Music-theater Portraiture

Guy Yedwab Experimental Music-Theater 4/1/08 Einstein and King George III: Musical Conceptual Portraiture

The breadth of work which can be considered “Experimental music-theater” is broad, so perhaps an examination of it can come from two works which, on the face of things, appear to utilize the same form. The first, Eight Songs For A Mad King, was written in 1969 by Maxwell Davies and Roy Hart; the second, Einstein on the Beach, was written in 1976 by Phillip Glass and enacted by Robert Wilson. The central conceit, from a certain perspective, is roughly the same: each attempts to paint a portrait of a historical figure (Eight Songs tackles King George III; Einstein tackles its namesake), and both of those portraits are not conventional, storytelling histories: they are abstractions, using movement and image to capture the ideas and popular mythology surrounding their subject. Both, also, have been labeled as 'opera;' Philip Glass referred to Einstein on the Beach as a 'portrait opera' and Eight Songs For A Mad King has often been labeled as a 'monodrama,' a subset of opera performed by a soloist. Both, with their small orchestra sizes, share the title of chamber opera; both are often performed in opera houses (especially in Europe, where opera houses are more common) and by orchestras or opera companies. Being operas, the first place to start is to compare them to the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as set forth by Wagner. Both are indebted to Wagner, at least to a certain degree, for their over-arching nature. Wagner says that the Gesamkunstwerk calls for “optic and acoustic understanding” (Wagner 185). Certainly, that's the sort of understanding which both pieces aim to engender in their audiences with regard to the figures they portray. Wilson, originally a painter, created complicated, large sets which made Einstein's world more vivid, and Glass' music was every bit as key. But to a certain extent, Wilson and Glass' contributions to Einstein on the Beach are to a certain degree separate; the music is being performed as the production is being performed, but most of the music does not come from the

actors. From this perspective, Eight Songs for a Mad King is closer to the total unity which Wagner indicates in his text: the instrumentalists, because of their position mounted upon the stage in birdcages, are part of the theatrical experience in a theatrical way. In fact, when the flautist and King George interact in the famous birdcage section, it is less as a soloist and an instrument as two performers in a duet. This is one aspect in which Eight Songs is slightly more 'experimental' in terms of its musictheater than Einstein on the Beach, because it blurs the lines between the 'theater' and the 'music of its music-theater more finely. But although the end-product might be to Wagner's specifications, Eight Songs for a Mad King and Einstein on the Beach are not entirely what Wagner had in mind. His idea was not just a new form of art, but a new process of creation. “who will be the poet? Indisputably the Performer. Yet who, again, will be the Performer? Necessarily the Fellowship of all the Artists” (Wagner 196). Wagner called for a theater created by its performers, as an egalitarian single unit. But both Einstein on the Beach and Eight Songs For A Mad King were written by composers (and in the case of Eight Songs for a Mad King, a libretto writer) and then taught to the performers. The model which Wagner creates for the theater is a theatrical communalism; but both of these performances were created through theatrical autocracy. One might even say that a mad director has to teach his orchestral birds to sing. Eight Songs for a Mad King and Einstein on the Beach are also distinguishable by their specific use of music; the individual styles of Maxwell Davies and Phillip Glass are different, and therefore they use their music to different effects. A comparison for how Maxwell Davies uses his music might, at a stretch, be compared to Luigi Russolo's “The Art Of Nose.” By using the extended vocal range for Roy Hart's incredibly flexible voice, he creates the “shrilliest, strangest, and most dissonant amalgams of sound” (Russolo 5). He is not creating the classical arias of the classical opera, but rather he strikes all of the screeches, whelps, moans, yells, and whimpers that the human voice is capable of. Maxwell Davies aims for the “bigger acoustic sensations” (Russolo 6), using mostly the sixth category of noises (“animal and human voices: shouts, moans, screams, laughter, rattlings, sobs” Russolo 10). Roy Hart believed that the voice is an aural manifestation of a state of being, and thusly his insane King George

III's fractured state of being could only be mirrored by an unconventional palate of human noise. Einstein on the Beach's minimalist score, on the other hand, is better compared to Erik Satie's Vexations and his “Musique D'Ameublement.” Phillip Glass' minimal use of sound and the repetitive structures have a strange effect on the ear; both Einstein's score and Vexations have been described as being hypnotic, although in somewhat different ways. Rolling Stone said of the score: “At first, the relentless repetition can seem merely hypnotic. Listen carefully, however, and you begin to notice a wealth of subtly shifting detail. Soon, you realize that hardly any repetition is literal; although the pulse remains steady, the whirling melodies are constantly changing in length, and the colors are dancing like a ghostly aurora.” The Rolling Stone article also highlights Glass' fascination with repetition; it discusses Music in Changing Parts which repeats the same basic melody 62 times. This isn't the 840 repetitions of Vexations, but it certainly contains the same spirit. Einstein is also less focused on the score than Eight Songs for a Mad King, although both have enough focus on the music to be music-theater. Einstein's score, although entrancing and beautiful, share space with Robert Wilson's extravagant sets and grandiose staging, whereas Eight Songs for a Mad King focuses the audience's attention on those performers which are creating the sound. With such a distinguished family of musical influences, ranging from Wagner to Russolo, it is clear that both of these 'operas' are clearly within the realm of 'experimental music-theater', and both demonstrate that the same general content (an expressionist portrait) can be tackled through different forms. Their similarities do not diminish the range of differences between them, and their connections to earlier works (and, possibly, to each other) do not diminish the originality and ingenuity which they demonstrate.