Robert Wilson was the most influential theater artist of our time

Salzburg, Austria — The news of Robert Wilson’s death at age 83 in New York reached me in a Wilsonian way — at the theater and absorbed in the kind of uncompromisingly slow, shockingly beauteous and incomprehensibly time-and-space-bending weirdness Wilson took infinite pleasure in hosting when he made what he called operas. He called everything he staged an “opera,” whatever that might be.

I had already been thinking of Wilson as I checked my text messages during an intermission here at the Salzburg Festival, where Australian director Barrie Kosky has created a pastiche of various Vivaldi arias brilliantly repurposed into a new four-hour opera based on stories from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”

In what turns out to be a striking reminder of Wilson, Kosky employs acclaimed German actress Angela Winkler in the spoken role of Orpheus, who functions as a narrator for the opera. Winkler happened to have been the mesmerizing star in Wilson’s 2011 version of Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu” for the Berliner Ensemble, with a decadently dynamite score by Lou Reed, as unlikely and darkly effective as Vivaldi turns out to be for “Hotel Metamorphosis.”

It almost felt, in fact, like Wilson, with his impeccable timing, had planned his death at the precise moment when the Salzburg Festival, as it unveils this summer’s major opera productions, could demonstrate the profound effect an American director has had on the way opera has become the most exalted form of theater.

“Hotel Metamorphosis” was followed Friday night by a new production of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda.” The buzz in Salzburg was that this would be the star-making vehicle for American soprano Lisette Oropesa, who recently appeared in Los Angeles Opera’s “Rigoletto” and is, indeed, a thrilling Scottish queen in her fatal, royal clash with mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey.

Enter, once more, Wilson. The new production’s director, Ulrich Rasche, had a residency at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center on Long Island. In Rasche’s very Wilson-like, if somewhat clumsy, concept, the queens and their courtiers are islands unto themselves, tirelessly (and tiresomely) pacing on giant rotating discs. Overhead is a grand rotating disc of bright light.

The next night, Salzburg delivered some of the most starkly focused and profound 70 minutes I’ve spent in an opera house. “One Morning Turns Into an Eternity” is the latest Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen collaboration and this was the second performance of the run, which had opened a week earlier and runs through Aug. 18. Sellars dedicated the performance to the memory of Wilson.

Sellars had long proposed the curious combining of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,” a violently expressionist monodrama for soprano and large orchestra, with the last movement, “Abschied,” of Mahler’s song-symphony “Das Lied von der Erde.” Both were written in Vienna in 1909. Both concern loss.

In “Erwartung” (Expectation), a woman, grippingly portrayed by Ausrine Stundyte, finds the body of her unfaithful lover. This is a work that changed music, having no repetition, every musical phrase is different — and wondrous. In what now feels like a cosmic connection, Wilson had made his Salzburg Festival debut in 1995, staging “Erwartung” with Jessye Norman.

The text for “Der Abschied” (The Farewell), taken from an ancient Chinese poem and sung with stunning intensity by Fleur Barron, is a long farewell, the eternity of life’s last moment, drawn out, never resolving, the unknown meaning of saying goodbye.

Salonen, who gets rivetingly precise playing from the Vienna Philharmonic, joins the two parts of Webern’s quiet, sparse Five Pieces for Orchestra, each tiny fragment singing volumes. The full implications of this will require further comment. But in this context, it serves for both Salzburg and Los Angeles, as an incomparable goodbye to Wilson.

Neither Sellars nor Salonen ever worked with Wilson. But Sellars told me the lasting effect on him as a young director of Wilson’s early works, non-narrative all-night shows in which little happened, but through lighting, design and movement, theater felt like a place for new possibilities. Sellars described Wilson as a kind presence through his life. His mother and Wilson were fast friends.

Perhaps Wilson’s closest confidant was Beverly Hills philanthropist Betty Freeman, who underwrote several of Wilson’s productions, including “Einstein on the Beach,” the opera he created with Philip Glass. Opera in America can be divided, plain and simple, before “Einstein” and after “Einstein.”

Wilson always stayed with Freeman when he was in L.A., keeping her up half the night drinking vodka. Salonen described to me being struck by Wilson’s wit at one of Freeman’s dinners.

Salzburg’s essential Wilsonian weekend was a reminder of how much more important Wilson — who was born in Waco, Texas, and spent his career in New York — ultimately has proved to Europe, where he got far more support than in America. L.A., however, proved unusally fertile territory. We uniquely championed him and uniquely let him down.

There was, of course, “the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down,” the 12-hour opera with Jessye Norman and David Bowie, commissioned for the legendary 1984 L.A. Olympic Arts Festival. Created in segments by various composers in various world capitals, with connecting segments called Knee Plays by David Byrne, it was to be put together at the Shrine Auditorium. But a last-minute fundraising effort failed to raise a $1-million shortfall and the full production was canceled.

The best known of those individual operas from “the CIVIL warS” was the “Rome Segment,” with music by Glass. Shortly after the Olympics, over Thanksgiving weekend, 1984, the Los Angeles Philharmonic jumped in and gave a concert performance of the “Rome Segment,” with Wilson lighting the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Between 2004 and 2008, L.A. Opera become the most supportive American opera company for Wilson, staging his transformative productions of “Madame Butterfly” and “Parsifal,” along with presenting “Einstein on the Beach” at UCLA.

Yet another promising L.A. Wilson/Glass collaboration went somewhat afoul with “Monsters of Grace,” which UCLA commissioned in 1998. An entrancing set of 13 Glass songs to texts by the ^{13th-century mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi was supposed to serve as the framework for pioneering 21st-century opera with 3D imagery. Unfortunately, the technology was in no way capable of capturing the mystical splendor of Wilson’s light and imagery.}

But Wilson did return to UCLA several more times with traveling shows. For all his abstraction, Wilson could be intensely personal as in his 2013 reading of John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” in Royce Hall. Cage had been Wilson’s first and most important inspiration for creating a theater outside of normal experience.

You entered his world, but once in it, the unexpected was expected to happen. Wilson was adamant about never telling an actor or an audience how to think. In “Lecture on Nothing,” a vulnerable Wilson allowed Cage to tell him how not to think.

Giving meaning to not seeking it may be, beyond all the amazing visuals and striking non sequiturs in his work, Wilson’s ultimate message. Politics will always divide us, Wilson liked to say. Religion will always divide us. But there is the possibility that theater can bring us together.

As early as 1969, Wilson was bringing us together when he mounted the first of what he then called his silent operas in New York at the Anderson Theater — originally an East Village venue for Yiddish theater in the 1950s and a decade later as Fillmore East, for rock bands. Wilson’s “King of Spain” drew both crowds, and he once told me an older woman said to him on her way out, “Sonny, I don’t know what this is. What I do know is that it is turkey.” But, Wilson marveled, she came back the second night.

Wilson changed everything he touched and as Salzburg, with incomparable help from Angelenos, his legacy remains essential to a world ever more divided by politics and religion. A second Olympics arts festival of some sort is around the corner in three short years. I hope we’re paying attention.