A tumultuous span of 82 years separates the arrival of Albert Einstein in Los Angeles as a visiting scientist at the California Institute of Technology and this month’s Los Angeles premiere of the groundbreaking opera “Einstein on the Beach” presented by Los Angeles Opera.

As important to the second half of the 20th century as “The Rite of Spring” was to the first, the opera’s three-performance engagement starting Friday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion represents the final chance audiences will have to experience the opera as staged by its original creators: director and scenic designer Robert Wilson, composer Philip Glass and choreographer Lucinda Childs.

It’s also been pointed out that of all the locations where “Einstein on the Beach” has been presented since its world premiere on Nov. 21, 1976, at the Avignon Festival in France, Los Angeles is the only place that can claim to have had Einstein and also have a beach.

To celebrate this historic harmonic convergence, the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech, under the leadership of director Diana Kormos Buchwald, has organized a special exhibition that will be on display at the Pavilion throughout next weekend’s run that will draw interesting parallels and insightful relationships between Einstein the man and “Einstein” the opera.

Part one of the three-part installation, Buchwald explained, is devoted to a series of up-close and personal photographs taken of Einstein between 1946 and 1950 at his home in Princeton, N.J.

“These are intimate portraits of Einstein that were taken by Herman Landshoff,” Buchwald said. “Only a few sets were ever produced, and we have one of them here at Caltech.”

The photographs taken at Einstein’s home (at 112 Mercer St.) show the world’s most famous scientist with his white shock of hair and genial smile within the comfortable surroundings of his study. Years later, as part of the Einstein Centennial celebration, one of Landshoff’s photographs would provide the basis for the Einstein commemorative stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1979.

The second element of the exhibit is a set of nine panels created by Caltech in collaboration with the Art Center College of Design that focuses on Einstein’s life in California between 1931 and 1933.

“It includes iconic images of Einstein and a collage of letters and newspaper articles,” Buchwald said. “There are stories and pictures of Einstein at work on the Caltech campus, moments from his private life, and his interaction with movie stars like Charlie Chaplin.”

Einstein’s first public event in Los Angeles was as a spectator at the Rose Parade in Pasadena.

By the time Einstein arrived in Los Angeles, Buchwald pointed out, he was already a major celebrity.

“His notoriety was enormous by that time,” she said. “He was the first celebrity scientist and he benefited from all the media: print, radio, movies and later television. Journalists would camp out at his house, which was about a mile from campus.”

But did he ever go to the beach?

“We don’t know,” Buchwald conceded. “We suspect he did. We know he went to Santa Barbara where he wrote that he enjoyed the ocean views. He also went to Palm Springs, Joshua Tree and the Grand Canyon.”

The final component of the exhibit relates specifically to Einstein’s love of music and his accomplished musical skills on the piano, but more notably on the violin. During his Caltech visits, Buchwald said, the school provided him with a Guarneri violin for his enjoyment.

The exhibit shows Einstein with famous musicians of the day, as well as a growing list of European emigres like Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, who chose to forsake the new Germany of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

“What do you think Einstein would have thought of ‘Einstein on the Beach?’ ” Buchwald was asked.

“That’s a very strange question,” she remarked. After a long pause, she responded, “What’s interesting is that Einstein’s favorite composers were the same as Philip Glass’ — Mozart and Bach. When (Glass) and Robert Wilson were creating the opera, they often spoke in terms of equations and they blocked out scenes mathematically in terms of time and intervals and breaks between the tableaus,” she said.

“Philip Glass studied mathematics as an undergraduate and there is a mathematical symmetry to the opera that plays a very important role. I think Einstein would certainly have liked the spectacle.”

Although the opera is in abstract expressionist style, there are recurring images/symbols: the Train, the Trial, the Elevator and the Spaceship, which represent specific aspects of Einstein’s life and theories.

“Einstein used these symbols after he had completed his work as pedagogical tools,” Buchwald said. “He used the synchronization of light signals as viewed by a passenger on a train or in a train station to explain an aspect of the theory of relativity. Elevators were used as an explanation for what is called the Equivalent Principle. The elevator then becomes the spaceship to illustrate time travel.”

The Trial, Buchwald continued, represents the need for scientists to be held accountable for their actions and for the impact those actions have on society. This, she points out, was particularly true in the 20th century when scientists devoted so much effort to creating weapons of mass destruction, whether it was the chemical weapons of World War I or the development of the atomic bomb, which Einstein both warned about and encouraged.

Historical photographs are woven into Wilson’s stage design.

“We see photographs of Einstein at age 12 or 13 in a very relaxed pose,” said Buchwald, who saw the opera during its 1982 revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Another photograph shows Einstein at the patent office. And we see the older Einstein as he appears in the opera in his suspenders.”

Glass will be in Los Angeles to participate in some festivities surrounding the opera performances.

“I saw ‘Einstein on the Beach’ more as a portrait opera,” Glass wrote in his 1987 autobiography, “Music by Philip Glass.” “In this case, the portrait of Einstein that we would be constructing replaced the idea of plot, narrative, development, all the paraphernalia of conventional theater.

“Furthermore, we understood that this portrait of Einstein was a poetic vision. Facts and chronology would be included in the sequence of movements, images, speaking and singing. Conveying that information, though, was not the point of the work.

“In one of our early conversations,” Glass continued, “Bob (Wilson) said to me, ‘I like Einstein as a character, because everybody knows who he is.’ In a sense, we didn’t need to tell an Einstein story because everyone who saw ‘Einstein’ brought their own story with them ... The point about ‘Einstein’ was clearly not what it ‘meant’ but that it was meaningful as generally experienced by the people that saw it.”

“We’re used to seeing opera that has narrative and tells stories, where action is following the music or the text,” Wilson said in a recent interview. “It’s something you can easily comprehend. ‘Einstein on the Beach’ is a work where you can get lost. That’s the idea. You don’t have to understand.”

Running more than four hours, “Einstein on the Beach” is presented in one act with no intermission. While the audience is free to come and go, when I experienced the opera in Berkeley last year it never occurred to me to leave my seat. The opera was riveting.

Jim Farber is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.