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The Harmonist
John Adams takes the agony out of modern music.
by Alex Ross, The New Yorker, January 8, 2001

As Highway 1, the California coastal road, goes north of San Francisco, it holds the eyes like a work of art. The landscape might have been devised by a trickster genius who delights in grand effects and strange juxtapositions. Rolling meadows end in sudden cliffs; redwoods rise above thin patches of beach. Towers of rock rest on the surface of the ocean like the ghosts of clipper ships. Here and there, a lost cow sits on the shoulder, looking out to sea. Side roads go up inland hills at odd angles, tempting the aimless driver to follow them to the end. One especially beguiling detour, the Meyers Grade Road, departs from Highway 1 shortly after the town of Jenner. The grade in question is eighteen per cent, and the steepness of the ascent causes dizzying distortions of perspective. The Pacific rises in the rear-view mirror like a blue hill across a hidden valley.

Not far from here is Brushy Ridge, the forest home of John Adams, who may be the most vital and eloquent composer in America. If you had to sum up his music in a single metaphor, you might say that it sounds like Highway 1. It is a cut-up paradise, a sequence of familiar elements arranged in unfamiliar ways. A gaudy Hollywood fanfare gives way to a trancelike sequence of shifting beats; billowing clouds of Wagnerian harmony are dispersed by a quartet of saxophones. Adams is not the only composer who has combined a classical education with a pop sensibility, but he is the one who has made the synthesis stick. His music, in spite of its discontinuities, has a unifying hum, as if riding on fresh asphalt. It is probably this sense of a firm foundation which has given his works their staying power. His first opera, "Nixon in China", had a trumphant revival in London last spring. A recent orchestral piece, "Naïve and Sentimental Music", is making the rounds of American cities. Before Christmas, the Théâtre du Chatelet, in Paris, gave the first performance of "El Niño", a two-hour-long oratorio on the Nativity, which will be performed again next week, in San Francisco. Adams wrote much of the work at Brushy Ridge last summer.

Brushy Ridge is at the far end of the Meyers Grade Road. Even though Adams supplies visitors with detailed instructions, the last part of the drive is a matter of guesswork. Unmarked tracks diverge in the woods, one leading to a startup winery and another to a corrugated-metal shack that the F.B.I. must have searched while looking for the Unabomber. The Adams house is at the top of a rocky hill. It is a comfortable, spare, rural-hippie kind of place. The composer is asleep on the couch, with the collected poems of Allen Ginsberg lying open in front of him. He wakes up, rubs his eyes, apologizes for a nonexistent mess, and sets about making coffee. At the age of fifty-three, he has a youthful and friendly face, framed by a neat, silvery beard. His eyes are sometimes bright with curiosity, sometimes clouded with a slight sadness. He loves to read, and his favorite gambit in conversation is to mention a book, such as the Ginsberg collection, that has excited him. If you saw him in Berkeley, where he lives most of the year, you might peg him as a U. Cal. professor–one of those plaid-shirted intellectuals who sit outside the Cheese Board, on Shattuck Avenue, eating organic pizza and annotating Wittgenstein.

When Adams is at Brushy Ridge, he is oftened joined on weekends by his wife, the photographer Deborah O’Grady, and their two teen-age children, Emily and Sam. But he is also alone for long stretches, and it takes him a few minutes to adjust to company. There is an appealing innocence about him, but it is an innocence sharpened by confidence. He speaks in mild, unhurried tones, halting to look for words that please him. On occasion, he breaks into an unexpectedly aggressive cackle, underscoring it with a clap of his hands and a merry roll of his eyes. There is coiled energy behind his laconic exterior. He does not talk much about his own work, but you sense that some portion of his mind is always occupied by it. After a couple of hours of conversation, he seems to grow anxious about the huge piece that is lying, incomplete, in his studio. But before he returns to work he gives a tour of his property, which occupies forty acres. He points out a few disused irrigation hoses in the woods; not long ago, the place was a pot farm. He greets one of his neighbors and gets into a "Chinatown" conversation about the water supply and the winery’s adverse impact on it.

