JOHN ADAMS

I’M NOT IN A RUSH TO RECORD OPERAS RIGHT NOW—I LIKE TO LIVE WITH THEM FOR A WHILE.

After 1985, when I moved to Los Angeles, I saw less of Adams, but we kept in touch. One afternoon, when he was in LA for performances, by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, of his gangbuster work Harmonielehre,³ I showed him around the 20^th Century Fox lot and took him to a film-scoring session there. And I visited Adams after his marriage to photographer Deborah O’Grady. They had recently moved to Berkeley, and John was working on his first opera, Nixon in China.⁴

John Adams’s current catalog of published works numbers over 60. He tours as a guest conductor throughout the United States and across the world, records extensively, and participates in numerous festivals and residencies. He has won five Grammys, the Grawemeyer Award (in 1995, for his Violin Concerto⁵), and the Pulitzer Prize (in 2003, for On the Transmigration of Souls,⁶ his response to the 2001 terrorist attacks).

On Valentine’s Day 2019, when I arrived at the Adams home on the flank of the Berkeley Hills, the first beams of sunlight were shining through after an intense