Minimalism, in able hands, builds tension from a commotion of counterpatterns. A criticism is that there are other ways to build tension, and that commotion, especially mechanical, tends to suggest spoof and irony whether we want them or not. John Adams can hold our attention with this technique, whether spoof or in earnest. But his greatest gift lies far way. He moves us most in the lyrical and elegiac, where minimalism remembers only its root purity. This side of his art takes hold in the last two scenes of Nixon in China, in much of the second act of A Flowering Tree, and in all of The Wound Dresser. What I had not realized until this third hearing, including the CD set, is that it finds at least as much scope and beauty in The Death of Klinghoffer.
It dominates from the beginning, even as a chorus promises war and breaking of teeth. Commotion has its say as the hijackers take over the ship and murder Klinghoffer. It resolves to grief again, and grief to sublimation. Insistence is never monotony. John’s elegy changes colors like the sea. It once touches dissonance, rare in John’s music since his Harvard beginnings. Grief is pain. But harmony can hold as much, and dissonance recedes. The sea is everywhere in this noble score, and in Tom Pye’s beautifully complementary sets. It is sad that we are denied simulcasts of both.
John always sets strong libretti, and Alice Goodman’s here is an example. But composers with the knack for words, including John, should set or assemble their own. John has been moving in this direction. It is the right one. Art is from the first person singular to the third plural. We owe the public our mistakes.