Appreciation: Robert Wilson, who changed everything he touched, was the most influential theater artist of our time

Salzburg, Austria — The news of Robert Wilson’s death at age 83 in New York reached me in a Wilsonian way — at the theater and absorbed in the kind of uncompromisingly slow, shockingly beauteous and incomprehensibly time-and-space-bending weirdness Wilson took infinite pleasure in hosting when he made what he called operas. He called everything he staged an “opera,” whatever that might be.

I had already been thinking of Wilson as I checked my text messages during an intermission here at the Salzburg Festival, where Australian director Barrie Kosky has created a pastiche of various Vivaldi arias brilliantly repurposed into a new four-hour opera based on stories from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”

In what turns out to be a striking reminder of Wilson, Kosky employs acclaimed German actress Ange