“Compared to what we have now, the historical figure of President Nixon doesn’t seem so bad!” John Adams says with rueful disbelief during a conversation in mid-August, hours before he is set to fly to Mexico City to conduct a series of concerts. He is referring to how starkly the world has changed since he first began writing his landmark opera Nixon in China four decades ago.
Adams is alarmed at the relentless onslaught committed by the current White House, eroding what he calls America’s “fundamental trust” in the democratic process. (He cites such examples as the ever-worsening partisan redistricting and the drive to “eliminate voting by mail.”)
When Adams embarked on Nixon in China in 1985, spectres of the Vietnam War and Cold War tensions were still extremely vivid. He himself had narrowly escaped being drafted as a young man. “It was a storyline that was very meaningful to me,” Adams recalls. “The clash of communism versus capitalism, represented by Mao versus Nixon, was a fundamental theme of our time.”
In November 2025, Adams conducts the Orchestra and Chorus of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in one programme, repeated across three evenings, centred on substantial excerpts from Nixon in China – in the process bringing music from his debut opera to Italy for only the second time. The distinctly American bill also includes Aaron Copland’s ballet suite Billy the Kid, opening with Short Ride in a Fast Machine – a brief, high-octane orchestral piece Adams forged in the same late-’80s crucible as Nixon.
Adams’ own journey began under the shadow of the Cold War, but his immediate world was local: clarinet lessons from his father, his mother singing in local musicals and the church choir, swing bands at his grandfather’s dance hall. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1947, Adams grew up in small-town New Hampshire in a deeply musical household.
After study at Harvard in the 1960s, Adams drove west and settled in the Bay Area, drawn by San Francisco’s spirit of experimentation. There, he absorbed influences from John Cage and Lou Harrison while exploring the hypnotic processes of minimalism – though he quickly realised he would need to make the style more expressive and less bound to procedure. Ambitious and defining early works such as Shaker Loops, Harmonium and Harmonielehre paved the way for Nixon in China.
When Nixon in China premiered at Houston Grand Opera in October 1987, it was a daring proposition: a contemporary opera about a recent historical event, created by a composer who had never written in the medium before in collaboration with a librettist – the poet Alice Goodman – penning her first opera text.
Exploring the tensions between public media spectacle and the more ambiguous and intricate reckoning of the private self, the main characters in Nixon are vivid in their contradictions – archetypes and individuals at once. “Pat Nixon is this quintessence of the stay-at-home Republican housewife and she’s a very sympathetic character”, Adams says. “Madame Mao, of course, is this fire-breathing, hell-bent-for-leather real communist – and the real energy behind the Cultural Revolution. Mao is both a killer and a philosopher.”
Although it faced some resistance from the critical establishment, Nixon in China eventually found a prominent place in the contemporary repertoire. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross has called it “possibly the greatest [American opera] since Porgy and Bess”.
“I don’t conduct it all the time, but I like to come back to it now and then”, Adams says, explaining his decision to offer selected scenes in Rome. “Only one of my operas has previously been produced in Rome” – the 1995 ‘song play’ I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, set in the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles – “so I saw this as a nice opportunity.”
The timing is apt: next year also marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and Copland’s outlaw ballet from 1938 adds another note of Americana. “You couldn’t have an American event without a bank robbery!” Adams jokes, explaining how Billy the Kid found its way into the programme.
Reflecting on how his operas have been interpreted as statements about current events, Adams says: “We as artists have to examine what it means to do art. But I don’t think that being political in your artistic statement is necessarily required. People come to art, whether it’s painting or literature or poetry or music or dance, for all kinds of different reasons – sometimes just pure spiritual reasons that you can’t put a finger on.”
Because of the topics he has addressed, Adams says he is often assumed to be primarily a ‘political’ composer. “But I chose those subjects because they resonated with my consciousness as an American, and I think they resonate with a lot of people’s consciousness, not just in the US”, he explains. “I don’t think any artist can change the vote. This was a dispute I always had with Peter [Sellars]. If you want to change the world, you have to go out and change people’s political behaviour. You’ve got to go out and drive them to the polling place or something. But I don’t think making an opera is going to change anybody’s vote.”
Adams’ operas have indeed reached international audiences: Nixon in China has been produced frequently in Europe, as has Doctor Atomic, which is being staged again this season in Freiburg, Germany, by Yuval Sharon. While his most recent opera, Antony and Cleopatra (premiered by San Francisco Opera in 2022), turns from contemporary history to Shakespeare’s tragedy, the line of continuity is clear: myth, image-making and the psychological weather of those who wield power.
“Music is the most psychologically precise of all the arts. You can say so much about a character with just a change of harmony”, Adams notes. Critics who dismissed Antony and Cleopatra as a reversion to conventional forms missed the deeper point, he adds. With its polarity of ancient Egypt versus the emergence of imperial Rome, “this is a story about the decline of one civilisation and the rise of another. You have in the character of Octavian, who becomes Caesar Augustus, this brilliant young guy. You look around in today’s America, and I’m constantly reading about Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and people who are very young, and they’re riding this crest of a wave of change. That’s very similar to what Augustus did.”
Pairing Copland with his own work highlights two very different ways of turning American stories into music. While Adams draws on the full dramatic resources of opera and the modern orchestra to grapple with the psychological and political complexities of recent history, in Billy the Kid Copland responded to the cultural currents of the 1930s with a lean, accessible style that could evoke the mythic imagery of the Wild West.
Adams recalls that Copland’s music was part of his childhood soundtrack. “My parents loved Appalachian Spring, and when I was probably ten, maybe even younger, they took me to Tanglewood and I saw him conduct the Boston Symphony. To an American composer, Copland is like what Brahms would be to a German composer. He found a very simple language that struck a very deep chord.”
Alongside composing, Adams carves out time for conducting. “It’s a very important part of my musical DNA,” he says, offering a counterpart to the solitude of his work as a composer. Partnering with the Santa Cecilia forces has been a particular pleasure. “The chorus is phenomenal”, he observes, referring to his last engagement in Rome, when he presented his 2012 oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary.
Conducting also gives him a chance to become immersed in works beyond his own. For his Mexico City tour, Adams had been preparing Stravinsky’s Firebird. “It’s taken nearly a month of my brain power to put it together in my head, but that sort of thing is a great challenge”, he says.
Adams is also fond of conducting Respighi’s big Roman canvases – an affinity that fits in Rome: Santa Cecilia’s orchestra premiered Fountains of Rome (1917) and Pines of Rome (1924) at the old Teatro Augusteo, and Respighi later taught, and briefly served as director, at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia.
When asked about the broader trajectory of American classical music, Adams strikes a balance between optimism and unease. He has always resisted the gloomy narrative of decline, believing that there will always be an audience for works of deep artistic statement. And another source of hope is the work of younger composers, whom Adams consistently champions. Yet recent events trouble him. He points to the elimination of the chief classical critic role at The New York Times as a symbolic blow to the cultural conversation.
That in turn prompts him to refer to Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit – specifically, the episode drawing on the novelist’s disillusioning visit to the United States in 1842. Dickens, he says, portrays Americans “basically as Yahoos: anti-intellectuals, just like Donald Trump. There has always been this sort of agon – this struggle between anti-intellectual populism and intellectual life – in this country.”
On his darker days, Adams admits, he feels as if he is “cultivating a very tiny parcel. But you do what you have to do. I’m always inspired by American artists like Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman – or Charles Ives, who had no audience to speak of – and yet we’re deeply grateful for what they did.”
John Adams performs with Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome on 6th–8th November.
See all upcoming performances by the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.
This article was sponsored by Fondazione Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.
