"For me," Philip Glass once claimed, "minimalism was over in 1974." It was in the spring of that year that Glass began meeting with stage director Robert Wilson with the purpose of collaborating on a new work for musical theater. The result, Einstein on the Beach, changed the course of Glass's career while also blurring the boundaries between art music and pop music and dismantling the barriers that separated their respective audiences. Considering the grand theatrical scale of Einstein, the economy of means implied by minimalism was no longer appropriate for the task. The repetitive gestures and driving rhythms found in Glass's earlier works are still present, but piled upon each other in greater measure, and combined with image and word to create a synergistic effect of "maximalist" proportion.

Far from a "The Life and Times of..." approach, Einstein on the Beach is more an abstract, five-hour musing on Einstein's personality and ideas than a biographical sketch—an approach that Glass has described as a "portrait opera." All of the performers on stage sport the scientist's trademark short-sleeved white shirt, suspenders, and pipe, while a violinist wanders between proscenium and pit in full Einsteinian garb (complete with wig and moustache), representing the physicist's noted musical hobby. The actual texts are rather vague in their references to Einstein. In fact, his name is mentioned in just two places and in contexts that are completely unclear in their meaning.

The work is a kaleidoscopic look at technology and modern life, using the figure of Einstein as a sort of mantra, than it is a picture of Einstein the man. Three primary visual images recur within the work: trains (recalling the metaphors Einstein used to illustrate the theory of relativity and with which he played as a child); a trial/bed setting (modern life and modern science examined); and a spaceship/field (a metaphor for transcendence and/or an escape from nuclear disaster).

As Robert Wilson put it, "You don't have to listen to the words, because they don't mean anything. I'm not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear." Many of the most profound and moving elements of the work are, in fact, art by accident. Since the score calls for a chorus of untrained singers (who must also dance and act), Glass aided the performers learning his constantly shifting rhythms and melodies by having them sing numbers and solfège syllables (do-re-mi, etc.). The overall effect was so striking that it was used in performance. The fragmentary nature of the text owes to its various and unique origins. During their initial meetings, Glass and Wilson were sometimes joined by Christopher Knowles, a 14-year-old autistic boy. Knowles' contributions, which constitute about two thirds of the entire spoken text, are intriguingly sporadic in their subject matter.

While Glass's music for Einstein on the Beach bears strong familial resemblance to his earlier works, it served a new, unique dramatic function—one that would reappear in his next opera, Satyagraha, as well as his numerous film scores, including The Thin Blue Line and Kundun.

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