Thomas Sleeper: Einstein’s Inconsistency

Thomas Sleeper's Einstein's Inconsistency is a series of eight operas, the longest being about 20 minutes with the shortest just under a minute. On the surface, the operas seem unrelated, but each acts as a sort of mosaic tile to create a treatise on the very nature of existence. What all the characters have in common (a king, a bureaucrat, a critic, a grieving man, a heretic, a priest, a paranoid woman, and finally God) is that they are all at the brink of discovering what it means to exist. When taken as a whole, Einstein's Inconsistency takes the listener into a sort of sonic funhouse. One cannot experience this work and remain unaltered by it. It is clearly a deeply personal piece for the composer and contains some of his most inventive and powerful music to date.