Robert Wilson’s productions floated into theaters and opera houses like visitors from another planet.

Most audiences, particularly in the United States, were — and still are — used to realistic theater, with clear settings, plots and characters. For 60 years, Wilson, who died on Thursday at 83, infuriated some and inspired many others by abandoning conventional narrative and conceiving, directing and designing works that were closer to long, enigmatic poems.

Wilson’s style was glacial in its pace. Very little would happen very slowly. His scenery was minimal, yet the backdrops glowed with blue light; the effect was spare yet lush. The performers’ faces were often whitened with makeup, like Japanese Noh actors, clowns or mimes. Their posture was rigid; their movements, formal, deliberate, almost ritualistic. Stiff gestures would be frozen for agonizing stretches.

A Wilson show was a paradox: an austere spectacle. Stylish and mysterious, his work was precisely calibrated, yet open-ended in its possible meanings. You tended not to be able to forget the experience, the look, the slowness.

He expanded our sense of what could happen on a stage by starkly limiting the action. In a climactic scene from “Einstein on the Beach,” his profoundly influential, nearly five-hour collaboration with the composer Philip Glass from 1976, a 30-foot bar of light gradually rotated from horizontal to vertical, then rose into the flies. That was it.

Wilson was born in 1941 into a conservative family in Waco, Texas. He left in his early 20s for the artistic ferment of New York, but the vast, luminous expanses he kept creating over the decades echoed the wide-open landscape of his upbringing. “I guess Texas is still in my head when I want more space around everything,” he told The New York Times in 1984.

In New York, he studied painting and architecture, and worked on therapeutic theatrical exercises with children who had disabilities and brain injuries, which helped point him in the direction his work would soon go: toward the nonlinear and nontextual, the unconventional and surreal. The modernist choreography of Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins fascinated Wilson, and he incorporated into his pieces the rigor of their movement vocabularies and their narrative ambiguity.

By this point there was, of course, a vibrant, scrappy downtown arts scene. But few were bringing into that milieu the meticulousness of Cunningham or Balanchine, as Wilson did in the late 1960s and early ’70s with “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud,” “Deafman Glance” and “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” all nearly silent.

Their eye-popping durations also set these pieces apart. It was in the morning after a nearly 12-hour, all-night performance of “Stalin” that Wilson met Glass. They began a series of conversations that resulted in “Einstein,” an opera that was a culmination of centuries of experiments in the union of image and sound, and a new way to think about plot — or the absence of one.

As they discussed potential subjects, Wilson suggested Chaplin and Hitler; Glass brought up Gandhi. They settled on a work that wasn’t in any straightforward way about Einstein, though he appears as a violinist and the whole thing builds to a vision of nuclear apocalypse, the nightmare endpoint of his discoveries.

In lieu of traditional biographical beats, Wilson’s cryptic settings included trains, a courtroom trial and a spaceship. He explored these metaphorically loaded places in strange, haunting, sometimes folksy and funny tableaus over four continuous acts, nine scenes and five “knee plays,” or short interstitial sections.

“Einstein” has no story or characters. What is it about? The extravagant flood of its ideas, energy, ceaseless movement and sudden pools of reflection, boredom, attention, the passage of time, the distillation of music and drama — opera’s elemental components — into something fresh and audacious.

Wilson and Glass found each other at just the right moment, bringing out the best of their aligned gifts for hypnotic repetition and tectonically gradual change. But the tour of “Einstein,” including its American premiere in a special engagement at the Metropolitan Opera, threw its creators into debt. Wilson found himself gravitating toward more financially stable homes in the state-subsidized theaters and festivals of Europe, which also offered generally more adventurous, receptive audiences than in the United States.

He retained his avant-garde eminence at home, though. His productions regularly toured or were revived in the United States, and in 1998, he notoriously staged Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Met. (He had begun to direct works by others, in addition to his original pieces, in the 1980s.)

The Met was at that point known for ornately naturalistic productions, and Wilson’s “Lohengrin” — which pared down the opera to some bars of light and little else — was greeted with a storm of boos.

A couple of years ago, when I was working on an oral history of that staging, I interviewed Wilson at the Watermill Center, the creative incubator he founded on the east end of Long Island. As he spoke about his vision, he sketched in pencil on a sheet of paper: on the left side of the page, all the scenes and sets in Wagner’s libretto, and on the right, his stylized versions. His adaptations were radically abstracted, but faithful in their essence.

“Everything that is called for in ‘Lohengrin’ is there,” Joseph Volpe, the Met’s general manager when the production premiered, told me. “It’s not there in the way most people would expect it. But it’s all there.”

For some, Wilson’s theater was cold and dull. Even for fans, it could sometimes tip into self-parody — few directors have had a more immediately identifiable aesthetic — or feel merely chic. He eventually became a kind of luxury brand, churning out trademarked product.

But at their best, his works felt like dreamlike apparitions from another world. They were also, though, deeply human in their childlike wonder, their endearing hopefulness, their utopian let’s-put-on-a-show impulse, those wide-open stages.

Wilson was most comfortable working in visuals, not text; to the extent he used words, they were often collages formed from the voices of others. For the final moments of “Einstein,” he asked Samuel M. Johnson, a 77-year-old performer, to write something.

After the ferocious scene of nuclear holocaust, Johnson sat in a bus onstage and recited a brief, sweet love story. “So profound was their love for each other,” he gently intoned, “they needed no words to express it.”

“Einstein” moves in this last sequence from complete destruction to pure tenderness. This could easily come across as sentimental, but after all those hours, the poignancy — the emergence of innocence from catastrophe, of simplicity from sophistication — just breaks your heart.