Words Without Music: A Memoir (42 page)

The audience was totally enraptured, both throughout and afterward. No one had seen anything like this before. It was a very young audience. Let’s say you were twenty or twenty-five years old: you’d go to the Avignon Festival and you’d walk into
Einstein on the Beach
. You’d have no idea what it’s going to be, and it goes on for five hours. People were out of their minds. There was an uproar. People couldn’t believe it. They were screaming and laughing—practically dancing. We were near exhaustion. We’d had two weeks of intense work. We hadn’t eaten. It was like the euphoria that accompanies childbirth, followed by ecstatic relief and, then, deep fatigue.

Then it was over. We knew we had done something extraordinary. And it wasn’t just us. Everybody knew it.

All kinds of people who were involved in the production were there, and all kinds of people who I’d never seen before. Almost everybody seemed happy. Michel Guy, of course, was overjoyed. This was his baby—he had commissioned it. He must have felt like Santa Claus and he had delivered the present. Without him, there wouldn’t have been an event. He gave us the money that helped us get it going.

There were four other performances in Avignon after the premiere. In the afternoons, Bob and I had conversations with the press and members of the public who wanted to talk about the work. We had debates and discussions and misunderstandings. We had huge support and rowdy dissent. We had everything:

“What the hell do you think you did?”

“How dare you do this?”

“What was that supposed to be?”

But the other thing we heard was “That was the most fantastic event I’ve ever experienced.”

Some of the questions were inane and some interesting. The best questions were
both
inane and interesting. For example, the question “Is
Einstein
really an opera?” was both stupid and intriguing at the same time. Neither Bob nor I had any special preparation for these meetings. In the end, I don’t think either of us really cared what people thought.

There were many writers from the press who now had their first chance to meet Bob and myself, since we hadn’t been doing press conferences before. Some of the reviewers had even refused to review it. They said this is not real music making. The French left-wing publications, including
Libération
, loved it, while the right wing hated it. Just like today. Some things never change.

These kinds of public meetings followed us throughout the European tour. And how could it have been otherwise? One of the “problems,” or possible grounds for misunderstanding, was the truth that
Einstein
had never had an “ideological” or “theoretical” basis. Very un-European. However, I believe that neither Bob nor I felt we needed to have one. For example, the fact that to produce
Einstein
required a proscenium stage, fly space, wing space, a lighting bridge, and an orchestra pit made using an opera house a necessity. In other words, an opera house was the only place where
Einstein
could be produced. That simple fact is what made
Einstein
an opera and that was good enough for us.

It feels as if
Einstein
, in its innocent and radical heart of hearts, had suddenly and unintentionally put Bob and me in a place where we were expected to explain a work that had emerged from our very lives and separate histories in a wholly organic, uninhibited, and unpremeditated way. It wasn’t a work that either asked for or needed an explanation. And we never tried to make one.

TOWARD THE END OF THE TOUR
we were in Hamburg, where Jane Herman and Gilbert Hemsley came to see
Einstein
. Jane and Gilbert worked for the Metropolitan Opera House, producing the Special Events series. Already being dark on Sundays, the Met wanted to do special events on those nights, and it was Jane’s job to do the programming. Jerry Robbins, who had seen the piece in Paris and at the Video Exchange Theater at the preview of it, had urged them to go to Hamburg.

Bob and I knew someone from the Met had come to the show, but we didn’t know why they were there. Afterward, when we met with Jane and Gilbert, they said that they wanted to stage it, and that they were going to bring it in. Bob and I smiled and said that was a great idea, but we didn’t believe it.

They left a few hours, later after we talked it through. Once they were gone, Bob and I looked at each other and said, “This is not going to happen.” Up to that point, the only concert hall north of Fourteenth Street I had played in was Town Hall in 1974. Mostly I had been downtown, in galleries and lofts, so the idea that we would go to the Met seemed a fantasy. Couldn’t happen.

And yet, the Met booked us for a Sunday night in November 1976. We had an agreement with them that we would get a certain amount from the box office to pay our crew and so forth, and they would supply the theater and their crew. If you look at the billing on the program for that night, it says, “Presented by the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Byrd Hoffman Foundation.” Over the years many writers, including professional journalists, claimed that Bob and I had rented the Met, perhaps thinking that it was astonishing that two young artists from downtown would have such a fantastic idea. But any way you looked at it, the idea that we rented the Met is absurd. For one thing, we didn’t have the money. Besides that, we couldn’t have put a show on at the Met without the Met’s electricians, lighting people, and stagehands. There’s no way we could have four-walled it—come into an empty theater and put the show up—in nineteen hours. Something on the scale of
Einstein
couldn’t have been done by outsiders. The fact is, the Met wanted the show, they were willing to produce it, and Gilbert was already making the plans.

When the tour was over, Bob and I flew into JFK from Europe. Paul Walters, an old friend and patron of Bob’s, met us at the airport.

“The first night is sold out,” he told us.

“What?” we said.

“You are sold out at the Met.”

The last ticket was sold eight or ten days before opening night. Right away they added a second Sunday night for the following week.

We only had a week before we moved into the Met. The problem was getting the piece set up in time for a six o’clock opening. The night before, they were doing
Die Meistersinger
, which ended at eleven. So we had from eleven o’clock Saturday night to six o’clock Sunday evening: nineteen very short hours. We usually took three days to load in, but we were able to do the turn around so quickly because Gilbert had figured out every minute, a tremendous feat of planning. He worked with the crew from the Met, who were fantastic and who worked all night until about five the next afternoon, when the doors opened. I don’t think we even had a minute to spare.

