Show tunes and Cole Porter, sung by his mother when she was cooking; big band and Ella Fitzgerald on the radio; the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes in his rock and soul-infused student years of the 60s. This melodic litany fired the imagination of the young John Adams (b.1947), growing up in New England, all but oblivious to the avant-garde parings being gobbled up by fellow composers. The union of text, rhythm and melody, each syllable precisely notated, was the crucible in which Adams’s own setting of the English language was forged.
Nowhere does this prove more vital than in his latest opera, Antony and Cleopatra, taken from Shakespeare and, despite streamlining, retaining the complexities and Elizabethan cadences of the original. The work was premiered, to an admiring but muted critical response, at San Francisco Opera in 2022 to launch that company’s 100th season. Last weekend the opera received its European premiere at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, this time conducted by the composer. The American soprano Julia Bullock, unable to perform in the US premiere, made her debut as Cleopatra, with the Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley returning as Antony. These two star performers have worked closely with Adams before. He created the work with their voices, stage personalities and, helped by an intimacy coordinator, their convincingly molten chemistry in mind.
Adams, we should recall, had early success with the genre-changing Nixon in China (1987), to a libretto by Alice Goodman. Mid-career he dared, in The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), to put an act of international terrorism on stage. In Doctor Atomic (2004-05) he explored J Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project (with Finley in the title role) long before Hollywood caught on to the idea. The zestful director Peter Sellars was Adams’s collaborator on these, concocting thoughtful, tutti-frutti texts out of documents, newspaper articles and poetry. Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer, is a departure in all respects. Why no Sellars? Why no political issue of our times? Why Shakespeare?
A fresh partnership can be just that, not a betrayal. Antony and Cleopatra, need we observe, is about dominion, war, human frailty. Every composer from Tchaikovsky to Verdi to Ethel Smyth, from Thomas Adès to Brett Dean to Kate Bush, has felt driven to make Shakespeare their own. Adams knew he was treading on hot coals, but art has never been about safety. Whatever the hesitations in San Francisco, something had changed by the time the work reached the Liceu. Revision can illuminate, set free. Think of Wagner, Verdi or Puccini. Without giving chapter and verse, Adams acknowledges he has tinkered and tightened.
On the basis of the first night in Barcelona, to a palpably enthusiastic audience, these small adjustments have lifted the opera to a potent and direct level of expression. Barring occasional awkward moments, Pulitzer’s staging, designed by Mimi Lien, with video interludes by Bill Morrison conjuring 1940s newsreels in the era of Italian fascism, was handsome and efficient. Lavish costumes, especially the gowns worn by Cleopatra, seemingly all beaten gold and burnished, were designed by Constance Hoffman. Adams has spent the past month working with the excellent Liceu orchestra and chorus, the latter a small but significant element. Standards were impeccable.
Many still describe Adams’s work as “American minimalism” then complain when it isn’t (which it hasn’t been for a couple of decades). The score bristles, spurts, thrums with originality. Keys shift in myriad ways, now a fluid change, now an aural coup. Rhythms sound regular, but each bar hits us with a new, contrary idea. Doused in the metallic jangles of the cimbalom, with the luscious additions of harps, celesta and chimes, and the snarls and rumbles of low woodwind and tuba, the orchestral writing dazzles. You can’t hear everything in one go: this is a substantial work, each of the two acts 80 minutes long, layered and subtle, yielding its riches slowly. It may still have flaws, a long scene here, too much fast dialogue there. Easy? No. Rewarding? Decidedly.
Like the play itself, the opera moves in a flux of conversation, action, emotion. The lead couple swirl from lust to love to hellbent fury. Finley, a formidable and intelligent performer, relished the lyricism of his lone moment in Act 2: he that had once “quarter’d the world”, betrayed by a woman. Bullock, at her best in her distinctive, glowing low register but capable of vicious, screaming outbursts, matched him in magnificence and charisma. The third main character is Caesar (Paul Appleby, bursting with icy intensity), the Roman triumvir, a sharp-suited Silicon Valley type with purpose. Every member of the supporting cast, led by Adriana Bignagni Lesca as Charmian and Alfred Walker as Enobarbus, was outstanding.
Antony and Cleopatra will open at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in spring 2025. So far, the Royal Opera House, London, has no plans to stage this grand opera in English, set to a play by the greatest writer in the language, by one of the top opera composers of the past half century. In so doing, the ROH could have honoured the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio – in which Antony and Cleopatra was first published – sold by booksellers in St Paul’s Churchyard barely a mile from Bow Street. We can thank the Liceu, 900 miles away, for stepping in and doing the job for us.
