Promotional Photo

John Adams
4:30 p.m. Oct. 28-29; Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. Free. 203-432-0670, yale.edu/whc.

Perhaps the most celebrated living American composer, John Adams is nearly as adept with the English language as he is with musical notation. His pieces have evocative titles like Slonimsky's Earbox, Shaker Loops and Short Ride in a Fast Machine. His recently published memoir, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, is a candid and readable tour of his work and his times. And his program notes, describing how he came to write this piece or that, are that rarest thing in the world: an enjoyable and unpretentious statement of the artist's intention.

With that in mind, we can expect to find his two upcoming Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University more than worth our while.

The first, entitled "Doctor Faustus and His Composition: Reflections on Thomas Mann's Fictional Composer" would seem to be a discussion of Adrian Leverkühn, the musical hero of Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, who gives up human intimacy in exchange for musical genius.

The Faustian theme is a natural fit for Adams. Anyone who's read Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise remembers that Ross suggests that musical high-modernists like atonal pioneer Arnold Schoenberg (whom Mann used as a very loose model) struck a kind of Leverkühnian bargain, choosing to pursue musical innovation rather than connect with a wider audience.

In Hallelujah Junction, Adams describes how he broke, to varying degrees, with the avant-garde musical philosophies of John Cage and the young Steve Reich in order to communicate emotionally with the listening public.

In some ways, Adams' conflicting desires to innovate and to communicate remain the driving force of his music, as he often acknowledges with a wink. The very titles of his pieces Harmonielehre and Chamber Symphony are sly references to Schoenberg, even as they reject his musical influence in favor of, respectively, Gustav Mahler and Frank Zappa.

The title of Adams' third (or so) opera, Doctor Atomic — a flawed masterpiece — also recalls the Faust story. Originally commissioned as part of a Faust-themed season at the San Francisco Opera, Adams' retelling of the invention of the A-bomb was, on the drawing board, the story of Robert Oppenheimer's rise and fall in American public life, as an ambitious scientist who ultimately paid the cost for his pride.

By the time it took the stage, it had evolved into a more oblique parallel of the Faust story, an alternately factual and lyrical account of the invention of a satanically powerful weapon.

Adams' second lecture, "Doctor Atomic and His Gadget: Composing the American Mythology" should offer an interesting account of this strange and intense piece. Musically breathtaking, dramaturgically puzzling, it is a work to be reckoned with.

Adams, whose operas with director Peter Sellars have dramatized such iconic American moments as the murder of a tourist by Palestinian terrorists (The Death of Klinghoffer) and the opening of diplomatic relations with Mao Tse-tung (Nixon in China), might seem to be selecting ephemeral or sensational subjects, but he examines them with the gravity and sobriety that they deserve.

By all accounts, the creative process for these works has been agonizing — he and Alice Goodman, the librettist for Nixon, were at each other's throats by the time they and Sellars finished the explosively controversial Klinghoffer; she finally jumped ship when Atomic was still in the planning stages.

But it is almost impossible to think, listening to the finished works, that the drama behind the drama was not ultimately worthwhile. Through that agonizing process of creation, the struggle to remake the old operatic form into something that could communicate to modern audiences, John Adams has created some of the most essential classical music of our age.

Let's hear what he has to say for himself.

Daniel Stephen Johnson writes about classical and new music at danielstephenjohnson.blogspot.com.