Glass composed stage works based on mythology and fairy tales, including La belle et la bête (1994) and the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus in Orphée (1993). Some of his stage works are “portrait operas” that highlight historical figures who transformed society through their ideas. These include Albert Einstein, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaten, as well as Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln and their involvement with politics. Glass’s interest in scientists and astronomy emerged not only with Einstein and his work on relativity and atomic energy, portrayed in Einstein on the Beach (1976), but also in the operas Galileo Galilei (2001) and Kepler (2008), both addressing the earth’s position in the universe. Glass also composed three science fiction operas, including 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988), where one sole character insists he has encountered aliens from another planet. Glass often merged his interest in science and science fiction with spirituality, as the texts in these works connect science with a type of spiritual awareness and suggest a coexistence in which one does not exclude the other. Glass does this by contemplating the universe not only in mathematical ways and formulas, but also in an abstract and poetic manner.