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Composer John Adams was born Feb. 15, 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He began composing at the age of 10 and first heard his music performed at the age of 13. His father taught him how to play the clarinet, and he was a clarinettist in community ensembles.
After he matriculated at Harvard University in 1965 he studied composition under Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, and David Del Tredici. While at Harvard, he conducted the Bach Society Orchestra and was a reserve clarinettist for both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Opera Company. He performed as the soloist in the Carnegie Hall world premiere of Walter Piston's Clarinet Concerto. He earned two degrees from Harvard University (BA 1971, MA 1972) and was the first student ever to be allowed to submit a musical composition for a Harvard undergraduate thesis.
He taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1972 until 1984. In 1985 he began a collaboration with the poet Alice Goodman and stage director Peter Sellars that resulted in two operas: Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, which are among the most-performed contemporary operas in recent history.
A recent stage work, I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky, was also given more than 50 performances in both the U.S. and Europe.
El Nino, a further collaboration with Peter Sellars, premiered in Paris in December 2000 and was seen again in San Francisco in January 2001.
Adams has received a number of prizes, perhaps chief among them the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music for On the Transmigration of Souls, composed for the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the first anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks.
In April and May of 2003, the Lincoln Centre presented John Adams: An American Master, the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer ever mounted at Lincoln Centre.
A filmed version of The Death of Klinghoffer was unveiled in 2003, directed by Penny Woolcock and conducted by the composer leading the London Symphony. Shot on location in the Mediterranean and aboard a cruise liner, it breaks new ground in the presentation of opera on film.
More recent projects include The Dharma at Big Sur (composed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the opening of Disney Hall in Los Angeles in October 2003); a new opera, Doctor Atomic, based on the life of Robert Oppenheimer, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premiered there in September 2005; and a new orchestral work for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.
In celebration of a 15-year partnership, Nonesuch Records in 1999 released The John Adams Earbox, a 10-CD compilation comprising almost all of the composer’s music over a 20-year period.
American poet Alice Goodman was born in 1958 in St. Paul Minnesota. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge universities, where she studied English and American literature. She has written the libretti for two of the operas of John Adams, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. The libretto for Nixon was written completely in rhymed, metered couplets, reminiscent of poetic and theatrical styles native to China.
She was raised as a Reform Jew, subsequently converted to Christianity and is currently an ordained Anglican priest serving in England.
Goodman resumed writing with John Adams on the opera Doctor Atomic, however she withdrew from this project after a year. It is reported that she is now working with Peter Sellars on a version of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.
In 2006, Alice Goodman took up the post of chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge.
She married the noted British poet Geoffrey Hill in 1987. The couple has one daughter.
Robert Orth as Richard Nixon in the Canadian Opera Company production of Nixon in China. Photo: Michael Cooper © 2011
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