John Adams was vilified for daring to portray the inner lives of Palestinian hijackers in his opera 'The Death Of Klinghoffer'. His subject may be controversial, but his music is not, writes Michael Dervan after an immersion in his work
John Adams is famous as the most performed of living American composers. But the explosion of media interest since late last year has nothing to do with an enhancement of that reputation. Quite the opposite. He's been in the news because of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which dropped a performance of the choruses from Adams's second opera, The Death Of Klinghoffer, in response to September's terrorist attacks. The orchestra played Aaron Copland's First Symphony instead.
The Death Of Klinghoffer is an operatic treatment of the murder by Palestinian terrorists of Leon Klinghoffer, who was a passenger on the Achille Lauro, the cruise ship hijacked in 1985. The management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra felt apprehensive about performing a work which so clearly articulates thoughts and feelings from both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The extract was cancelled "out of sensitivity to the current mood of their audiences, who at the present moment need music of comfort and solace". Adams, it turned out, was having none of it. He refused to allow the substitution of any other work of his, and he proceeded to make his displeasure public.
Long tainted with controversy, to the point of cancelled productions in Los Angeles and Glyndebourne, Adams's opera found itself yet again in the glare of negative publicity. But the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which runs a composer weekend at the Barbican, in London, every January, persisted with its plan to give the work its UK concert premiere, at the start of John's Earbox, its three-day showcase of Adams's work.
Adams, who was in London at the weekend for the event, was eloquent in Klinghoffer's defence. The sin he perpetrated with librettist Alice Goodman was, he said, to have portrayed the terrorists as people with inner lives. The intention, explained Goodman, was not to provoke, but "to make something beautiful that tells the truth". These are believable pleas, although it would be easy to forgive all of those involved - including Peter Sellars, the stage director who proposed the Klinghoffer subject - even if they had the intention of provoking people in a culture that sometimes seems to reach collective evaluations of international strife only in glaring black and white.
Adams's music can certainly be seen as carrying its messages with a similar simplistic clarity. Text and music handle the issues with pop-art bluntness, or, if you prefer, with soap-opera subtlety. As a student in the 1960s, Adams found himself more stirred by rock music than by the serialists he was being trained to emulate. The young composer's responses linger on in the mature composer's penchant for pulsating walls of sound effects - heard in the stirring opening chorus of Palestinians - the haloed fringes of synthesiser sound and the emulation of bass-heavy amplified rock-group grunt.
In many ways, Klinghoffer is not at all remarkable. Choruses of national sentiment are no operatic novelty, any more than the war-like conflict the work deals with, or the inclusion of a violent death (complete with death aria and an aria of desolation for the bereaved). And there's a calming and binding presence in the ship's captain, a character whose compassion and detachment mirror his duality as both participant and observer (his role has been likened to that of the Evangelist in the Bach Passions).
Adams and Goodman may be right about the reasons for US resistance to the work. Normal European perspectives may well seem pro-Palestinian in comparison with those of US citizens most likely to take exception to the bipartisan nature of Klinghoffer. Yet, I must admit, I couldn't help but feel that some equivalent of political sloganising was under way in this opera. I felt lectured at.
Of course, in many ways, Adams is a man with a mission. He is, you could infer from his description of his development as a composer, a very determined subversive. He speaks witheringly of the critically fashionable serial composers of his youth, whom he characterises as writing ever more rarefied works for ever dwindling audiences. And his route back to music that made sense to him - music with directness of emotion, with pulse and with repetition - was through minimalism.
But even minimalism, as represented by the clear processes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, was something he chose in turn to subvert. He seems to have found something too glacial, too abstract, about process music per se. He wanted to be able to lever more directly at his listeners, and, as John's Earbox revealed, you can interpret virtually all his work as attempts at carrying out that leverage.
HIS description of Grand Pianola Music, from 1982, as a piece that mixes the worlds of Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Liberace and the Supremes into the patterns of minimalism - it is for orchestra with two rippling piano soloists and amplified female vocal trio - gives a fair indication of the relish with which he tackles unlikely-seeming scenarios.
Twenty years ago, the glorified banality of the piece was an even more daring slap in the face than it might seem now. (Adams traces the origin of the work to a dream he had of driving along a Californian freeway and seeing the two black stretch limos that were overtaking him turn into gleaming concert grands, spewing out the chord of E flat major, with Homeric sirens preying on his attention in the background.)
Harmonielehre, a large, 40-minute orchestral work from 1985, seeks to recapture the dying days of late-Romantic tonal harmony in the context of minimialism. His newest piece, Guide To Strange Places, a BBC co-commission that had its UK premiere with the composer-conducted BBCSO on Sunday, takes as the extraneous elements what he calls the "over-the-edge hyperexpressivity" that he associates with a wide range of music, from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique to Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice and Ligeti's Atmosphères.
First impressions, however, were that Adams's playful ear might have spent more time distorting echoes of Stravinsky than of any other composer. The Rite Of Spring seems to be the ghost in this machine.
Indeed, Stravinsky, an apparently unquestioned god in Adams's pantheon, leads to some interesting comparisons. The great Russian's exploration of neoclassicism can be seen as a major redrawing of the balance between the formal and conventionally expressive elements in music, downplaying the latter at the expense of the former.
It was this that provoked Constant Lambert's memorable putdown that Stravinsky, like a savage faced with the bowler hat and the chamber pot, two great symbols of Western civilisation, was apt to confuse their function. Adams's endeavour is to return expressiveness to modern music, but to do so in the process-governed style that seems least likely to accommodate it with comfort. He's even declared a wish to turn minimalism into a humanist experience.
The works in the Earbox weekend that took him closest to the conventions of melodic expressiveness - The Wound-Dresser, a Whitman setting from 1989, and the Violin Concerto of 1993 - were those that found him sounding least like himself.
And there's a paradox in Adams's output. In spite of his "most-performed" status, the most popular of his works, Shaker Loops, from 1978, is one of the most purely minimalist. Is there another Stravinskian connection here? The great success and sustained popularity of the three early ballets, culminating in The Rite Of Spring, is something Stravinsky was never to emulate throughout his long, stylistically varied and hugely successful career, least of all when he finally came to terms with the 12-tone technique of Schoenberg, his arch rival.
Schoenberg, too, seems to be one of the most complicated relationships in Adams's life, not least because he abandoned what Adams calls the pleasure principle. By a curious coincidence, it is Adams's zany Chamber Symphony, a cartoonish encounter with Schoenberg from 1992, that remains one of his strongest works.
There was a pervasive feeling over the weekend that Adams, who appears prolix by nature, suffers frequent leakage and dilution both as a minimimalist and a neo-expressionist. In the Chamber Symphony he found a more lasting strength by turning to embrace the ghost he's been running from.