He makes his way across a steep ravine to a large, modern warehouse. "My composing shed," he calls it. There is a tradition of composers working in the woods; Gustav Mahler wrote many of his symphonies in a one-room hideaway constructed to his specifications, and Adams can claim to have the largest composing hut in history. He raises the overhead door and walks through the warehouse, part of which is rented out to a wood-cutter neighbor. There is a sharp smell of freshly cut redwood. Adams goes into a smaller room, where sheets of music paper are scattered around an electronic keyboard and a computer terminal. He fiddles with the keys, commanding the computer to play the aria "Pues mi Dios ha nacido a penar," or "Because my Lord was born to suffer," which opens the second part of the new oratorio. In meekly peeping tones, the computer sings a sinuous, long-breathed Adamsian melody, twisting and turning over lullaby chords. After about fifty bars, the music trails off into a single unharmonized line. The composer stares at the floor, cupping his chin in his hand.Then he goes back to work, chipping away at the silence of everything that remains to be composed.

It is a strange business, composing music in twenty-first-century America. The job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object–a painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting–but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead or alien form–so much so that jazz aficianados routinely say, "Jazz is America’s classical music." To make the counterargument that America’s classical music is America’s classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost. In such a climate, composers easily become embittered.

It is often suggested that American composers thrive in isolation, that they are best understood as lonely mavericks. The prototype is Charles Ives, the putative Beethoven of American music, who made money in the insurance business and in his spare time produced radical collages of hymn-tune, marching-band Americana. Wilfrid Mellers, in his classic book "Music in a New Found Land," said of Ives, "His integrity is synonymous with his experimental audacity," with his "pioneer’s courage." Such sentiments look handsome on the page, but they can serve to rationalize failure. Ives, for all his tremendous gifts, made only sporadic efforts to reach an audience, and was most comfortable sketching in private. Certain of his successors have taken pride in their obscurity, advertising themselves as experimenters, technicians, amateurs, and curmudgeons. There was a time, in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the boundaries between the classical and the popular were more fluid: Copland listened to Ellington, Ellington listened to Ravel, Bernstein listened to them all. After the Second World War, however, European doctrines of atonality swept the land like a virus, sending composers into university quarantine.

In the sixties, a band of young composers struck out in a new direction. Their music came to be called minimalism, and, by a curious chain of events, it reversed the trends toward the marginalization of the American composer. A West Coast visionary named La Monte Young became mesmerized by isolated sonorities in the twelve-tone music of Anton Webern; in 1958, he wrote a String Trio in which chords were sustained for minutes at a time. A Californian, Terry Riley, applied Young’s "long tone" methods to the simplest chords, such as the C-major triad. With "In C," Rileys’s revolutionary work of repetition, minimalism was off and running. Steve Reich perfected the process; Philip Glass popularized it; rock stars of the sixties appropriated it. The Velvet Underground found its signature sound when it incorporated the eerie viola drones of John Cale, who had played in Young’s ensemble. Brian Eno used minimalist techniques to create "ambient music," and from that source grew the electronic sounds that ripple through dance clubs around the world.

America’s classical music, then, is alive and well, and thriving in the oddest places. The minimalists’ chance discovery of a huge new audience for contemporary music suggests that other avenues are waiting to be found. When, in the seventies, Steve Reich sold hundreds of thousands of copies of "Music for Eighteen Musicians," he destroyed a central myth of modernism, demonstrating that music did not have to be esoteric to be audacious. And when, at around the same time, John Adams began writing serious concert works that drew on minimalist techniques, he showed that classical forms were capable of absorbing almost anything. Minimalism, for him, was an art of amalgamation, a way of linking together the widest possible gamut of American sounds. He resumed Copland’s populist mission, but without any trace of big-city knowingness. His open prairies became modern, moody spaces, lit up with neon red and bathed in television blue.

