Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, Milan, 2009: theatres in continental Europe pay extravagant sums to stage Robert Wilson’s ambitious productions
Robert Wilson, whose 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach arrives at the Barbican this May (music by Philip Glass), is a model of the modern magus: a genuine native North-American artist. That is to refer less to Wilson’s ethnicity—he is a white Texan—than his status; he is a man who, like choreographer Merce Cunningham, painter Barnett Newman and composer John Adams, to name but three of a dozen or so like them, simply could not be anything else but American. In this company, Robert Wilson is emphatically the odd one out. For decades, he has been lionised by theatres and opera houses in Berlin, Paris, Zurich and elsewhere in Europe. Europeans who love his work think of him not as an American but as theirs—an avant-gardist with the clout and charisma of Peter Brook or Peter Stein. Lavishly subsidised theatres in France and Germany spare no euro to secure his tenancy. It gets odder: Wilson speaks not a word of French or German (or anything other than English). And were you to look for something of Wilson’s in New York, you’d be likelier to find Brecht on Shaftesbury Avenue. Wilson’s hyper-stylised shows tank in America—and he is traditionally little liked in London; the New Statesman described his 2003 Covent Garden Aida as “a slick, silly reduction... brainlessly ignor[ing] the politics of the piece.” Megaphonic publicity surrounds the London revival of Einstein on the Beach. Inspired by a photo of the scientist standing with the sea behind him, the work eschews any biographical context. The action shifts between a train station and a space ship. Glass’s chant-filled, minimalist score is interspersed with stream-of-consciousness monologues. Wandering in and out over five hours, audiences can decide for themselves why Einstein appears as an ecstatic fiddler and as a dancer. The promotional puffery accompanying Einstein should not obscure another odd fact. Though performed to acclaim in European cities in 1976, it ran for just two nights in New York and left Wilson and Glass $150,000 in debt. This did nothing to curb his colossal imaginings. In Berlin in 1979, he staged Death, Destruction and Detroit (DDD), an “opera” of similar length to Einstein. One scene in DDD, based on Albert Speer’s pillar-like beams of light illuminating the sky of Nazi Berlin, was so expensive to mount in an attempted revival of the show in New York that it caused its cancellation there. Another Wilson enormoshow, the CIVIL warS, commissioned by and for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, was also cancelled. Never seen in its projected day-long entirety, it all but bankrupted its creator. Who, then, is this man generating such toxic financing in his own country, but seen in continental Europe as a visionary? He was born in 1941 in the conservative town of Waco in Texas. Wilson came of age during the ballsy artistic endeavours of 1950s and 1960s New York: Abstract Expressionism, the later choreography of Martha Graham and George Balanchine, the funky nihilism of composer John Cage, the aggressive whimsy of Andy Warhol. Teenage speech difficulties left Wilson with a lifelong distrust of words and an interest in art as subjective projection. This can make his work emotionally vacuous. Some of it is narcoleptically slow, with silence and oneiric imagery overriding narrative logic. Only Wilson—a much younger Wilson, mind (he is now 70)—would have dared mount a seven-hour silent opera in 1971 (Deafman Glance): poet Louis Aragon declared it the thing he had been waiting for all his life. Since the 1980s, Wilson has become a regular at the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre in central Berlin named after Brecht’s 1950s troupe. Many Wilson productions there—of Büchner, Shakespeare, Brecht-Weill—have adopted a highly mannered, repetitive, almost glacial style which borders on self-parody. Mincing trots, limbs at weird angles and stiff turnings-of-the-head inhabit these stagings like imitations of animatronics: mannerisms already detectable in Einstein on the Beach. In person, Wilson is courteous, dapper and refined; tall, handsome, correct. I have interviewed him twice in his Long Island HQ near the Hamptons, the Watermill Center. Here, in a converted electronics lab, he is building his legacy: a space in which to experiment, mount exhibitions, conduct auctions (often of his own prints and doodles), hold starry summer benefits—expect Lou Reed, Isabella Rossellini, Rufus Wainwright—and display, among hundreds of other objets, a perverse collection of “designer” chairs, not one of which can be sat in by even the most contortionally skilled human being. The truth is that Wilson is a very odd artist with his finest work behind him. Over the last 20 years—he began to develop Watermill in 1992—he has been manufacturing his immortality. Watermill is an exceptionally beautiful spot, with groomed lawns, outdoor sculpture, woods; the building itself is like a sepulchre, a shrine to... well, Wilson. Spend any time there, and you start to feel irritated by acolytes scurrying around answering the slightest need of “Bob.” Is Watermill a new Bayreuth in the Hamptons? It bears all the marks of artistic egomania: every cent earned by its maker goes into its running. Like Wagner, Wilson is both wizard and dictator. Whether Einstein on the Beach matches any of the German’s creations is debatable, but it remains seminal to the 1970s avant-garde and is still, probably, the very best thing Wilson has done.
