John Adams in the Sierra Buttes, the setting for his new opera, “Girls of the Golden West.”Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

John Adams Writes a New Opera, and It’s a Western

Hiking in California’s gold country with John Adams, an enfant-terrible-turned-elder-statesman. His new Gold Rush opera is definitely not Puccini’s.

SIERRA CITY, Calif. — The fragrant firs had given way to jagged, rocky peaks, and the composer John Adams climbed a vertiginous metal staircase to a fire lookout high atop the Sierra Buttes, an aerie perched 8,587 feet above sea level.

“All this was heavily mined,” Mr. Adams said, surveying a seemingly serene landscape of glacial lakes and Ansel Adams evergreens that had once been torn apart by frenzied prospectors during the Gold Rush. “There were shafts into the interiors of the mountains.”

These days Mr. Adams is mining some of the real-life tumult that churned beneath the oft-mythologized surface of the California Gold Rush of the early 1850s — the ethnic tensions, ugly bursts of nativism and brutality toward women — for his latest opera, “Girls of the Golden West,” which will be given its premiere Nov. 21 at the San Francisco Opera.

Image
John Adams near the bridge in Downieville, Calif., that is the backdrop for a climactic scene in his new opera, “Girls of the Golden West.”Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

The opera’s mid-19th-century setting (its title archly evokes Puccini’s more melodramatic “La Fanciulla del West,” or “The Girl of the Golden West”) is a departure for Mr. Adams, whose pathbreaking operas “Nixon in China,” about a 1972 presidential trip, and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” his still-controversial exploration of a 1985 hijacking, were so contemporary that some critics initially sniffed that they were “CNN operas.” But Mr. Adams said that the new work, with a libretto assembled from historic texts by Peter Sellars, his longtime collaborator, had come to feel disturbingly of the moment — especially its scenes of white miners whipped into anti-immigrant frenzies.

“They all came here looking for gold,” he said at one point during a drive through the Sierras along State Route 49, which links many of the old mining sites of the 49ers. “And when it became not so easy to find gold, they all started sounding like Donald Trump.”

It was particularly jarring, he said, to write the opera’s climax — in which a Mexican woman is lynched — against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential race. “I kept hearing ‘Lock her up!’ at those horrible rallies,” Mr. Adams said, recalling news footage of Trump supporters chanting for Hillary Clinton’s imprisonment being shown as he wrote choruses for his opera’s angry mob.

Three decades after the premiere of “Nixon in China,” Mr. Adams can fairly stake a claim as America’s most prominent composer. This onetime enfant terrible has grown into an elder statesman. This year, leading orchestras around the world celebrated his 70th birthday; over the past decade, three of his operas finally reached the stage of the Metropolitan Opera; and earlier this month, the Berlin Philharmonic, which made him its composer in residence last season, released a lavish boxed set of his works.

But for all that, Mr. Adams — a thoughtful, wryly funny man who lives in Berkeley, about 200 miles from here, and could easily be mistaken for one of that college town’s professors, or ex-hippies, or both — still worries about what classical music should be, how to get it to speak to audiences that now flock to other art forms, and what his role is in its changing ecosystem. He has had a small rustic cabin here in the Sierras for decades (large swaths of “Girls” are practically set in the neighborhood) and, as he wrote in his 2008 memoir, “Hallelujah Junction,” the region’s gilded past has sometimes struck him as a troubling metaphor.

Image
Much of Mr. Adams's new opera, “Girls of the Golden West,” takes place near his rustic cabin in the Sierras. It was being repaired after damage from a neighboring fir tree that was struck by lightning.Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

“From time to time when driving in the High Sierra I’ll see amateur gold miners, panning in a river that 150 years ago gave up the best of its treasure to the first prospectors,” he wrote, “and I’ll be tempted to wonder if the image of these latter-day panners, hoping only for a tiny nugget, isn’t an illustration of my own predicament as a composer.”

It is a predicament that Mr. Adams has long grappled with. Early on he turned away from the sometimes chilly modernism of the 20th century — which, at its most extreme, wore its indifference to popular tastes as a badge of pride — and embraced harmony, rhythm, unabashed emotion and flashes of humor. He explored minimalism alongside composers such as Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich — weaving shimmering, textured tapestries out of the pulsating repetition of small elements — but later found it confining and tried to incorporate it into a broader language. (He has compared it to Picasso leaving the strictures of Cubism behind.) His palette is constantly evolving — synths here, saxes there, chugging arpeggios, swelling strings, Bachian choruses, echoes of Wagner or Beethoven or jazz or rock. Along the way he developed a voice that remains recognizably his own through the constant changes.

The landscape, and the idea, of California loom large in the work of Mr. Adams, a transplant from New England who found his composer’s voice in the Bay Area after making his way west in an unreliable Volkswagen Beetle in 1971. He previously explored its facets in pieces like “The Dharma at Big Sur,” which evokes the Pacific Coast of Jack Kerouac, and “City Noir,” which suggests the seamy Los Angeles of a Philip Marlowe. With “Girls,” he and Mr. Sellars have returned to its earliest days — the dark underbelly of part of America’s creation myth.

Image
John Adams, hiking to the Sierra Buttes outside of Sierra City, Calif.Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

Songs have been on Mr. Adams’s mind these days, and he tried his hand at becoming a tunesmith for the new opera. While “Girls” has big, operatic set pieces — there is an aria based on Frederick Douglass’s powerful “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and a rollicking instrumental interlude for Lola Montez’s scandalous “Spider Dance” that has already found success in the concert hall — Mr. Adams has also written new music for a series of old miner’s songs that Mr. Sellars has included in the libretto. (Mr. Sellars said in a telephone interview that Mr. Adams had written “unforgettable earworms” that he cannot get out of his head.)

