Provocateur of the Opera
In the first act of John Adams’ opera “Girls of the Golden West,” a New Englander — born Louise Clappe and pen-named Dame Shirley — arrives at the mid-19th century California Gold Rush aboard a mule. For audiences at the opera’s premiere at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House last fall, there was a feeling, rare in classical music, of regional familiarity and historical curiosity. The impact was even stronger for Adams, the Berkeley-based composer who maintains a second home in the High Sierra, not far from the setting of the drama.
Adams must have felt a likeness of mind with the stalwart Shirley. “She’s a remarkable person with both great grit and determination, and also a wonderful sense of self-deprecatory humor and a great capacity to empathize with other people,” he said in an interview during rehearsals. He might as well have been talking about himself.
Over the past 40-plus years, Adams has created an extensive body of work, much of it confronting musical conventions. He has dramatically updated the opera repertoire with topics such as Richard Nixon’s opening of international relations with China (“Nixon in China”); terrorism (“The Death of Klinghoffer”); and the development of nuclear weapons (“Doctor Atomic”).
This newsworthiness and the scope of
