"Paris"
by David Stevens

	With the home team showing off in the U.S., the 
Paris opera season was launched by Robert Wilson's and 
Philip Glass' "Einstein on the Beach," given nine 
performances at the Opera Comique under the avant-garde 
aegis of the Festival d'Automne and the Semaines 
Musicales Internationales de Paris.
	
	"Einstein" is an opera mainly because Wilson 
and Glass say so, but more convincingly because it has 
a score by Glass that runs for the full four-and-a-half 
hours plus, contributing powerfully to the work's 
cumulative mystical-mesmeric-dramatic effect. There is 
no chance for conventional vocal display - the principal 
performer, Lucinda Childs, is primarily a dancer - but 
most of the seventeen listed actors double or triple as 
dancers and choral singers; the eight musicians include 
a woman vocalist.
	
	"Einstein" is a dreamlike, almost bubliminal 
study of themes from the life and times of the great 
scientist. There are some overt references - notably a 
violinist (Robert Brown), made up as Einstein, who has 
some extended cadenzas to play - but many more are 
addressed to the subconscious. The work moves in an 
inexorable "lentissimo," animated by a proliferation 
of mini-events, a huge theatrical machine propelled by 
feverishly spinning inner parts.
	
	The music, played by Glass' own ensemble in 
his established idiom of a busy succession of notes 
suspended in static and repetetive patterns, had a 
quasi-Oriental hypnotic effect that aptly complemented 
Wilson's slow-motion time scale. The musicians 
occasionally joined in onstage.
	
	The basic structure is of three visual images 
seen three times each in various transformations for 
a total of nine scenes, divided into four acts and 
further separated, or articulated, by five intermezzo-
like transitions that Wilson calls "kneeplays." The 
images are a train - a large cartoon locomotive that 
appears at the beginning and the end, a rear view of 
the train disappearing in the distance, finally its 
transformation into a building inside which a character 
feverishly does calculations; a trial scene with jury, 
wigged judges, witness box and an immense glowing bed 
that finally soars slowly into the flies; finally a 
field and spaceship - at first the field is full of 
dancers whirling dizzily with flower-child exuberance 
(choreographer Andrew de Groat) as the spaceship hovers 
above, evolving into a dehumanized fantasy interior of 
the spaceship. A kind of climax is provided by a drop 
curtain that seems to represent a nuclear explosion, 
suggesting Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" as a title 
reference, but it is softened by idyllic kneeplay.
	
	At the October 6 performance, the Halle Favart 
was well filled with a relaxed and attentive audience. 
Spectators would walk out for an intermission not 
offered by Wilson and Glass, then return, sometimes 
applauding one or another of Wilson's stage effects 
(some of which severely taxed the Comique's resources) 
and rewarding all with a warm ovation.