72 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
MUSICAL EVENTS
IMMORTAL LONGINGS
The première of John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” at San Francisco Opera.
BYALEXROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIHER LOREDO
P
erhaps the riskiest venture that an
English-speaking composer can
undertake is to make an opera out of
Shakespeare. Although the repertory
contains various Shakespeare adapta-
tions, only one version by a native speaker
has found a secure place on interna-
tional stages: Benjamin Britten’s “A Mid-
summer Night’s Dream,” from 1960.
The hazards of Bardic opera are obvi-
ous. The plays generate their own in-
delible music in the reader’s mind, and
recitations by celebrated actors linger in
the memory. A safer approach is to ap-
propriate Shakespeare’s drama and psy-
chology while substituting a more mod-
ern text. 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.
Britten’s singular feat was to set the
“Dream” line by line while imposing his
own lithe, eerie personality.
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. The libretto, which Adams
devised in consultation with the stage
director Elkhanah Pulitzer and the
dramaturge Lucia Scheckner, is pre-
dominantly straight-up Shakespeare,
with a few interpolations from Plutarch
and Virgil. A hyperkinetic opening,
with violas tapping out a galloping
figure and winds scurrying in pigeon-
like haste, gives notice that Adams
will, like Britten before him, bring to
bear an unmistakable personal voice.
You have the sense that the composer
is not overawed by the assignment.
This is in contrast to Brett Dean’s ex-
cessively self-aware take on “Hamlet,”
which was seen at the Met last season.
Adams has been writing operas since
the nineteen-eighties, and he long ago
established an extraordinary knack for
making music from the English lan-
guage. In place of fixed, singsong pat-
terns, he has perfected a malleable vocal
line that follows the irregular rhythms
of thought and speech. 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. The richer the
language, the stronger Adams’s response.
When, at the end of the first act of
“Doctor Atomic,” J. Robert Oppen-
heimer sings John Donne’s “Batter my
heart,” the anguished eloquence of the
music alters how you perceive the poem.
At the same time, Adams possesses
a melodic signature that is independent
of his literary sources. The pivotal mo-
ment in “Harmonielehre,” his break-
through 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.
It is intensely theatrical, gestural music,
a monologue without words. In “An-
tony and Cleopatra,” similarly prowl-
ing Adamsian lines surface in the or-
chestra, now aligned with settings of a
venerable text. The collision with Shake-
speare appears to have been inevitable.
“
A
ntony” is the first stage work that
Adams has created without Peter
Sellars, who masterminded “Nixon,”
“Klinghoffer,” “Atomic,” and other po-
litically charged projects. Those who wish
to see Adams address urgent issues of
the day may be disappointed, but he has
earned the right to step away from con-
The orchestra seethes beneath the singers, delivering brief, explosive outbursts. temporary controversies. “Antony” still
