Pamela Rosenberg is hired as the general director of San Francisco Opera. The work immediately sparks furious backlash, and the resulting controversy pushes Adams to take a long break from opera. The Adams-Sellars-Goodman collaboration continues with The Death of Klinghoffer, an opera about the hijacking of a cruise liner in 1969 by members of the Palestine Liberation Front. The opera receives both Emmy and Grammy awards, and its recording is named one of the “ten most important records of the decade” by Time. Nixon in China, which features a libretto by Alice Goodman and is directed by Sellars, premieres at Houston Grand Opera in 1987. For instance, he sets Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Harlem places the philandering and womanizing men of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in Trump Tower and casts the epic hero of Handel’s Orlando as an astronaut stationed at Cape Canaveral.Īdams and Sellars begin working on an opera based on Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. Throughout the 1980s, his productions of canonic operas will challenge performers and audience members alike to reconsider these works’ place in the modern world. By this time, he has already made a name for himself by staging wildly reimagined versions of opera and theater-including an abridged version of Wagner’s Ring cycle with puppets.

He founds the orchestra’s New and Unusual Music series and soon becomes one of the United States’ most important voices for contemporary classical music. As he gets to know the city’s thriving new music scene, Adams broadens his compositional palette to include minimalism and other distinctly American styles and forms.Īdams is hired as by the San Francisco Symphony to serve as their advisor on new music. The Harvard composition faculty is deeply invested in the musical modernism currently in vogue in Europe, and Adams will initially embrace the sharp dissonances and complex forms of the style.Īdams moves to San Francisco to teach at the city’s music conservatory. Peter Sellars is born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 27.Īdams attends Harvard, where he receives both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music. His earliest music training will be clarinet lessons with his father, and he will begin composing at age 10. John Adams is born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15.

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