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Berkeley’s John Adams, a creator of volatile, large-scale music, is one of America’s most frequently performed composers. His two operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, the story of the 1984 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their eventual murdering of an American-Jewish passenger, have been among contemporary entertainment history’s most controversial and widely seen stage events. Now comes a third opera that is certain to stir up audiences. Working with famed director Peter Sellars, Adams has created Doctor Atomic, a libretto recreating the tense and uncertain final hours shared by Berkeley physicists Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, and Robert Wilson on the eve of the first test explosion of the atom bomb. The opera debuts internationally October 1 with the San Francisco Opera. Seeking insights into the emotional roots driving his allegorical work, California Monthly editors interviewed Adams earlier this summer. CalMo: As a Harvard student in the 1960s, you were influenced by the “flowering of rock and jazz.” This influenced your “breakaway,” to the West Coast and Berkeley. Nearly 25 years later, with a huge body of your work performed throughout the world, is there any single regional influence that drives you? John Adams: California has had a huge effect on me an as artist. I grew up in New England and was educated in the east coast academic environment, which in the sixties and early seventies was largely unaware of Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and even Native American culture. My musical education was decidedly Eurocentric, but fortunately I listened to a lot of American popular music. This had the predictable effect of making me rebellious and wanting to go west. In addition to the cultural contrasts that the West Coast offered, the landscape itself for sure influenced the way my large-scale musical structures evolved. I could never imagine composing the kind of music I do were I still living in Boston or New York. CalMo: Do you go out to hear local music in the Bay Area? John Adams: I don’t follow rock or pop music much anymore. But, since my son is a very committed jazz musician, I’ve been to a lot of clubs, especially Yoshi’s in Oakland, which is a wonderful place to hear music. Over the past three years, while I’ve been Composer in Residence at Carnegie Hall, I created an annual festival called In Your Ear. This has given me the chance to invite many West Coast performers to play—everything from electronic gamelans to jazz to performance artists and experimental composers. CalMo: You also cite the influence of iconoclastic characters of Northern California—Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Henry Miller. John Adams: In the case of the opening for the new Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall in Los Angeles, I composed a piece called The Dharma at Big Sur. This is a work for electric violin and orchestra, and it largely sums up my various influences, not only musical and literary, but geographical as well. The guardian angel of the piece is Kerouac, whose evocations of California made such an impression on me as a young man. Musically, the work is heavily influenced by north Indian raga traditions and the saranghi, the classical Indian violin. Not every piece of mine is so site-specific, but the piece is a good example of how. CalMo: Morality plays obviously influence your work. Do you sympathize with any of the characters in your operas besides Klinghoffer? Disdain them? John Adams: I try to do what any good dramatist would do, which is to “inhabit” or “get under the skin” of whatever character I am portraying at the moment. It’s no secret that I’ve taken a huge amount of very nasty criticism over the years for giving a voice to Palestinians in The Death of Klinghoffer and even for writing deeply felt emotional music for characters who are also brutal terrorists. I don’t think this is substantially different from Shakespeare’s way of handling Iago, but because my stories are contemporary and politically volatile, listeners tend to construe a parti pris on my behalf. CalMo: Elaborate on your feelings for Oppenheimer and Teller. Or is it the tension between them and the times they lived in that drive the opera? John Adams: The relationship between the two is not the main theme of Doctor Atomic. Teller is one of my characters, but he’s treated as sharing the same uncertainty about the bomb’s use as that of the other young scientists. I imagine that most people going to hear my opera will expect the standard “Strangelovian” treatment of Teller. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. In 1945 Teller was still a protege of Oppenheimer. Oppie was extremely fond of him and was more willing than anyone to excuse Teller’s frequent stubbornness and unwillingness to work as part of a team. It’s important to understand that among the physicists at Los Alamos, Teller was one of the only people who had personal experience living under a communist totalitarian state (in Hungary during his childhood). That experience made an indelible impression on him and made him utterly committed to preserving what he construed to be the American approach to personal liberty. Of course, ten years later he and Oppenheimer were on opposite sides of a profound moral and political divide, and Teller was instrumental in what became the great public humiliation of his former colleague, friend, and mentor. That, to me, is a profoundly tragic story. CalMo: We live in arguably equally perilous and duplicitous times. And yet, the administration shows no hint of being in a moral dilemma. In your mind, is what we are seeing globally the stuff of opera? John Adams: Although I am emphatically not a Bush-Cheney fan, I can’t agree that the present administration shows “no hint of being in a moral dilemma.” When I was a kid during the sixties, terms like “mutually assured destruction” and “nuclear disarmament” were very common. We felt that the world was forever balanced on the brink of a thermonuclear holocaust, but that the basic human need for survival would prevent either side from launching an attack. September 11 really did change that assumption. We now live with an even more unsettling reality—what’s called “asymmetric” warfare, or terrorism that involves suicide on the part of the attacker. This seems to me to be something quite new in the history of warfare. The kamikazes of World War II were a last-ditch, desperate expression of a failing military. But in our time, the insurgency in Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center have introduced us to a new and much more menacing threat. This threat is so unusual and so new that I think the U.S. government is still improvising a response to it. Ironically, the United States is in the position of having to say, in effect, “we and we alone will choose which countries are allowed to have nuclear weapons—ourselves, Pakistan, India, Israel, Russia—and which are not—Iran, Iraq, North Korea, etc.” That is a very difficult moral position to uphold. CalMo: Where and how do you do most of your composing? John Adams: I have two studios, one on the top floor of my home in Berkeley, and another—with a complete duplicate of all the equipment I use—at a remote place up in the northwest corner of Sonoma. I work very regular days, literally nine to five. I never work at night. When I am up in the country place, I get up very early, before dawn even, and work all morning until around 1 p.m. At this point in my career, I’ve written quite a lot of pieces, and each day brings a raft of communications from conductors, performers, publishers, orchestras, opera companies, and journalists around the world who have questions to be answered, so I have to factor that time into my workday. But when I read about the enormous responsibilities that a person like Oppenheimer shouldered, I feel I shouldn’t complain! NOTE: Philip Morrison, who studied under Oppenheimer at Berkeley and later joined his mentor as the youngest scientist on the Manhattan Project, died in April. See the “In Memoriam” section in this issue for his obituary.
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