Wilson's opera includes musical settings of Latin texts by the 1st-century-Roman playwright Seneca and allusions to the music of Giuseppe Verdi and from the American Civil War, featuring the 19th century figures Giuseppe Garibaldi and Robert E. Lee as characters. In the mid-1980s, Glass produced "works in different media at an extraordinarily rapid pace". Projects from that period include music for dance (Glass Pieces choreographed for New York City Ballet by Jerome Robbins in 1983 to a score drawn from existing Glass compositions created for other media including an excerpt from Akhnaten; and In the Upper Room, Twyla Tharp, 1986), music for theatre productions Endgame (1984) and Company (1983). Beckett vehemently disapproved of the production of Endgame at the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts), which featured JoAnne Akalaitis's direction and Glass's Prelude for timpani and double bass, but in the end, he authorized the music for Company, four short, intimate pieces for string quartet that were played in the intervals of the dramatization. This composition was initially regarded by the composer as a piece of Gebrauchsmusik ('music for use')—"like salt and pepper ... just something for the table", as he noted. Eventually Company was published as Glass's String Quartet No. 2 and in a version for string orchestra, being performed by ensembles ranging from student orchestras to renowned formations such as the Kronos Quartet and the Kremerata Baltica. This interest in writing for the string quartet and the string orchestra led to a chamber and orchestral film score for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1984–85), which Glass recently described as his "musical turning point" that developed his "technique of film scoring in a very special way". Glass also dedicated himself to vocal works with two sets of songs, Three Songs for chorus (1984, settings of poems by Leonard Cohen, Octavio Paz and Raymond Lévesque), and a song cycle initiated by CBS Masterworks Records: Songs from Liquid Days (1985), with texts by songwriters such as David Byrne, Paul Simon, in which the Kronos Quartet is featured (as it is in Mishima) in a prominent role. Glass also continued his series of operas with adaptations from literary texts such as The Juniper Tree (an opera collaboration with composer Robert Moran, 1984), Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (1987), and also worked with novelist Doris Lessing on the opera The Making of the Representative for Planet