When I visited Adams at his house in Brushy Ridge, last June, he was pondering the composr’s realtionship with the mass culture. "I like to think of culture as the symbols that we share to understand each other," he said. "When we communicate, we point to symbols that we have in common. If people want to make a point, they reach for a reference. It might be a Woody Allen movie, or a John Lonnon lyric, or ‘I’m not a crook.’ When I was young, I came to realize that twelve-tone music, or for that matter, all contemporary music, was so far divorced from communal experience that it didn’t appear on the national radar screen. It would be nice to hear someone say, ‘Look at that gas station in the moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’"

He began with the advantage of a memorable name. As far as he knows, he is not related to the Boston Adamses, but he had an almost surreally old-fashioned American upbringing. He was born in 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he spent most of his childhood in the white-steepled hamlet of East Concord, New Hampshire. His father played the clarinet, and his mother sang in musicals and with big bands. His grandfather ran a dance hall on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, and the family would go there to play music during the summer. "It was called Irwin’s Winnipesaukee Gardens," Adams recalled in a 1992 interview. "It had a gorgeous hardwood dance floor built out on pilings over the lake. It was incredibly romantic." Duke Ellington’s band played at Irwin’s once, and Adams was allowed to go onstage and sit on the piano bench next to the Master.

Adams was something of a child prodigy. He wrote music, played the clarinet, and, on occasion, conducted the local orchestra, which was sponsored by the New Hampshire State Mental Hospital. He had to cope with the fact that the hospital patients who played in the group sometimes improvised freely during the performance. When he was thirteen, the orchestra presented his Suite for String Orchestra, and he became the talk of the village. At this time, he was listening to little twentieth-century music, although he did fall under the spell of Sibelius. "I was used to seeing snow and pine trees in New Hampshire," he explained. "When I went into the record store, I bought albums with snow and pine trees on them. They were all Sibelius." Adams has taken on many other influences with the passing years, but he remains loyal to this early one; echoes of Sibelius’s slowly evolving musical landscapes can be heard in all his major orchestral works.

In 1965, Adams went to Harvard on a scholarship and heard the surprising news that tonal music could no longer be written. Along with many other young composers of the day, he was led to believe that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method was the only way forward. He even wrote a letter telling Leonard Bernstein that his "Chichester Psalms" was in the "wrong" style. Adams’s teacher was Leon Kirchner, who had studied with Schoenberg himself, and who held sway over Harvard composition students for many years. "I respected Kirchner deeply," Adams said, "but my relationship with him was complicated. He was very severe with me early on. He would tell me ‘Don’t bother to bring that kind of thing in.’"

At the same time, Adams was soaking up the culture of the late sixties. He counted twelve-tone rows by day and listened to the Beatles in the dorm by night. The sense of disconnection between these worlds was so extreme that he wrote almost nothing. "I had to turn something in for my senior thesis," he said, "so I wrote a song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble, a setting of psychedelic texts by another undergraduate. It is somewhere in the bowels of Widener Library and, to my horror, will someday be exhumed." Most of his energies went into performance. He conducted the Bach Society Orchestra and put on a student production of "The Marriage of Figaro." His conducting was good enough to attract the attention of one of Bernstein’s talent scouts, and, despite his adverse review of "Chichester Psalms," he was invited to the maestro’s conducting seminar at Tanglewood. But he turned down the invitation and decided to devote himself to composition. He had a gift that Bernstein lacked–the ability to say no.

By 1972, Adams had had enough of East Coast musical politics, and he drove to San Francisco in a Volkswagen Beetle. After working for a year as a forklift operator on the Oakland waterfront, he took a low-paying job at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as a jack-of-all-trades instructor. He had been studying the writings of John Cage and began organizing elaborately anarchic Cagean happening. For one piece, "lo-fi," he and his students assumed various positions around the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park and played 78-r.p.m. records that had turned up in Goodwill stores. This activity proved no more satisfying than the highbrow work that he had done at Harvard. In an autobiographical essay, he wrote that "the social aspect of these events was piquant, and the post-concert parties were always memorable, but the musical payoff always seemed ‘lite’. I began to notice that often after an avant-garde event I would drive home alone to my cottage on the beach, lock the door, and, like a closet tippler, end the evening deep in a Beethoven quartet."

