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In his seventh decade, John Adams's musical fertility still springs anew
John Adams is 61. How did that happen? For all my adult life he has been one of the most important figures in the contemporary classical musical world. From his earliest major works, such as Shaker Loops (1978) and Harmonium (1980-81), he has possessed a fresh, young voice, ripe with possibilities. He forged his own rich and expressive musical language that could speak to a mainstream audience out of the exciting but austere minimalism of composers such as Steve Reich combined with other influences of his time, from the rock and pop of, say, the Beach Boys and the Supremes, through the jazz of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, to the great American mid-century musicals and some eccentrics such as John Cage and the British composer Cornelius Cardew, with his Scratch Orchestra.
Adams was a leading player in the long march away from the post-Schoenbergian serialism that dominated postwar music and diminished concert audiences until the 1970s. In his autobiography, Hallelujah Junction (Faber & Faber), due to be published on 2 October, he quotes from the composer Milton Babbitt's notorious 1958 essay "Who Cares If You Listen?":
The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in . . . mathematics, philosophy and physics. Advanced music . . . scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts
and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.
To escape such arrogance and elitism, Adams moved from Harvard to the west coast.
Although it is now 21 years since the premiere of his first opera, Nixon in China, I still remember the euphoria I felt on first hearing it. At last! I thought. Opera isn't dead! Benjamin Britten isn't the final master to enter the operatic canon. This will enter the repertoire of houses across the world and still be performed in fifty, a hundred years' time.
Since then opera and music-dramas have been an important part of his working life. His enormously creative partnership with the director Peter Sellars (and the outstanding librettist Alice Goodman), which produced Nixon in China, also gave birth to The Death of Klinghoffer, an intense and solemn St Matthew Passion for the late 20th century on the subject of Israeli-Palestinian conflict and terrorism. In 2005, he and Sellars created Doctor Atomic, about J Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the atomic bomb, and the Faustian bargain between science and politics. (Doctor Atomic will have its British premiere in February at English National Opera.)
So, where is Adams at 61? He is now one of the most successful and admired composers and conductors in the world. His most recent opera appeared in 2006 and has just been recorded by Nonesuch Records. A Flowering Tree was another fruit of his partnership with Peter Sellars, a commission from the City of Vienna to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart. For the first time, Adams produced his own libretto and culled the story from Sellars-guided researches into folk tales (though the words are occasionally clunky - as has happened before with composers' librettos: Wagner notoriously, Michael Tippett too). The Magic Flute was one inspiration and the work shares with Mozart's final opera the themes of magic and transformation.
The original Indian story of A Flowering Tree is about a poor young woman, Kumudha, who changes herself periodically into a tree so that her mother can harvest the blossoms to sell. A prince witnesses this magic, falls in love with the girl, and marries her. But one day his jealous sister breaks Kumudha's branches mid-transformation and she is left deformed - half tree, half girl - and flees the palace. The distraught prince goes in search of his wife and wanders the world as a beggar. Eventually he finds and restores her.
The work is immediately appealing, though not in the familiar mode of Adams, fizzing with energy, speed and exhilaration, but with gentle pulses and shimmering textures. It rises at several points - Kumudha's transformations, for instance - to intense climaxes that are reminiscent of the ecstatic musical representation of nature in Janácek's Cunning Little Vixen.
Adams's sound-world is still expanding and, with A Flowering Tree, it has embraced a new sweetness and lyrical beauty. In this, the composer's seventh decade, his musical fertility still springs anew.
"A Flowering Tree" (Nonesuch) is released on 22 September
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