The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘To this day, I don’t really consider myself an opera fan’
John Adams, the greatest living opera composer, reveals his bold new take on Shakespeare to
At 75, the most successful living composer of opera is preparing for his newest work, which premieres this week in San Francisco. But here’s a surprise: John Adams has chosen to tell the story of Antony
and Cleopatra: a subject from ancient history, based on Shakespeare’s play. It’s a radical departure from the more contemporary pieces that made his name: Nixon in China (1987), retelling Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972; The Death of
Klinghoffer (1991), the hugely controversial piece about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship; and Doctor Atomic
(2005), on Robert Oppenheimer’s creation of the atomic bomb.
Yet Adams’s historical project has posed its own challenges. “It doesn’t get any easier,” he says from San Francisco. As he talks via Zoom, he swivels the camera round to show a massive surface with a half-finished jigsaw. “This table I’m sitting at, which now has my granddaughter’s puzzles all over it, was filled with huge charts and Post-it Notes with every scene, every character, every line. The dilemma was wrestling this beast, which is a play with 44 characters and 30-something scenes, to get it into two acts.”
There has also been upheaval in the casting: the American soprano Julia Bullock (recently the star of Handel’s Theodora at London’s Royal Opera) had to withdraw because she was pregnant, and was replaced with Amina Edris.
“She is tremendous – and she was born in Cairo,” Adams says. “These things are so complex: remember that although everyone thinks Cleopatra is Egyptian, the Ptolemy family were actually Macedonian.”
Adams is well aware of the problems surrounding identity in the arts. The recent production of
Nixon in China by Scottish Opera was highly praised, up for a South Bank Show Award, but it was then attacked for failing to cast Asian singers in the Chinese roles, and as a result, Scottish Opera withdrew the show from the nominations.
Adams recognises the changing times: “We’re going through a period when many people are now trying to make amends for racism and insensitivity in the past, and the pendulum is now swinging radically to the other side. It was ironic, in that withdrawn production, that Nixon was a black singer [Eric Greene].
“I can say that the last time I conducted Nixon in a semi-staging with the Los Angeles Phil, and the new production that will be done in Paris with Gustavo Dudamel next year, in both of those cases we’ve been able to cast Asian or Asian-American singers for all the major roles. That just wasn’t possible in 1987 when Nixon was new: the American singer Sanford Sylvan, who created the role of Chou En-Lai, was incredibly poetic, but you couldn’t have that now. There were some wonderful Asian or Asian-American singers, but most of them just didn’t do a rhythmically tricky piece like mine. Now that area is expanding very quickly in terms of people with the technical skills.”
Adams, in person a genial, friendly figure, has often attracted controversy. The biggest storms of protest have been reserved for The
Death of Klinghoffer, accused of anti-Semitism because it was seen as being too sympathetic to the hijackers of the cruise ship. There were strident calls for the opera to be banned. Glyndebourne, which co-commissioned the opera, has never staged it.
Adams loves the work deeply, but even now, after a hit run at the Met in New York, he is sceptical about its future. Though he will conduct a concert version this season in Amsterdam, he tells me: “The likelihood of it being done again in the US is very, very slim, not because there aren’t directors and companies who would like to do it, but because they’re afraid of a scandal.”
Is choosing Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra, which kicks off San Francisco Opera’s centenary season, a retreat from contemporary problems? Absolutely not, says Adams.
“Just because this story takes place 2,000 years ago does not mean it’s not very much about today,” he says. “In the play, it’s the young Caesar Augustus [US tenor Paul Appleby] who seems to have the answers; Antony [Canadian tenor Gerald Finley] had this glorious past as a general but now everything he does is a failure – he can’t even do his own suicide right – while the young Caesar seems to know the future, like some of these ‘masters of the universe’ we have around us in Silicon Valley. There’s an aspect of PR savvy in Caesar that existed then, and has many analogies with my life and yours.”
Adams sees close resonances with the rise of authoritarianism in the United States. “This is the story of the rise of one civilisation and the decline of another, and we’re in a situation right now where we are looking at something that could be really terrible to the future of our civilisation.”
Shakespeare has been a minefield for composers, and until the recent successes of Brett Dean’s Hamlet and Thomas Adès’s
The Tempest (both of which played around significantly with the text), many had fallen by the wayside. For Adams, there is also the ghost of Samuel Barber’s Antony and
Cleopatra, which opened the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966 to a chorus of derision, but which he has deliberately not studied.
Isn’t Shakespeare notoriously difficult to set successfully to music? “No, I found just the opposite,” he says. “It’s been a thrill – every, every phrase, every mouthful has suggested a musical gesture. In my last opera [ Girls of
the Golden West, not yet seen here], I added in several short scenes
‘The likelihood of The Death of Klinghoffer being done again in the US? Very, very slim’
from Macbeth and I found that I loved working with Shakespeare.”
Of course, Adams has been a hugely creative figure on the American scene, expanding from his early flirtations with minimalism into an exploration with every genre from symphonic to chamber to vocal music.
Now that he has left behind the label of “minimalism” (attached to him and to others such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass), does he think of himself as part of the establishment? “Oh, you’d have to ask a 20-year-old composer whether Adams has sold out. When I was in my 20s, I probably felt like that about Aaron Copland. Actually I was always involved with orchestral music in a way that Steve and Phil weren’t. Even to this day, I don’t really consider myself an opera fan – I don’t go, mostly because the productions don’t interest me. I’m ashamed to say this, but it was only during the pandemic that I engaged with Verdi and learned Italian.”
So can he be optimistic about the future of opera? “If the subjects are subjects that speak to people, Klinghoffer about terrorism, Nixon about politics, I think opera still has a future, because you’ve got an experience that you just can’t get with any other art form.”
‘Antony and Cleopatra’ premieres at the San Francisco Opera from September 10, and will be livestreamed on September 18 at 10pm. Details: sfopera.com. ‘John Adams Collected Works’, a 40-disc set of all his major pieces, is available on Nonesuch Records