The pianist Sarah Cahill, who has known Adams since his early San Francisco years, noticed early on his need for isolation. "He could be, and can be now, tremendously gregarious," she says, "but it was always understood that he had to be out of touch for long stretches of time." During one of his spells of solitude, he had an epiphany that led him in a new direction. "I was driving to the Sierra Nevadas," he told me, "and excerpts from Wagner’s ‘Götterdämerung’ came on the radio. I was thunderstruck by the simplicity and power of the emotions in the piece. I knew all at once that I wanted to move toward this intense emotionality in my own music. I began to hear it echoing in my mind, as something within reach. But it took me several years to find the technique to accomplish it."

He had another breakthrough during a trip to Florence, with a group of highschool students. "I was struck again," he recalled, "by the immediate and transforming beauty of the surroundings–particularly the architecture. I began to think about how I could create big architectural spaces in music through the manipulation of patterns and repetition. There’s great drama to be found in the use of a limited range of notes and then in the sudden introduction of something deep in the bass or high in the treble. Then you achieve a real sense of space in music." When he heard the minimalism of Riley, Reich, and Glass, the pieces of his technique fell into place. He mapped fragments of Romantic harmony onto the electric grid of minimalism. Adams announced himself with an astonishing sequence of works, "Shaker Loops," "Harmonium," "Grand Pianola Music," and "Harmonielehre," each of which was more confident than the last.

The title of "Harmonielehre," which had its first performance in 1985, was aimed directly at the East Coast musical establishment. It took off from a famous text by Schoenberg, in which the inventor of atonal music set out to anatomize the preëxisting tonal system and, at the same time, to demonstrate that the system had become decadent, even degenerate. "Somehow, the word really got to me–the idea of this summa harmony," Adams said. "I kept thinking about spiritual harmony, too. Schoenberg seemed like some religious zealot cutting off his genitals to prove how totally pure he is, how dedicated to the Lord." Adams laughed, as if surprised by the violence of his image. "Yes, ‘Harmonielehre,’ my version of it, is a kind of parody," he continued. But I also reached out and embraced all of that harmony that we weren’t supposed to touch." The piece begins with a colossal blast of E minor, and, within a few minutes, decadent tonal chords are proliferating everywhere.

The feeling is one of tonality rising from the dead. Although many twentieth-century composers held on to tonality in various forms, few were able to make it breathe with animal life, as Adams did in "Harmonielehre" and its companions. The other American minimalists, for all their insistence on basic chords, had shied away from such textbook progressions as I-V-I, or C-G-C. "Grand Pianola Music" lands on that sequence with a vehemence that borders on the absurd. These days, the composer is apt to be embarrassed by his youthful bravado–"This piece is like a barking dog running around with no leash," he told an audience in San Francisco–but "Grand Pianola Music" has aged well: it has a startling transparency, mixing sweetness, sadness, madness, and joy.

In 1983, Adams had another stroke of luck. While visiting his parents, in New Hampshire, he happened to meet a recent Harvard graduate named Peter Sellars, who, in one of the operatic brainstorms for which he would become famous, came up with the idea of dramatizing Richard Nixon's trip to China. For a libretto, Sellars turned to a classmate, the poet Alice Goodman, who extracted an array of half-comic, half-epic archetypes from the documentary record of Kissinger, Mao, Chou Enlai, and the Nixons. Goodman’s style, statuesque but wry, reads like politicized Wallace Stevens. One aria is a fantasia on "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," with Pat Nixon, transformed into a poet of American virtues, proclaiming, "Let the band play on and on;/Let the stand-up comedian/Finish his act, let Gypsy Rose/Kick off her high-heeled party shoes."

Faced with this intricate text, Adams restrained his own penchant for large gestures. He took a more neutral tone and reacted to the text line by line. His demands on singers were sometimes hard, but he turned out to have an extrordinary knack for vocal writing. His preset style of musical speech–flexible, irregular melodies, often switching back and forth between duple and triple rhythm–matched the rise and fall of English speech. For example, in Nixon’s opening monologue, "News has a kind of mystery," Adams had to set these potentially unwieldy lines:

And though we spoke quietly
The eyes and ears of history
Caught every gesture
And every word.

