![]() It is intensely theatrical, gestural music, a monologue without words. The pivotal moment in “Harmonielehre,” his breakthrough piece of 1985, is the emergence, midway through the first movement, of a sprawling, upward- and downward-lunging theme in the strings and horns, more or less in the key of E-flat minor. ![]() When, at the end of the first act of “Doctor Atomic,” J. Robert Oppenheimer sings John Donne’s “Batter my heart,” the anguished eloquence of the music alters how you perceive the poem.Īt the same time, Adams possesses a melodic signature that is independent of his literary sources. The richer the language, the stronger Adams’s response. ![]() Consider how he handles the phrase “The Eastern hemisphere beckoned to us,” in “Nixon”: a quick triplet pattern on “hemisphere” makes the word hover above the beat, delaying the next accent. In place of fixed, singsong patterns, he has perfected a malleable vocal line that follows the irregular rhythms of thought and speech. This is in contrast to Brett Dean’s excessively self-aware take on “Hamlet,” which was seen at the Met last season.Īdams has been writing operas since the nineteen-eighties, and he long ago established an extraordinary knack for making music from the English language. You have the sense that the composer is not overawed by the assignment. A hyperkinetic opening, with violas tapping out a galloping figure and winds scurrying in pigeonlike haste, gives notice that Adams will, like Britten before him, bring to bear an unmistakable personal voice. The libretto, which Adams devised in consultation with the stage director Elkhanah Pulitzer and the dramaturge Lucia Scheckner, is predominantly straight-up Shakespeare, with a few interpolations from Plutarch and Virgil. John Adams, the composer of “Nixon in China,” “The Death of Klinghoffer,” and “Doctor Atomic,” has entered the ring with a finely wrought, fiercely expressive rendering of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which had its première on September 10th, at San Francisco Opera. Britten’s singular feat was to set the “Dream” line by line while imposing his own lithe, eerie personality. Verdi and Arrigo Boito did as much in “Otello” and “Falstaff” so did Thomas Adès and Meredith Oakes in “The Tempest,” which made its début in 2004 and has shown staying power. A safer approach is to appropriate Shakespeare’s drama and psychology while substituting a more modern text. The plays generate their own indelible music in the reader’s mind, and recitations by celebrated actors linger in the memory. Although the repertory contains various Shakespeare adaptations, only one version by a native speaker has found a secure place on international stages: Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” from 1960. Perhaps the riskiest venture that an English-speaking composer can undertake is to make an opera out of Shakespeare.
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