Can we imagine Beethoven struggling with the demands of 21st-century media? The question is on John Adams’ mind as he catches up with a backlog of interviews after a winter storm delayed his concert last week in Cleveland. “He had little patience for dealing with anybody,” notes the American composer of his irascible forebear, “even the counts and princes who were the source of his income.” Adams, by contrast, sounds relaxed even though his interviews have overrun.
One reason for all the interest is the announcement of San Francisco Opera’s programme for its centennial season. After a gala concert, the opening night in September will be the premiere of Adams’ new opera, Antony and Cleopatra. Based on Shakespeare, with some help from Virgil and Plutarch, it promises to be a big event and marks the breaking of new ground for its composer, a resident of California.
Before that, there is the small matter of a landmark birthday. On February 15, Adams turns 75. However difficult this is to believe, given his bright personality and youthful outlook on the world, the young composer who came to notice in the late 1970s in the wake of minimalists such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass is now an elder statesman of American music.
As an artist, he has travelled further than most. After a youthful dabbling with modernism, Adams soon saw the minimalists’ new simplicity of musical style as the way forward. At first he tweaked it, then increasingly allowed a richer music to grow, and in the past decade or two he has blossomed into a different species of composer. How does his music sound now? “That’s John Adams!” is the only answer that fits.
“I have always found it hard,” he says. “I just met with some students and said to them: ‘The most difficult thing about composing is starting a piece. And I have to tell you it never gets easier.’ Some composers write so much, always another symphony, another concerto, and I wonder if they have any self-criticism. I would rather experience the pain of doubt and have to live with that. It is one thing to give audiences what they expect, but branding myself like that never appealed to me. Creating music is all about self-discovery, however pretentious that may sound.”
It may not be a coincidence that the past half century has seen an explosion of cultural activity on the West Coast. In 1971, when Adams moved to California, the orchestras in Los Angeles and San Francisco had distinguished histories and two of the 20th century’s “greats” — Stravinsky and Schoenberg — had lived there, but there was no sign of the wellspring of creativity that there is now.
“It has been a slow slog,” says Adams, “but I am a proud Californian and deeply involved in music there. California has a liberal political climate and a rich population, including Hispanics, south-east Asians and a large black community. I have written several pieces [about California] — The Dharma at Big Sur, City Noir and the opera Girls of the Golden West — and I would be happy if people in years to come say: ‘Adams is to California as Dvorak is to the Czechs, or Bartok to Hungary.’
“The one thing that makes me extremely upset is what is happening to the landscape because of climate change. I have a place in the country where I compose [what Adams calls his ‘Mahler hut’ is deep in the forest three hours from Berkeley] and from July to November it has become a dangerous place to be.”
The premiere of Antony and Cleopatra will fall in the middle of that period. It will mark a big change for Adams, who sparked a generation-long trend for American operas about modern political leaders and events, first with Nixon in China, then, controversially, a Palestinian hijacking in The Death of Klinghoffer and, more recently, the testing of the first atomic bomb by J Robert Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic.
He says he found the experience of setting short scenes from Shakespeare in his previous opera, Girls of the Golden West, so inspiring that he wanted to do more. In particular, he was keen to try what he calls “straight-out drama”, where the characters, rather than soliloquising, interact instantly.
“Here are two lovers who are not Romeo and Juliet,” he says. “They both have pasts and in the course of the play do terrible things to each other. This speaks to me as an older person. I am drawn to Antony, a man who has a heroic past as a soldier and now wants to enjoy life, as if he had retired to Hawaii or Las Vegas. Then he encounters young Octavius Caesar, who reminds me of the young masters of the universe, like the ones in Silicon Valley.
“Cleopatra is also an extraordinary person. People seem to expect that my Cleopatra will come out of the grand opera tradition, but my take on her is much more mercurial, sexy, vain, a bit like the main character in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I wrote to Julia Bullock [who will sing the role at the premiere] and said I hope you have kept the summer free because I have written for you a role as big as Isolde.”
Adams’ students are lucky to have a mentor who has led a life of constant artistic evolution. Not standing still has served him well and given us a corpus of works in which no two are predictably the same. Does he have any advice for young composers today?
“One thing makes me most optimistic,” he says. “When I was at school in the late 1960s it was what I call the bad old days of modernism, when [you were judged on] what style you wrote in. Now composers are much more concerned about communicating and the social message of their music.”
By all accounts this will not have a direct impact on the new opera. Although it may have been tempting to view larger-than-life political figures such as Antony and Octavius Caesar through a 21st-century lens, he says the opera will keep them in the Roman era, not move them to Washington DC.
“I don’t agree with people who say a composer can create political change. Think of Joe Manchin [Democratic senator from West Virginia] — his one vote could make Biden’s agenda happen. I say to students, you may think that by writing pieces with great political sentiment you will create change, but you will still not change Manchin’s mind. Music and art do something different. Everybody needs music and I firmly believe it should form part of our lives.”
The premiere of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ will be given by San Francisco Opera on September 10; sfopera.com
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