"I realize that it is shocking that I compose an opera about events from two thousand years ago, when I have always dealt with events of the recent past, as in Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic or The Death of Klinghoffer. But it was doing Girls of the Golden West, my previous opera, that my collaborator, Peter Sellars, discovered that in those Californian places where gold was searched for in the mid-19th century, it was very popular to recite Shakespeare as a form of entertainment. In other words, that surreal image of miners had to be produced totally dirty reciting Hamlet or King Lear. It was in this way that in Girls... I introduced some scenes from Macbeth and I discovered that I love doing Shakespeare. I'm not the first composer to admit it, of course, but Antony and Cleopatra is also "A drama that I have always known and I particularly like that the protagonists are already mature and not some young Romeo and Juliet. People who, as they say in America, have been there and done all that."
John Adams (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1947) twists his face in an American style when he says this last phrase with a Far West accent. The one who is perhaps the living composer most appreciated by the operatic world on both sides of the Atlantic is these days at the Liceu immersed in the rehearsals of that Antony
The score is co-commissioned by Gran Teatre itself (with sponsorship from the BBVA Foundation, since it is not in vain that Adams was awarded the 2019 Frontiers of Knowledge Award) and by the San Francisco Opera, where Adams resides and where this title premiered last year. passed to commemorate the institution's centenary. At this point, however, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York has also wanted to join the project, since no one is aware that it is a winning horse in the always difficult contemporary opera scene.
The one on the 28th at the Gran Teatre will mark the European premiere of this political opera that talks about Rome versus Egypt and also about the declining regime of Antony and Cleopatra versus the emerging totalitarianism that the young Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, would impose later. The libretto, the work of Adams himself, is the result of a sifting of the original, sometimes extrapolating phrases, putting them in the mouths of other characters to synthesize and concentrate the scene.
Shakespearean meter is not something to respect. “John manages to approach the audience with his direct way of communicating, and we will not have Shakespeare's meter here as we study it in school, but the power of the text attracts attention and is very easy to understand,” says Elkhanah Pulitzer, the stage director who worked on the script.
“I love reading metrical and rhyming poetry, and it's interesting how it has come back into our culture through rap. No poet dares to use them, but rappers do – adds Adams –. What I'm looking for is an internal rhythm of the words. And Shakespeare would probably be horrified if he saw it, but he expressed it in a way consistent with the contemporary way.
The staging plays with the theater within the theater. Or rather, with cinema within the theater, since it uses the iconography of Hollywood from the 1930s, with Art Deco elements. “We wanted to play with the myths, the Liz Taylors and the Richard Burtons, and with the idea of what it means to be a public person with a mask,” notes Pulitzer. Thus, in the public sphere, the opera spectator encounters the actors who in turn play the Shakespearean characters, as well as the paparazzi, while intramurals, in privacy, these truly become the beings. historical: two people whose love, in the geopolitical context, represents the fusion of two cultures to create a new world in which to build bridges of understanding and acceptance. “It is curious how that geographical area continues to be so volatile even today,” Adams told the press, in relation to the conflict in Israel.
In this production, Antony is in Hawaii, he is back from everything, from his past as a military general: he only thinks about having fun. Cleopatra, on the other hand, still loves him and still has things to prove in Alexandria. They are two iconic leaders between whom intelligence and sexual desire run, but political ambiguity will cause love to prevail in the end.
And then there is Augustus, who will establish a totalitarian government with an iron fist, displacing the previous generation... “My analogy is built from what I live in San Francisco, where Facebook, Twitter emerged... and where are all those masters of the universe, young billionaires convinced of being right,” adds the composer.
Both the American soprano Julia Bullock and the Canadian baritone Gerald Finley had already worked with Adams. She participated in the cast of Girls... and encouraged the composer to stage a Shakespeare. Finley, for her part, played Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic. For once the opera anticipated the cinematic blockbuster!
And if in the past they defended their operas at the Liceu from Stravinsky to Richard Strauss, Falla, Glazunov, Mascagni or Toldrà, this time it will be John Adams who sits on the podium. “I never fully understand my works until I direct them myself,” he confesses.T