My family was beside themselves about
Einstein
coming to the Met. Some relatives came up for the premiere, and many more would have come had there been tickets available. For my mother, it was completely different from what had happened eight years before, when she came to hear me at Queens College in a virtually empty auditorium. Now she was coming to the biggest opera house in the world, and it was sold out.

I don’t know what she thought. We never talked about it.

As I mentioned before, Ida was sitting in the same box as Bob’s father, and I know that they talked to each other about what was going on. One story I heard is that my mother said to Bob’s father, “Mr. Wilson, did you ever have any idea what your son was thinking about, what was going on in his head?”

“No, I had no idea at all.”

Basically, you have two people who weren’t really similar—one was from Texas, one was from Baltimore—but they each had a son who had done something extraordinary, and they were clueless about what it was about. That doesn’t mean that she didn’t value it. I do know that Ida sent my brother, Marty, outside to find out what the tickets were being scalped for. I think they were going for about fifty or a hundred dollars, and that impressed her. It impressed her that you could sell the tickets right on the street for much more than the box office price. For her, it wasn’t about judging the art or the music. It’s not that she didn’t care. She just didn’t know, whereas Ben knew a lot about music, but he was gone by then. What Ida
did
know was that it was a big event, and that the city had turned out, and that it was going to be done again. And that somehow, in a miraculous way, this son of hers—whose career she must have more or less given up on after seeing the debacle at Queens College eight years before—had, at the age of thirty-nine, seen his ship come in. It must have been an astonishing moment for her.

The Met holds roughly three thousand eight hundred people. Even standing room was sold out, adding another one hundred and seventy-five. There isn’t any other opera house that size in America, and we sold it out twice. What was surprising to Bob and me was that there was no indication there had been such a huge swell of enthusiasm for either his work or mine. Neither of us had a big promotional team. There was no wind pushing the sails, as far as we knew. Possibly a thousand people from downtown came, but I think the audience that filled the Met came from all over New York.

As soon as the two performances at the Met were completed, the last on November 28, 1976, Ninon Karlweiss invited us to her apartment on the East Side and informed us that, the great success of
Einstein
notwithstanding, the tour was $100,000 in the red. Bob and I were, of course, deeply shocked. A truism of the opera world—that operas lose money—was unknown to us. We were that naïve. We didn’t realize that no opera house pays for itself, whether it’s Paris or London, Moscow or New York. Huge fund-raising efforts go on all year long, every year, to pay for the deficits of those houses. For example, some years later when we were playing in Stuttgart, I was told that every seat in the house was subsidized with something like eighty
deutschmark
s. We hadn’t realized we were going to lose money that first night at the Met, and the next week as well. None of the thirty-five performances of
Einstein
had played to an empty seat, and still the tour had ended up in debt.

Both of us said to her, “Ninon, how did that happen? How could you do that to us?”

She was calm and obviously unrepentant. After we had gotten over our shock, she told us very simply, “Let me tell you something. You were both really unknown, and I knew that
Einstein
had to be seen. So I had no choice. I booked every performance below costs and you took a loss every night. Not so much, maybe two or three thousand for each showing. Over the four months, it just added up. I knew you would be in debt at the end, but I also knew that it would make your careers. Both of you.”

In the end, Ninon was right. But an immediate problem still faced us. To address it, we began by selling everything we could—drawings, music scores, equipment, the works. Some of our artist friends held an auction to raise money to help, but the
Einstein
debt dragged on for years.

In the aftermath, Bob worked in Europe and seemed to be making theater pieces everywhere. I stayed in New York and continued my work, but now as a “successful” opera composer, who still had to drive a cab for two more years. Neither Bob nor I was interested in becoming a partnership in the manner of the famous ones in music-theater—Brecht and Weill, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, etc. In any case these kinds of partnerships—businesses, really—were far less common in the opera world.

Bob and I continued differently. From then on, every six to eight years we would do a work together, with other collaborators and other people in between. Our next work together would come in 1984, when I became one of six composers who worked with Bob on his
CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down
. I composed the
Rome
and
Cologne
parts. We would come together from time to time, bringing with us new experiences and independent ideas. Some of my favorite works with Bob,
White Raven
and
Monsters of Grace
, came about in that way.

I’ve always thought of
Einstein
as the end of a cycle of work that had begun with the highly reductive, repetitive music which characterized the early days of the compositions for my ensemble, a period that began in earnest in 1969 with
Music in Fifths
and
Music in Similar Motion
. For that reason, the music I wrote for
Einstein
didn’t surprise me as much as those earlier pieces, when I had found myself unexpectedly writing music that had so much energy, discipline, and power. I was feeding off of my own music. The energy system that I was involved with was like a maelstrom, with
Einstein
as its fullest realization.

The years from 1965 on were overflowing with the sound of a new musical language that I shared with a number of other composers of my generation—a sound that was broad enough in scope, and intense enough in its urgency, to allow for all manner of individual expression. Several generations of composers were able to develop highly personal styles on that basis, and that has made it possible for the present generation of young composers to coexist so comfortably in a new music world of diversity and heterodoxy, where the means of expression—acoustic, electronic, various forms of global and indigenous music—can be equally broad and diverse. The generation I grew up with in the 1960s had to bear the brunt of another, older vision for the future of music that was narrow and intolerant. I think that kind of tyranny, for the moment, is behind us.

Einstein on the Beach
rounded out an eleven-year period for me. The recognition that came from it made it easier to get work, but it didn’t make any difference to the music. The pieces that came afterward would represent a new chapter, and, in reality, the disappointment felt by some diehard fans with the music after
Einstein
has more to do with their unfulfilled expectations than with what I was actually doing.
Einstein
was, indeed, over, completed. With the next opera—
Satyagraha
—I would be on the threshold of a new body of work.