Unpacking the images, Adams set the first line three times. The third time, he stretched the word "quietly" into a gentle melisma–"qui-i-i-i-i-et-ly." The up-and-down arc of the voice is not only a lovely addition to the vocal line but also an indication of Nixon’s character: he is, at heart, a dreamer, a fantasist. Whether this trait conforms to the historical Nixon is beside the point: in this opera, he is a composite politician, a merchant and consumer of American nostalgia. Adams allows him eloquence, yet remains detached. The minimalist figuration churning beneath the vocal lines is like a camera trained on a subject.

"Nixon in China" helped set off a fad for operas with contemporary subjects: Charles Manson, Marilyn Monroe, Harvey Milk, and Rudolph Valentino, among others, have been set to music. The genre has been given such condescending labels as "CNN opera" and "docu-opera," but Adams bristles at the idea that "Nixon" was some sort of trendy exercize. "Anyone who uses these terms," he said, "just doesn’t begin to understand what opera is about, potentially or historically." Indeed, Verdi, among other composers, kept as up-to-date with current events as the censors would allow. With "Nixon," Adams plays a very sophisticated game; the subject of the opera, to a great extent, is the idea of political art itself. Much of Act II is taken up with one of Mme. Mao's totalitarian ballets, and Adams re-created it with a transhistorical mix of secondhand pop and secondhand Wagner. He portrays an antimusical phenomenon in a musical way. The irony is worthy of Verdi himself.

In 1991, under intense media scrutiny, Adams, Goodman, and Sellars reunited for a second opera, "The Death of Klinghoffer." This one had a harder time. The intention was to use the hijacking of the ocean liner Achille Lauro and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer as the basis for a sort of Middle East Passion or Requiem. Two problems arose: first, Goodman’s libretto was not as sharply etched as the one for "Nixon," and, second, the project came so close to current events as to be singed by them. Sellars wanted to show all the characters, even the Palestinians terrorists, as flesh-and-blood individuals, but the idea of giving voice to the murderers of Jews did not sit well with some listeners–particularly since the American premiere took place in Brooklyn less than a month after the Crown Heights riots. Klinghoffer’s daughters said that the opera’s sketches of Jews were anti-Semitic, failing to understand that the entire point of the piece was to overcome stereotypes. Perhaps "Klinghoffer" tried to do too much; a forthcoming film version, being produced for Channel Four in Great Britain, may tell more. Certainly, his score is a coolly haunting creation. It shows a turn away from minimalist processes and toward a sort of polyglot lyricism, or "hypermelody," which the composer continues to explore.

The reception of "Klinghoffer" still troubles Adams. "At the time, I was so upset. I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘Anti-Semitic Opera Opens in Brooklyn’–you can’t shake that kind of thing," he said. "Not long afterward, plans for other productions mysteriously folded. I won’t go into details, but I know that some people were deterred by the so-called ‘controversy,’ which came from a few critics looking to turn their reviews into op-ed pieces. It may be part of the reason I haven’t had the inclination to spend another two years working on an opera. It’s too depressing." Adams shook a little as he said all this, in the quiet of his Brushy Ridge studio.

The "Klinghoffer" imbroglio was, in a way, a useful experience for Adams. It showed him the outer limits of the popularity of serious classical music, beyond which lay the no man’s land of media notoriety–the limbo zone of David Helfgott and Andrea Bocelli. "Let’s face it, classical music just doesn’t sell," he told me, regaining his usual equanimity. "I sell more records than most contemporary composers, and I’m grateful for that, but it’s still a pretty puny number compared with some records that my label, Nonesuch, puts out. I can’t compete with ‘Buena Vista Social Club.’ I’m not even famous on the level of, you know, Yo-Yo Ma. But the audience insn’t an inconsiderable one–I’ll just say that measuring it by pop standards doesn’t do it justice. I listen to what people say to me directly. If a hundred people say they like a piece of mine, maybe it’ll be a thousand people in ten years’ time, and the audience will build from there."

