Last year I was very hard on John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic. I wanted to like it, but, while I admired the music, I was disappointed in it as drama. Having now seen the San Francisco Symphony’s semi-staged production of Adams’ new opera A Flowering Tree, I’m very happy to say that it doesn’t share most of the problems I found in Doctor Atomic. I was an Adams early adopter, and an obsessed fan in the 80’s, so I was relieved.
This is a beautiful and admirable work, and it’s the first of John Adams’ theatrical works that actually “works”. I think the reason must be that this is the first one that has, you know, a plot. The music is rich and colorful, and chock full of delicious Adamsy goodness. The music is so effective, and yes, dramatic, that I wasn’t nearly as irritated by Peter Sellars’ staging as I would have been otherwise. Much has been made, with good reason, of Adams’ musical depiction of the main character’s transformation into a tree, which occurs four times in the opera. In each case, the context is different, and Adams paints each transformation in a different way, the final one being a literally spectacular payoff at the very end of the piece.
Painting. This is what Adams is extraordinarily good at in his operas. The final tree transformation joins the hair-raising arrival of Air Force One in Nixon in China, The “gymnopedie” depicting Klinghoffer’s slow-motion descent in The Death of Klinghoffer and the final moment of Doctor Atomic as great examples of how Adams’ can create music that, when combined with staging and lighting, tells a story that words cannot.
Again, this was a “semi-staged” production. About a third of the stage in Davies Symphony Hall was dedicated to staging, with a platform cleverly placed above the orchestra for some of the action. The staging used an interesting, and sometimes very moving, convention of having a dancer shadow each of the characters. Unfortunately, there are several long orchestral and choral passages that were, I guess, unstageable. During these passages we’d have the singers standing or sitting motionless and the dancers doing very little. It’s still unclear to me what the significance of some of these passages is in terms of the storytelling.
A Flowering Tree also makes use of a narrator, which can be problematic when it comes to staging. What do the characters do while the narrator is singing? Like Doctor Atomic, whose libretto was slapped together from “found materials”, this suggests some sort of fear of having to actually write for the characters, which I find puzzling and disappointing. But in this case, Sellars handled this fairly well, I thought. I guess there was so little happening anyway, so the narrator fit in somewhat naturally.
The use of a narrator and the many how-on-Earth-do-I-stage-this moments had me thinking that this might be a better oratorio than opera, but in the second act as the story unfolded I became increasingly convinced. Whereas Doctor Atomic had no plot to speak of, and we never heard from the characters in their own words, this piece has an appropriately simple plot. We understand what the characters want, and we’re routing for them. Given this foundation for the first time, Adams shows what he can do dramatically.
