Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the tremors have been significant. Simply staging The Death of Klinghoffer recently was enough to see the Met picketed on charges of anti-Semitism. While The Gospel According to the Other Mary isn’t going to start any riots, Adams’s latest work marks a turning point, both in the composer’s music and his social mission. No longer content to comment and observe, Adams turns his gaze to the story of the Passion — reclaiming and rewriting the originary narrative of the Christian West.
Yes, Gospel is a companion-piece to Adams’s 2000 opera-oratorio El Niño, offering a crucifixion to bookend its nativity, but where El Niño’s rewrite was a delicate, interrogative affair, the Gospel’s is emphatic, declarative. The same magpie collage of sources — Primo Levi, Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, Old and New Testaments — shape the libretto, but here they conspire to seize the story back from between its pastel-coloured Good News covers and play it out among the drop-outs, addicts and illegal immigrants of LA’s Skid Row.
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