an experimental performance company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds (named for a teacher who helped him manage a stutter while a teenager). With this company, he directed his first major works, beginning with 1969's The King of Spain and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud. He began to work in opera in the early 1970s, creating Einstein on the Beach with composer Philip Glass and choreographer Lucinda Childs. This work brought the artists worldwide renown. Following Einstein, Wilson worked increasingly with major European theaters and opera houses. For the New York debut of his first opera, the Metropolitan Opera allowed Wilson to rent the house on a Sunday, when they did not have a production, but would not produce the work. In 1970, Wilson and a group of collaborators, including choreographer Andy deGroat and the dancer and actor Sheryl Sutton, devised the "silent opera" Deafman Glance in Iowa City, where it premiered at the Center for New Performing Arts on December 15. The large cast of the premiere production of Deafman Glance included Raymond Andrews and Ana Mendieta. The show subsequently traveled to the Nancy Festival in France and to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It later opened in Paris, championed by the designer Pierre Cardin. The Surrealist poet Louis Aragon loved it and published a letter to the Surrealist poet André Breton (who had died in 1966), in which he praised Wilson as: "What we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us". In 1975, Wilson dissolved the Byrds and started to use professional actors. In 1983/84, Wilson planned a performance for the 1984 Summer Olympics, the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down; the complete work was to have been 12 hours long, in 6 parts. The production was only partially completed; the full event was cancelled by the Olympic Arts Festival, due to insufficient funds. In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize jury unanimously selected the CIVIL warS for the drama prize, but the supervisory board rejected the choice and gave no drama award that year. In 1990 alone, Wilson created four new productions in four different West German cities: Shakespeare's King Lear in Frankfurt, Chekhov's Swan Song in Munich, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando in West Berlin, and The Black Rider a collaboration by Wilson, Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, in Hamburg. In 1997,