For composer John Adams, opera still has an important role in tackling contemporary issues
The Pulitzer winner looks back on his decades-long career in music — and some of his most controversial works
If you think opera is a stodgy art form reserved only for retellings of ancient myths and Shakespearean dramas then you're probably unfamiliar with the work of John Adams. He's a Pulitzer-winning composer and conductor who's best known for centering his operas around major political events in modern history, such as the J. Robert Oppenheimer story (Doctor Atomic) or the California Gold Rush (Girls of the Golden West).
But Adams's work has also been quite controversial. Recently, while he was in Toronto conducting the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Adams dropped by the Q studio to reflect on his life in music and some of the biggest risks he's taken in his decades-long career.
It all started with his 1987 opera Nixon in China, which was the first of his many collaborations with theatre director Peter Sellars. The groundbreaking opera recounts U.S. president Richard Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972, where he met with Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
"Nixon was this very complicated figure," Adams says. "He expressed a lot of the values of the United States — many of which have come back to roost in our country after this recent election — and yet he had weaknesses. That's the sort of thing we love as opera composers. We love complex people like Otello or Wotan or Don Giovanni…. It was very controversial that in 1987 there would be an opera about people who were still living."
Adams's second opera with Sellars, The Death of Klinghoffer, was even more contentious. It looked at the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front. The hijacking resulted in the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish American passenger who used a wheelchair.
Since its premiere in 1991, The Death of Klinghoffer has been heavily protested with critics claiming that it's antisemitic and glorifies terrorism. When New York's Metropolitan Opera staged it in 2014, Adams required police protection just to get to the performance.
We're not on the cultural radar the way Wagner or Verdi or or even Stravinsky was…. We've given our place over to the Taylor Swifts and the Bruce Springsteens of the world.- John Adams
"What happened was that we wanted to tell both versions of the narrative," he says. "It begins with this angry chorus of exiled Palestinians, but it ends with a Jewish American who's just discovered that her husband's been murdered and she's all alone, feeling the grief and the loss of the person who means the most to her in life. So, you know, it's a fundamentally very human thing. And for scholars and musicologists to say that it's slanted in one direction or not I think is very unfair."
Adams says he recently found out that Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who's best known for his films Call Me by Your Name and Challengers, will be directing a new stage production of The Death of Klinghoffer in Florence in 2026.
Though Adams is no stranger to controversy, he was hesitant to move forward on one piece that the New York Philharmonic commissioned him to write in commemoration of Sept. 11, just a year after the attacks.
"I thought it was a terrible idea," he says. "I couldn't imagine a piece that wasn't either heart on sleeve or just, you know, in bad taste. But then I gave it a lot of thought and I realized we classical composers, we're not on the cultural radar the way Wagner or Verdi or or even Stravinsky was. We've sort of fallen off. We've given our place over to the Taylor Swifts and the Bruce Springsteens of the world. And I thought, you know, I ought to be able to find a way to respond to this."
After the tragedy of Sept. 11, there was a real need to process the grief of the nation, and classical music was one of the most powerful ways to express that collective emotion. The result was Adams's composition On the Transmigration of Souls, which won him his Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
"I ultimately found a way to make a piece that involved a children's chorus, adult chorus and orchestra," he says. "The text of which was largely made up from the little messages that family members put around Ground Zero … when they were sifting through the debris of the fallen towers, hoping, hoping against hope, that maybe a family member was still alive."
When it comes to the role or ability of classical music to address the issues of our time, Adams says he has to remind himself that creating a genuine artistic experience is still important, even if it only gets a small audience.
"I think that what we do in the world of classical music is very challenged — there's just so much noise," he says. "It's very, very hard to get people out to confront and also enjoy a challenging musical performance. So I feel that what we do is very special. We musicians are privileged to be able to make a living at it."
The full interview with John Adams is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with John Adams produced by Ben Edwards.
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