. The bomb is an image the audience supplies.
Here the work’s refusal costs it. Einstein is a figure at a violin, not a man disclosed; the apocalypse has no protagonist; nobody undergoes what the images show. The icons of the century, the scientist, the train, the court, the bed and the machine, are set side by side and transformed, but they do not act on one another, and the law never judges the scientist. What the work offers in place of statement is a condition of attention. It is a great one, and a condition of attention is not yet a truth about one.
Movement V
Knee Play 5 closes the evening, and after the catastrophe it is small. Under the counting chorus and the violin, a bus driver, in Johnson’s text, tells the story of two lovers on a park bench. It is tender and banal, and it is the last thing said. Against the end of the world the work sets a plain human scale, and the scale holds. The counting that began while the audience was finding its seats is still going.
The first performance was at the Avignon Festival on 25 July 1976. The production toured in Europe and was given twice at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York that November, the company having hired the house. Its makers staged it again in 1984, 1992 and 2012, after gaps of eight, eight and twenty years, and between those revivals the music lived in recordings, in 1979 and 1993, and in the concert hall. Its demands, the length, an expert ensemble and Wilson’s stage, keep it out of the ordinary repertory. Productions by other directors have since shown that it can live without its first staging.
Its reach is in what came after. It made Glass an opera composer, and Satyagraha and Akhnaten followed; it opened the road by which John Adams’s Nixon in China and a generation of post-minimalist opera reached the major houses; it made Wilson’s theatre of images an international form. The houses took its sound more readily than its form. Fifty years on, the form is still the thing: an opera made of the same thing, heard and seen for long enough to become another.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets a work whose material is repetition, and asks whether its durations are required. In large part they are. The Act I diagonal is the scene: shortened, it would become a dance number rather than a span of time spent watching one body cross and return. The knee plays cannot go, since without them the acts would be separate pieces, and each family of images needs its third appearance, because the third is the first two transformed. Length is not charged. What holds the axis is give the test finds: the Trials, Act III above all, run long in text play that adds little after its first turns; much of the staging keeps a slow tempo for its own sake; and the convention that lets the audience leave and return admits that not every minute is compelled.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Disclosure through sound and image is credited, and part of it can be stated: attention itself has a shape in time, and the century of relativity and the bomb was lived as images of trains, courts and machines, not as argument. The Bed, a bar of light rising for minutes, makes duration felt as an event. The Spaceship turns the field dances’ joy into catastrophe, and Knee Play 5 answers it with a bus driver’s tender, ordinary story of two lovers on a bench: a human scale set against the end. That is a meaning, not only a mood. What holds the axis is refusal on principle. Einstein is a figure at a violin, not a man disclosed; the trial is of nobody for nothing. Much of what the work gives is a state of attention, not a truth about one.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Height is real and recurs. The Spaceship is the sublime of terror and speed: the full ensemble at its fastest, the chorus at its loudest, light and machinery filling the stage, the catastrophe arriving as exhilaration. The Bed is the quiet height, an organ cadenza and a wordless soprano under a rising beam, transport by slowness. The field dances rise by kinetic joy, dancers spinning on the cycle; the Building’s saxophone over the pulse is grandeur of another kind; the violin’s knee plays are intimate. Frequency is held by design. The Trials are wit and attrition, and long stretches ask the listener to wait for elevation rather than giving it: a work of four and a half hours that rises five or six times.
Score: 8.6 / 10
There is construction here, not only allusion. Einstein is made a figure of the century: the scientist as fiddler, whose thought experiments ran on trains and clocks, set beside a trial for judgement, a bed for sleep and death, and a spaceship for ascent and destruction. The scheme builds these into a cycle. Each image returns transformed: the train becomes a building, the bed a beam of light ascending, the field the inside of the machine. The particular stays vivid in Childs’s pipe, the clock, the lovers on the bench. Held below the gate because the images are icons placed side by side, not an archetype the work enacts. Nobody undergoes anything: the trial has no defendant, the apocalypse no protagonist.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is opera with plot, characters, an orchestra in the pit, arias and intervals. The departures came at once: no plot and no characters in the operatic sense; an amplified ensemble of organs and winds for an orchestra; a chorus singing numbers and solfège; texts of found speech and word-pattern by a teenager, a retired man and a dancer; four and a half hours without an interval, the audience free to come and go; dance and image weighed with music. The stake was real: the company hired the Metropolitan Opera House to set it before the opera audience. Held below the top because each component had precedent, in Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin and the Judson dancers. The swerve is the joining.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that the same thing seen and heard for long enough becomes a different thing. Only a long form of slow change in repeated cells can make that a fact rather than a report. Cut to concert length, it becomes a suite of minimalist pieces, which is what the recordings are. The three families of images in three appearances each are a theme and variations in space, and the knee plays, Wilson’s term for the joints, give the whole its articulation. The music’s processes and the stage’s slow transformations are one procedure in two media. Held below the top because in places the form is a container: the Trials hold text play the form would survive without.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Fifty years of return, and evidence over promise. Glass returned to it in Music by Philip Glass (1987) and Words Without Music (2015); Robert Fink’s Repeating Ourselves (2005) reads minimalism as cultural practice; a documentary on the work was made in 1985; and productions by other directors have begun to read it without Wilson, re-interpretation rather than remounting. Questions stay open: what the work means by Einstein, whether the finale is the bomb or a liberation, whether its repetition is trance, critique or industrial pulse. Held below because the literature is narrower than the repertory classics’, and much of it treats the work as an event, the night at the Met and the birth of minimalist opera, more than returning to it in detail.