Adams’s music in this first act is restless, spiky, ever moving forwards, and we miss any sense of lassitude. There is one vital element surely missing here, and that is the sheer sensuality of the Antony and Cleopatra relationship. Antony is told that his wife Fulvia has died returning to Rome, he agrees to marry Octavia, Caesar’s sister. Antony’s dissolute life in Egypt with Cleopatra is contrasted with the brutal energy of Caesar (the young Octavian) in Rome. What Adams achieves is a constant buzz of tense action, with his ever more inventive orchestral writing, with exotic sounds from gongs and a cimbalom, underpinning the text.
This Antony and Cleopatra is set in a world that echoes the glamour of the 1920s and 1930s, but forget the lavishness of Joseph Mankiewicz’s non-Shakespearean film with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: this is a spare, intense scenario with only 12 main characters, that seeks to capture the underlying pathos of its protagonists rather than the grand spectacle of their conflicts. Unlike recent Shakespeare operas by Thomas Adès (The Tempest, which re-versified the text) and Brett Dean (Hamlet, which reordered the play), this is a relatively faithful version of the story, simplified for impact and adding material from Plutarch and Virgil to enable Adams to incorporate his trademark pulsating choruses into the score.
They have turned to Shakespeare, and have attempted with some success to boil down the rambling structure of Antony and Cleopatra into manageable operatic form.
It is striking that, returning to the genre in a commission for the opening of San Francisco Opera’s centennial season, he has moved away from Sellars and instead has worked with an up-and-coming director Elkhanah Pulitzer, and a dramaturg, Lucia Scheckner. His most recent opera, Girls of the Golden West (2017), which has not so far been seen in the UK, won few friends for its libretto by his long-time collaborator Peter Sellars. His contemporary pieces have pushed at the boundaries of the art-form, caused controversy – in the case of the treatment of Palestinian terrorists in The Death of Kliinghoffer (1991), potentially terminal for the piece – and have ensured that every new work he produces gains international attention. In the years since the runaway success in 1987 of his opera Nixon in China, John Adams has established himself as a foremost proponent of the genre.
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