And he aimed for a mostly sparse, lean sound for his Western opera. “How can you tell this story in a more modernist, complex language?” he asked. “I think it would be ridiculous.”

For all his past success, though, Mr. Adams said that premieres still make him nervous. “I just don’t know what it’s going to be like — whether I’ve made an aesthetic wrong turn or not,” he said at one point during the hike down from the Sierra Buttes.

“We live in this strange era where we’re still sort of having this spasm back and forth out of modernism and into something new,” Mr. Adams said. “And then somebody will come up with something that’s really a more modernist creation, and it will be a success, and I’ll think ‘Oh God, I’m not relevant anymore.’”

Image
A scene from a dress rehearsal of the San Francisco Opera’s production of “Girls of the Golden West,” which will be given its premiere on Nov. 21.Credit...Stefan Cohen for San Francisco Opera
Image
Downtown Downieville, Calif., the setting for “Girls of the Golden West,” on a recent afternoon.Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

He even raised the possibility that “Girls,” which San Francisco commissioned and produced along with the Dallas Opera and the Dutch National Opera, could be his last large-scale opera. “I think if I do another theater piece, it’s going to be small,” he said.

The “Girls” project began when Teatro alla Scala in Milan asked Mr. Sellars to direct a new production of Puccini’s “Fanciulla del West.” The Puccini opera features ravishing music, Italian operatic drama, and a sometimes pulpy libretto based on a David Belasco play that raises modern eyebrows when its Native American characters greet each other with “Ugh.”

Mr. Sellars passed. But he approached Mr. Adams about creating their own Gold Rush opera based on existing sources. Some opera buffs have bristled at their title’s wink at the Puccini opera, especially after Mr. Adams confessed in an interview that he does not really know it. But Mr. Adams’s work has long engaged with composers of the past — and he has written his share of allusive titles, including “Scheherazade.2,” a symphony for violin and orchestra whose title evokes Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” and his orchestral work “Harmonielehre,” which took its title from a book by Schoenberg, a composer he was actively breaking from.

Much of “Girls” is drawn from the letters of Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, a New Englander who lived in the mining camps with her husband, a doctor, in 1851 and 1852, and published them under the pen name “Dame Shirley.” It also incorporates bits of Mark Twain’s writings; Shakespeare, whose work was often performed for miners; and others.

This collagelike approach — which Mr. Sellars has used since he took over the lyric-writing duties from Alice Goodman, who wrote the librettos of Mr. Adams’s first two operas, “Nixon” and “Klinghoffer,” — has been controversial. It solves one problem: By using existing texts, it answers the sometimes distracting question of what a new opera in English should sound like. But some critics have found it lacking drama or poetry — which Mr. Adams rejects, saying he prefers them to many other recent librettos, which remind him of television scripts.

Image
A view of Young America Lake, on the way up to the Sierra Buttes fire lookout, with Upper and Lower Sardine Lakes below.Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

Philip Glass, America’s other leading opera composer, once described himself as an “image composer” and Mr. Adams as a “word composer,” Mr. Adams recalled. “I think he was right,” he said. “Although he sets words, the main thing for him is the image he’s thinking of. And for me it’s the word — not only what it says, but also the rhythm and the sound.”

For “Girls,” Mr. Adams found himself composing the history of a stretch of California where he has had a rustic cabin for decades. Staying there earlier this month with his dog, Amos, he woke up to find his car’s doors wide open and his passenger seat shredded by a bear. “A bottle of beer in the trunk had popped open from the altitude and he or she was apparently furious not to have been able to get to it,” he wrote in an email. “And Amos? Slept through it.”

The opera’s climax takes place a short drive away in Downieville, an old mining town that was the home of one of the most infamous episodes of the Gold Rush: the lynching of a Mexican woman who was hanged for killing a white miner who had broken down her door the night of the very first Independence Day celebrated by the new state of California in 1851.

That is how the composer found himself with a date with an ex-sheriff.

When Lee Adams, a former sheriff of Sierra County and a local history buff, heard that “Girls” would dramatize the hanging, he reached out to Mr. Adams, offering to show him around Downieville, where the local paper, The Mountain Messenger, still prints the price of gold in each edition (it was $1306.99 that week).

Image
The composer John Adams, hiking. He said “Girls” could be his last large-scale opera. “I think if I do another theater piece, it’s going to be small,” he said.Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times

They met at the Downieville Museum, in a former Chinese store that was said to have offered gambling and opium in the back. The ex-sheriff explained that people there still argue about the hanging. Its details are hazy: contemporary accounts gave the hanged woman’s name as Josefa, which is what the new opera calls her, but she was widely remembered later as Juanita. And it is unclear what took place between her and the miner she stabbed: It is generally agreed that he broke down her door, but whether he assaulted her is uncertain. But what happened next still shocks: She was tried before an angry mob and hanged on a bridge — all in the course of a day.

“I have no idea if she was at fault, not at fault, whatever,” Mr. Adams, the former lawman, said. “The bottom line is, she did not get a legal trial.”

Not that the onetime sheriff is exactly squeamish about hanging: He led the effort to restore Downieville’s historic gallows, and his license plate reads “Hangman.”

Mr. Adams took a walk to a bridge near the spot where Josefa was hanged and read a plaque which gave her last words as “I would do the same again if I was so provoked.”

“I’m not too keen on this,” he said, growing serious as he visited the scene of his finale. “To me it’s like a tourist attraction. And I’ve lived with this in my mind for so long.”

A correction was made on 
Nov. 27, 2017

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misidentified the lakes below the Sierra Buttes. Young America Lake is in the foreground, not Upper Sardine Lake. (Upper and Lower Sardine Lakes are in the background.)

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Nuggets From the Gold Rush. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT