John Adams

American composer John Coolidge Adams (b. 1947, Worcester, MA) has created some of the most provocative artistic statements of our age. Adams’s controversial operas about real-life recent events contributed to a reinvigoration of contemporary opera in America. While the composer’s stage works have generated much scholarly and critical interest, the breadth of scholarship on Adams’s music expands beyond the operas. Early instrumental works have been the subject of scholarly discussion about the evolution of musical minimalism to postminimalism. Interviews and Adams’s autobiography offer insight into the many musical tributaries that have informed the composer’s life: big band jazz heard at the family’s dance hall in New Hampshire; musical theater sung by Adams’s mother in community productions; classical music as a clarinetist in youth symphonies; rock and roll; and the New England landscapes that would long inspire Adams. At Harvard University, Adams studied composition with Leon Kirchner, a former student of Arnold Schoenberg. Kirchner introduced Adams to the rigors of academic serialism and also to the problem, which would later plague Adams, of how to balance instinct with method. In 1971, after completing degrees (BA and MA) in music composition, Adams relocated to northern California. Adams joined the San Francisco experimental music scene and eventually established a voice as a distinctly American composer. Much scholarship has been devoted to the plurality of Adams’s stylistic impulses. Phrygian Gates (1977) and China Gates (1977) were the composer’s first works in the strict minimalist style. Soon thereafter, Adams began to integrate compositional techniques drawn from pre-Baroque to late-19th-century Romantic styles. Shaker Loops (1978), Harmonium (1981), and Harmonielehre (1984–1985) resulted. In 1985, Adams began composing the opera Nixon in China (1987) in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman, discovering a penchant for text setting. Their next opera, The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), proved to be a critical minefield, giving rise to a series of polemical debates about music, politics, and representation. After Klinghoffer, Adams composed primarily instrumental works using increasingly chromatic and modal idioms. In the early 2000s, Adams returned to grand opera with Doctor Atomic (2005) and continued to compose stage works, including A Flowering Tree (2006), The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012), and Girls of the Golden West (2017), all in collaboration with Sellars. Adams’s focus on subjects of living memory in both the operas and instrumental works, such as On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), transformed the contemporary classical repertoire, making Adams a principal figure in late-20th and early-twenty-first-century American music.

John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer

The viewing of opera begs the question of how operatic text (music and libretto) becomes constrained and absorbed by the performance medium. Especially in contexts where the filmic projection of images creates additional layers to the actions taking place on stage, the visual field becomes semantically overloaded and requires negotiation on its own terms. This chapter argues that Tom Morris’s production of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer preserves the integrity of the operatic text by interjecting visual images that set the broader allegorical themes into relief. Themes implicit in the operatic text, while being absorbed into the performance text, become integrated into the overall narrative that balances the mythic dimension with realism. More specifically, this chapter examines the intersection between the operatic and performance texts in Morris’s productions in three analytical stages and introduces a theoretical framework for categorizing intermedial relationship based on Nicholas Cook’s models of conformance, contest, and complementation.

Tansy Davies Between Worlds, Barbican Theatre, London

As suggested by its title, Tansy Davies's new opera Between Worlds is more fantasy than a representational depiction of historic events. Co-commissioned by ENO and the Barbican, where it was premiered on 11 April 2015 with a superb cast conducted by Gerry Cornelius (I attended on 21 April), it raises a central aesthetic and political question about the extent to which public figures of our time can be drawn and re-drawn in art. Recent docu-operas, such as Nixon in China, the more recent Anna Nicole and, of course, the highly controversial The Death of Klinghoffer suggest the issue is a live one.

FIRST PERFORMANCES

London, Barbican: Alexander Goehr's ‘When Adam Fell’ Paul ConwayLondon, Barbican: Thomas Adès's ‘Polaris’ Robert SteinUniversity of Manchester: Philip Grange's ‘Ghosts of Great Violence’ Paul ConwayManchester University – Psappha 20th anniversary concert Tim MottersheadBirmingham, Symphony Hall: Cecilia McDowall's ‘Seventy Degrees Below Zero’ Paul ConwayLondon, ENO: John Adams's ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ Robert SteinLondon, Barbican: Rebecca Saunders's ‘Still’ Paul ConwayChichester University: ‘New Music Chi’ John WheatleySt Mary's Church, Shrewsbury: John Joubert's Cello Concerto Paul ConwayLondon, St. Giles Cripplegate: Jericho House's ‘The Tempest’ Jill Barlow

Re-producing Klinghoffer: Opera and Arab Identity before and after 9/11

John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer stages the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. This essay proposes that the representations of Palestinian hijackers in three different productions show the opera reinventing itself before and after 9/11, when Arab identity hovers ambiguously in the U.S. Imaginary. Analyses focus in particular on distinct forms of collaboration among artists and media. In 1991 thorny associations among media produce an ambiguous Arab subject that reflects, and encourages, a capability for dialogue around the topic of terrorism. By contrast, two productions in 2003 rely on film and photograph to situate rigidly delineated Palestinian characters—demonstrating a dependency on visual media and a consequent highlighting of race that may be emblematic of a post-9/11 era. The essay concludes that different forms of collaboration in The Death of Klinghoffer can be approached as a microcosm of social and political interactions taking place far beyond the opera proper.

Klinghoffer in Brooklyn Heights

Is The Death of Klinghoffer anti-Semitic? Performances of the opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in September 1991 were at the epicentre of a controversy that continues to this day; the New York audience was – and remains – uniquely hostile to the work. A careful reception analysis shows that New York audiences reacted vehemently not so much to an ideological position on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but to specific nuances in the satirical portrayal of American Jewish characters in one controversial scene later cut from the opera, a scene that must be read closely and in relation to specifically American-Jewish questions of ethnic humour, assimilation, identity and multiculturalism in the mass media. I understand the opera's negative reception in the larger context of the increasingly severe crises that beset American Jewish self-identity during the Reagan-Bush era. Ultimately the historical ability of Jews to assimilate through comedy, to ‘enter the American culture on the stage laughing’, in Leslie Fiedler's famous formulation, will have to be reconsidered. A close reading of contested moments from the opera shows librettist Alice Goodman and composer John Adams avoiding the romance of historical self-consciousness as they attempt to construct a powerful yet subtle defence of the ordinary and unassuming.

Proms 2004: Adams, Corigliano, Saariaho

Like its predecessors Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, the third opera in John Adams's trilogy, Doctor Atomic, seems set fair to juxtapose modern political forces, personalities and moral debate. Here admiration for Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow geniuses who created the atomic bomb is contrasted with the enormity of destruction wreaked on Hiroshima. With over a year to go to the opera's world première by San Francisco Opera, the composer himself conducted Easter Eve 1945, the opening of Act 2, at the Albert Hall on 22 August with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Audra McDonald as soloist.