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Adams himself, in his interview with the NYT, is expecting the next post-post modernist composer who will make him obsolete. The truth is that Adams and Sellars, mostly Sellars with his antics, and Adams partly under his nefarious influence, have become thoroughly conventional. I have to agree with Joshua Kosman on every point he makes. Saw the opera yesterday night, it was my birthday gift, and my long lasting infatuation with John Adams took a serious hit. Whether that is what listeners and lookers find in the work, only THEIR direct experience, subsequent reflection and the passing of time can determine. A composer (or writer, or painter, etc.) can speak of her/his aim or intention in creating a work, of what drew them to the subject and what they hope will come across. It does not, however, tell you much of anything about what the audience will be experiencing “out front.” 3) In connection with that last thought: one of the many things that irritate me about John Adams is his tendency in interviews to speak about what his music “does,” as if this were a done deal. 2) As a stage director (plays, operas, “music theater”) I can tell you that EVERY participant in the creation of a new work – conductor, director, performers, designers – needs to believe 100% in the worth of the piece during the time they are involved with it! This is proper and right and necessary. This is an issue that goes way beyond this new piece. Thank you.ġ) You appear to have missed the extent to which some reviewers and commentaters, including many who describe themselves as fans of John Adams’s music, are expressing their long-term disappointment with Adams’s disinclination to work with a librettist, instead leaning on a collage-like accumulation of documents designed to lend “authenticity” to each new opera. I would speculate that his ambition to be recognized as someone who writes Really Important Operas is only intermittently matched by the sort of self-knowledge that instinctively or consciously guides the most successful creative talents to choose projects (and collaborators) that show their true gifts at their best.
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“Future music historians, I think, will perceive even more clearly that we can today the extent to which Goodman’s retirement from creative activity was a central, defining catastrophe in Adams’ operatic career.” It is admirable for an artist constantly to be striving to expand her/his expressive reach, but Adams seems to me a frustrating case of a truly great talent repeatedly getting in way over his head and out of his depth the pattern in too many of his “big” pieces has been: 3-4 superb numbers surrounded by stretches of decent writing, plus a fair amount of really hollow music. “None of it, though, could rescue a work whose central misjudgments were baked in from the start.” and: 2. While I haven’t seen/ heard this new opera, Joshua Kosman’s Chronicle review certainly resonated with my personal experience of much of John Adams’s stage work, post-Nixon in China: 1.