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A meeting en route to a rare masterpiece
by David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Enquirer, February 13, 2001

Nighttime San Francisco can be dispiritingly devoid of taxis. So when composer John Adams appears out of the darkness and offers you a lift back to your hotel - so what if it's a breach of professional distance? - you take it. We'd both been to a private Kronos Quartet concert; he was headed home to Berkeley. Climbing into a car that no image-conscious composer would want a journalist to see, I relished exclusive moments with this great but fun musician, only to find my powers of conversation failing. Silences were long.

That was a year ago. Now, I like to think he was simply preoccupied with his latest piece, El Niño. Performed last month by the San Francisco Symphony, it's Adams' version of the Nativity story, an odd choice for a composer with a trickster streak. Jesus, Mary and Joseph have now joined Richard Nixon and Palestinian terrorists as personages enshrined in music by Adams. With skepticism, I listened to a San Francisco radio broadcast, and for the first time in 25 years of music reviewing, I can say the following about a new work: It's a major masterpiece.

And to think I shared the same car while his brainwaves may have been mulling the finishing touches. This is the closest I've ever come to the germination of something great. Not to name-drop (oh well, why not?), I was in Andrew Lloyd Webber's office the day he ran in with a floppy disk containing what he swore would be a hit song in his projected sequel to The Phantom of the Opera (it was nice, nothing more). I was in the audience when Laura Nyro read an in-progress poem that later became "Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp" (a fine song, not a masterpiece). The point is that I've had some close brushes with this sort of thing; I'm not dazzled by El Niño just because the composer gave me a ride.

The question is how you recognize a masterpiece when you hear it. Usually, masterpieces aren't recognized until long after they come into the world. But Adams admirers - and these include many who dislike his fellow minimalist Philip Glass - have followed him loyally from his first major works, Harmonium and Harmonielehre, through his two, so-called CNN operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, and into some odd cul-de-sacs such as Hoodoo Zephyr.

So you know when the next step handily surpasses them all, has profound and urgent things to say, and is all it can be. Shouldn't all of that qualify El Niño as a masterpiece? The music industry is definitely behind it: The release date of the recording was bumped up from 2002 to late this year.

The two-hour piece sets a huge variety of texts, both ancient and modern, all with visionary dimensions that also tell the familiar story in human terms: Joseph grows jealous over the immaculate conception, everybody copes awkwardly with divine occurrences, and the birth of Jesus was not without its labor pains. Its large musical apparatus includes orchestra, chorus (both adult and children), vocal soloists and a trio of countertenors who sing material advancing the plot.

The sound is characteristic Adams: Chord structures and orchestrations are lush, dreamy and glistening with well-buffed colors, and then some. Early on, there's a deeply arresting convergence of treble instruments - a white-light sonority, you might say - suggesting the unbearable intensity of spiritual enlightenment. I've never heard anything like it in Adams. And what could be more appropriate to a piece about God visiting Earth?

Most Adams works have individual moments when a musical choice is so right that you can't imagine it any other way - or any other composer having arrived at it, such as the trancelike monotone to which he set Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" in the second movement of his choral work, Harmonium. El Niño has such moments one after another, such as the excruciating choral dissonances given to the Passover slaughter and the wounded-animal vocal lines Dawn

Upshaw sings in an extended lament that follows. That's not to suggest that it's perfect. The low-key ending seems oddly vague. But perfection doesn't necessarily translate into greatness (Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, for one).

The point is that El Niño's greatness is found in concentrated form. A masterpiece often says a lot with a little, and in a short period of time. In contrast to the expansiveness so often heard early in the minimalist movement, Adams has ideas morphing into one another in heady succession and with tremendous impact in just the first five minutes of the piece.

A masterpiece reflects and defines its time; El Niño does so both musically and in its choice of texts. King Herod's decision to commit genocide is sung over a boogie-woogie ground bass modified so as to be obsessive and sinister. Upshaw's lament utilizes Spanish-language texts by Rosario Castellanos characterizing a 1968 student uprising in Mexico City that ended in slaughter.

Most modern, though, is Adams' conception of beauty. We all need musical repose and harmonic softness, but nothing is so simple in our world. Adams' chord structures have teeth, except when characters are fantasizing - and not of this world.

I didn't realize how much I needed this masterpiece until I heard it. We've been living too long on masterpieces of ages past. And as towering as they are, there's always some mental extrapolation involved, as when you become accustomed to the endlessly repeated texts of Handel's Messiah or the contemplative dead spots in Wagner. They're available to our modern sensibility but don't exactly reach out to it. With its array of orchestral color, vernacular-music overtones and even accommodation of our shorter attention spans, El Niño is all ours. Can there be anything more exciting?

David Patrick Stearns' e-mail address is dstearns@phillynews.com.

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