Adams is one of the very few American composers who receive a comfortable income from commissions and royalties. Robert Hurwitz, who has been Adams’s producer at Nonesuch since 1985, told me that some of the records have sold upward of fifty thousand copies, which is exceptional for a classical release and altogether freakish for new music. (The company recently released a de-luxe, ten-CD boxed set, entitled "The John Adams Earbox.") Musicians of international stature–Emanuel Ax, Simon Rattle, Gidon Kremer, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Kent Nagano among them–have given Adams’s music more than a dutiful once-over. Ax, whose reputation is based on authoritative readings of Beethoven and Brahms, has gone all over the world with "Century Rolls," the concerto that Adams wrote for him, and he has also recorded it for Nonesuch.

"It doesn’t look hard at first," Ax told me, examining the piece in preparation for an all-Adams concert that will take place in Los Angeles in February. "The notes are relatively sparse on the page. With a lot of twentieth-century works, and even with a lot of Romantic concertos, such as the Rachmaninoff Third, you’re going for gestures, for great waves of sound; if you ride the wave from the bottom D to the top D, it’s all right to schmutz a little in the middle. ‘Century Rolls’ is more like a Mozart concerto, where if you play a B-flat instead of a B-natural it’s a complete disaster. Once every note is in place, once every rhythmical cell is in synch, the jigsaw puzzle is complete, and the picture is fantastic."

Last June, the composer participated in an "American Mavericks" festival, in San Francisco, at the invitation of Michael Tilson Thomas. Adams, who conducts about fifteen weeks a year, led the New World Symphony in "Shaker Loops" and "Grand Pianola Music." It was intersting to see how briskly his sound world coame to life once the musicians had solved a limited number of technical problems. "Very precise on top, very lyrical underneath." he said, at a rehearsal. "Off the string," he told the violins, in "Shaker Loops," and as the players shortened their bowing the music became bright and crsip. In a passage where most of the strings have to turn their pages at the same time, he asked them to practice doing it as quietly as possible, so as not to spoil the transcendental hush. "The New York Philharmonic would have had me for breakfast if I’d asked them for that," he said afterward.

Over the past decade, as performances of his operas have become mysteriously scarce, Adams has immersed himself in orchestral music. He wrote a Chamber Symphony, whose funky bass lines seem to poke fun at Schoenberg’s work of the same title; a Violin Concerto, whose otherworldly passacaglia slow movement can stand comparison with the instrumental lamentations of Britten and Shostakovich; and "Century Rolls," which has hints of Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton in its easygoing bop and swing. The multiple directions suggested by these pieces sometimes puzzled Adams’s admirers, who found the Romantic minimalism of "Harmonielehre" so grippingly likable that they simply wanted to hear ten more things in the same style. But Adams has resisted the temptation to repeat himself and often takes pleasure in tweaking his audience.

With "Naïve and Sentimental Music," of 1999, Adams tried his hand at something like a heroic American symphony. The title alludes to a celebrated essay by Schiller that contrasts "naïve," or natural, art with the "sentimental," or self-conscious, kind. Adams says, essentially, that he can do both at once. His control of orchestral resources is stupendous, but the real strength is in the thematic writing: the work unfolds as an endless forty-five-minute melody. The theme first shows up as a serpentine aria for flutes and oboes over strumming harp and guitar; for long stretches, it disappears into a series of orchestral mob scenes, only to resume without a pause; in the second movement, it mutates into a slow, sad love song for guitar; and, finally, a fragment of it, run in reverse, is blasted out by brass instruments in the densely minimalist finale. At once rigorous and raw, the piece reveals Adams as a supremely confident symphonic composer. It is strange to remember that he once described himself as an opera composer who wrote for orchestra in order to fill up his spare time.

Composing is a difficult business, but the payoff can be profound. On December 15th, at the Théâtre du Chatelet, Adams witnessed the first performance of "El Niño," with Kent Nagano conducting. Paris was fairly abuzz over the event, to the extent that the city is ever abuzz over anything in particular; the composer was advertised as a purveyor of "flamboyance orchestrale, luxuriance instrumentale, jubilation rythmique." The audience, an immaculately fashionable one, responded with a long round of rhythmical clapping, which is the French version of a standing ovation. There were also a few boos, but a total absence of scandal would have been discouraging in the city that had famously mixed feelings about "The Rite of Spring." The press was out in force, and it failed to reach a consensus. The critic of Libération praised Adams’s "art of polyphony, borrowing from from the Middle Ages as much as from Ligeti." The critic of Le Figaro, however, asserted that the composer displayed "too many contradictory influences," and that the result was "vaguely Alzheimer-like."

The next morning, sipping coffee on the Place de la Bastille, Adams was in a good mood. He had been in Paris for the rehearsals, and his family had come over for the premiere; he was about to take his children to the Louvre. "I’m usually horrified by my pieces when I first hear them," he said, "but this one feels pretty good. I think I’ve finally learned how to write for voices. The orchestration didn’t overwhelm them–I finally got that right, after having to make so many adjustments to ‘Nixon.’ It’s such an astonishing feeling when all these elements come together–voices, instruments, words, action. It makes me think about writing for the stage again, terrifying as that is to contemplate. No more grand opera, though. You end up talking about nothing but the budget. When they were building Notre-Dame, did someone say, ’Put up that buttess by next spring, and, no, you can’t have any more money’?"

"El Niño" looks suspiciously like an opera in disguise. It can be done in concert form, but for Paris, and for San Francisco next week, Peter Sellars has devised a multimedia production in which soloists and chorus are joined by dancers and film sequences. The libretto, which Sellars and Adams created together, draws on the King James Bible, Gnostic Gospels, Martin Luther, medieval mystery plays, and a selection of Latin-American poetry on Nativity themes. In the film, which plays behind the stage, Hispanic actors present a dreamlike allegory of Jesus’ birth in a Southern California setting. While he was working on the piece, Adams delved deeply into Hispanic culture and learned Spanish from a teacher in Berkeley. He now watches Spanish-language television to keep up with South American news.

"El Niño" is a piece of grand dimensions and gentle details. The plot is advanced by a neo-medieval trio of countertenors, who function as God’s backup singers. Dawn Upshaw, in the role of the Virgin Mary, unfurls an indelible new melody for the familiar words "My soul doth magnify the Lord." Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has a series of ecstatic Marian rhapsodies of her own; one of them, "Pues mi Dios ha nacido a penar," is a painstakingly filled-in and embroidered version of the aria Adams sketched on his computer back in June. Moments of drama land like shocks: when the chorus thunders, "For with God no thing shall be impossible"; when Willard White, in a convincing impersonation of God himself, sings "I will shake the heavens"; when the massacre of the innocents begins over a sinister vamp of trombones and piano. This Nativity is laced with fear: Mary believes that her miracle might be taken away, and hurries through the night. The emotional ambiguity of the work is indicacted in the title, which is Spanish for "infant" but also calls to mind destructive weather.

The model is Handel’s "Messiah," but there is no "Hallelujah Chorus," no climax of joy. The first part closes with a movement called "The Christmas Star," in which the star of Bethlelhem is represented by a shimmering, intricately ornamented sequence of G-minor and D-major chords. It is not unlike the brazen climax of "Grand Pianola Music," but the tone is more sombre, more muted. When a D sounds low in the orchestra to anchor the harmony, Adams marks it mezzo forte in the trombones–half loud. The miracle seems to hover at a distance, just outside our reach. In the finale, a children’s chorus sings in Spanish of the palm tree that bent down to give Mary refreshment. The work closes with their small voices and solo guitar. The tune is Adams’s own, but it sounds as if children had been singing it for hundreds of years. I thought back to something the composer told me after he related his youthful encounter with Duke Ellington. "The older I get," he said, "the more committed I am to recapturing my first impressions of the world."

The music of John Adams, unlike so much classical composition of the last fifty years, has the immediate power to enchant. When I first heard "Nixon in China," fragments of it invaded my head, and they did not leave for weeks. It seems likely that a century from now audiences will still be fascinated by this opera, and that some listeners will have to double-check the plot summary in order to remember who Richard Nixon was. Such is the composer’s slow, posthumously sweet revenge. "El Niño," too, tugs at the memory. As I walked away from the Place de la Bastille in the rain, I hummed Adams’s palm-tree song to myself, and it seemed to me that I had just spent the morning with a man who was never going to die.

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