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is opera and concert music of the 1970s, and the intrinsic force is large: the work reorganised what an opera could be, an evening of music, image and movement on equal terms, without story, in the language of repetition, and it brought minimalism, until then a music of lofts and galleries, into the opera house at full theatrical scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Glass an opera composer, with Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984) completing the trilogy of portraits it began; it opened the road by which John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987) and post-minimalist opera reached the major houses; and it made Wilson’s theatre of images an international form. Discounted because much of that reach runs through Glass’s later, more conventional operas, and the mainstream took its sound more than its form.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty years. The form survives whole: the music in Glass’s performing materials and complete recordings, the staging in the makers’ own revivals of 1984, 1992 and 2012, which kept the design and added Childs’s choreography for the field dances within the life of the work. Presence is real but rationed. Its makers have staged it four times, with gaps of eight, eight and twenty years, and its demands, the length, an expert ensemble and Wilson’s stage, keep it out of the ordinary repertory; recordings and concert performances carry it between. Productions by other directors show it can live without its first staging. The surface fixed to its moment, the amplification of the 1970s and a cold-war apocalypse, is modest. The long silences are charged.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Invention is credited elsewhere; this axis weighs command, and the command is real and load-bearing. Glass’s additive processes are exact over hours; the writing asks great stamina and precision of the performers, the chorus counting in shifting groups from memory and the violin in perpetual figuration; the cadence cycles are timed so that a change of one chord registers as an event. Wilson’s lighting and slow transformations, the bar of light and the train’s approach, are exactly controlled, and Childs’s choreography is rigorous geometry. Held well below the repertory summits: the harmony is narrow by choice and the voice-leading inside a cycle simple; the amplified organs have a limited range of colour beside the orchestral command of Otello (9.5) or the counterpoint of the Goldberg Variations (9.7); and the texts, as made things, are uneven by design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Spaceship’s catastrophe at full force and Knee Play 5’s quiet story of lovers on a bench. One law governs both, repetition with slow change: in the music under each, the counting chorus and the cycle; in the image, each family transformed the third time; in the dance, the diagonal and the spins; in the texts, Knowles’s word-patterns permuted like the music’s cells. The law covers music, light, movement, speech and stage machinery, and that breadth is why the figure is high. The strain is in the spoken texts. Johnson’s speeches are narrative and sentimental in a work that otherwise refuses narrative, and the Trials’ verbal comedy runs on a looser rule than the music beneath it. Their being repeated material answers most of the strain, not all.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders present are many: science and its thinker, in Einstein and relativity’s trains and clocks; technology and transport, in train, building and spaceship; the law, in the trials and the prison; history, in the bomb and the century’s machines; consciousness and time, the work’s real subject; love, in the lovers on the bench; popular culture, in radio, a song and a supermarket; sleep and death, in the Bed. The scale is large and the range real. What holds the axis here is integration. The orders are set in one structure of images but do not act on one another: the law does not judge the scientist, and the lovers meet the bomb only by sequence. The family, labour, the state as institution and the sacred are absent or only glanced at.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.2, then Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Living Form at 8.9. Opera without plot or characters, sung in numbers, played without an interval and set on the stage of the opera house; a reorganisation of what an opera could be that brought minimalism into the house at full scale; and a long form of slow change that alone can make attention what it knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: science, the law, love, history and the century’s machines held in one structure of images, but set side by side, not integrated, with the family, labour, the state and the sacred absent. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 7.9: trial scenes that run past their turns, and a disclosure given more as a state of attention than as a truth that can be stated.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable at 8.6 clears it by a tenth, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 falls short by four tenths and The Unconcealment at 7.9 by six. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate, 8.5, stands in the band of Tier IV and below the 9.0 the summit requires in any case.
Basis · Einstein on the Beach, the opera in four acts with its five knee plays, music, texts and staging taken as one work, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, recording or text was in hand. The work is scored as Glass and Wilson made it: nine scenes in four acts, framed and joined by five knee plays and played without an interval, with texts by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs, and with Childs’s choreography for the field dances, added for the revival of 1984 and kept since, as part of the work. The music alone, the recordings of 1979 and 1993, and later productions by other directors are evidence for the work’s return, reach and survival, never the unit, and no single production is the unit. The music is known chiefly from recording, the staging from documentation and film. The texts are in English; they are quoted only where the words are certain, in four words or fewer. The sections and the families of image were tabulated, and the gaps between the makers’ stagings computed, by script. The conductor of the recordings and their running times, the nights of the New York performances, the further sources of the title, the makers’ own account of the finale and of the first production’s finances, the spelling of the chord cycle and of the knee plays’ bass, the numbers of performers, and the names and places of later productions are not given, since they could not be verified. The sound and sight of the work as performed are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged.