Reuniting the score and designs from Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, this exhibition focuses on the opera's premiere performances in 1976. Visitors enter a gallery awash in blue light where they encounter Glass's entire never-before-displayed autograph manuscript as well as Wilson's storyboard, thirteen leaves encompassing 113 scene designs. Footage from the New York rehearsal and 1976 productions in Paris and Brussels runs continuously in the gallery. The documentary Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera, about the 1984 production at BAM, is screened in the Morgan's Gilder Lehrman Hall throughout the exhibition.
This exhibition is made possible by the Charles E. Pierce, Jr., Fund for Exhibitions.
Robert Wilson
Einstein on the Beach, 1976
Storyboard drawings
Graphite on paper
9 3/4 x 9 inches
Leaf 7 of 13
Collection of William Kistler
©Robert Wilson. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Photography: EPW Studio
Philip Glass (b. 1937)
Knee Play 3 from autograph manuscript, Einstein on the Beach
Collection of Paul Walter, on deposit at the Morgan Library & Museum
Used with permission
Photography: Anthony Troncale