To progressive musicians, Robert Wilson will always be most closely associated with Einstein on the Beach (1976), which in addition to being Philip Glass‘s most masterful and iconic work, is the one that most optimistically proclaimed the future of new music theater, liberated from narrative forms and the affected European accoutrements of opera singing and traditional orchestras. That disappointingly few works in its lineage have subsequently managed to approach its impact suggests that it may have been more of an outlier than a paradigm shift—a pinnacle of American minimalism at its most monumental, succeeded by a drift toward postminimalism and neoclassiciam with Glass himself abandoning his avant-gardism to fulfill commissions for more conventional linear operas.

Wilson leaves behind a music theater project begun with Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, who has committed to completing it for an anticipated 2026 debut. We will look forward to UPSIDEDOWN: a journey as a late testament.

As it turns out, I had a personal connection of sorts with Wilson. He and my mother (then named Anne McCall) and her best friend (who later wrote books under the pen name Katya McCall Walter) were a close-knit group of three at Waco High School in the 1950s. She recalls helping him with his classwork there and during his brief enrollment at Baylor University (where her father was Chancellor) before decamping for Austin then New York. I discovered this by accident in 1984 after complaining to Mom—who taught psychology at Occidental College and didn’t particularly follow the art world—about Los Angeles’ failure to support Wilson’s ambitious Summer Olympics project. I casually mentioned that like her, he was from Waco:

“Robert Wilson? Robert M. Wilson.”
“Yeah.”
“I went to high school with a Robert M. Wilson. I helped him with his trigonometry. He said ‘McCall, I’m gonna flunk this class’, but he managed to get through it. He was into theater, I remember him putting rabbits onstage.”
“Really? Did you know he’s, like, the most famous experimental theater director in the world today?”
“No, I didn’t! Good for him. He was close friends with me and Carolyn. We were kind of a threesome. You know…[pause]…I think Robert was gay…”
“You got that right Mom!”
“…and his father was a pretty stern Methodist minister that I don’t think he had a good relationship with. He felt more comfortable hanging out with us because, you know, we didn’t care. He went to Baylor for a semester, then went to New York and that was the last I saw of him.”