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El Niño – Interview with Christian Leblé

John Adams discusses his new Nativity oratorio
receiving its premiere in Paris on 15 December, 2000.
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John Adams, why did you choose to compose this large piece on the traditional Nativity story? Does the story have a special meaning for you?

The piece is my way of trying to understand what is meant by a miracle. Reading the New Testament Gospels I am always struck by the fact that the essence of the narratives are miracles. They are miracles performed by Jesus or by God through the actions of Jesus. I don’t fully understand why the story must be told in this manner, but I accept as a matter of faith that it must be so. I am sure there are many explanations ranging from the logical to the mystical. Each of us who consider the story has to come to terms with these miracles and what they mean. The Nativity story is the first of these miracles, and El Niño is a meditation on these events. In fact, my original working title for it was How Could This Happen? This phrase, taken from the Antiphon for Christmas Eve, also must surely have been uttered by me at the births of my own children and by countless others who have contemplated birth.

Do you have an interpetation that coincides with a traditional religious viewpoint?

I was brought up in the New England Unitarian tradition which is the same tradition of Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists. Theirs is a "humanist" approach to religion and probably the least mystically inclined of all Christian teachings. I remember as a boy listening to the way the stories from the Bible were analyzed as metaphors of morality. The moral teachings were taken to heart. But the New Englanders I grew up with were for the most part uncomfortable with the kind of superreality that exists in the Gospels. So when, some thirty five years later, I came to the point of creating this new piece I found myself confronted by all the miracles in the story. How was I to deal with them? Would I treat the Annuciation, the Virgin Birth, the visitation of the Magi, the Christmas star all merely as metaphors, as any "rational" person would do? Or would I look deeper inside myself and try to find a different reality, a reality in which these events are truths? Jung said that a religious truth obeys its own logic, and this logic is different from the truth of the corporeal world.

You have written two operas, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, with themes drawn from contemporary events. How does it feel to be composing to a theme that is very old and has been the subject of so many works of art for centuries?

Entering into this myth, making art about it and finding one’s own voice to express it can’t help but put one in a very humble position. You realize that you’re just another artisan adding another stone to an edifice that is already centuries old and infused with the effort and genius of many who have gone there before and done it better than you. Perhaps that is why, upon completing it, I found that I could detect a certain medieval quality to some of what I’ve written. That quality is not there as an exoticism but rather as a artifact, a "tonality" that acknowledges the venerable nature of the material and sets the emotional tone.

For an American composer whose music drawn so much from your country’s political and cultural identity, a work with a title in Spanish is a surprise. Why did you chose to call the piece "El Niño"?

Well, first of all, anyone living today in California has to be aware that English is not the only language spoken by Americans. And even though there are some politicians who would like to consecrate English as the "only" language, the fact is that we are a wonderfully polyglot society, and Spanish is only one of many of the idioms spoken here. But more important, what makes the libretto for El Niño special is the incorporation of of texts in Spanish by several Latin American poets, most of them women. These texts are about the Nativity and, when mixed with the more familiar Biblical texts, give a color and a tonality to the work that I find deeply satisfying. The idea of incorporating Hispanic texts into the libretto was Peter Sellars’s. I’d asked him to help me in the creation of the libretto. We both call California home, and the intensity and genuineness of Latin American art and culture is one of the great gifts one receives by living here. For me, having the voices of women poets in my piece was essential. And the choice of these particular women–Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral and Hildegard von Bingen-- opened up possibilities of another dimension to the story telling. So much of the ‘official’ Nativity narrative has traditionally been told by the Church, and presumably by men. But seldom in the officially sanctioned stories is there any more than a passing awareness of the misery and pain of labour, of the uncertainty and doubt of pregnancy or of that mixture of supreme happiness and inexplicable emptiness that follows the moment of birth. All of those extreme emotional states surrounding the birth of a child are touched upon in the Spanish texts in El Niño. The two major voices in the piece are both those of Mexican women. One is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th century nun whose ecstatically revealed poetry reminds me of not only Hildegard von Bingen but also of Emily Dickinson. Sor Juana is famous in Latin countries, making the challenge of setting her poetry something one does only with the greatest respect and care. The other great poet, four of whose poems provide the deepest psychological intuitions in the piece, is Rosario Castellanos. She was a 20th century novelist who lived in and wrote mostly about Chiapas, the mountainous southern state of Mexico where the most "indigenous" of its people live. She is equally as great a poet as Sor Juana but, being more modern, her imagery is more familiar to us, and her descriptions of pregnancy, labor, sexual union and the physicality of birth give El Niño a reality that it otherwise would lack. Furthermore, I found the women’s sensibility more open to the possibility of magic, more welcoming to the notion of miracles.

You’ve also included religious texts that stand outside the Biblical canon.

Yes, the Hispanic texts are interwoven with other Nativity texts, some familiar, such as Luke and Matthew, and others not so familiar, such as the little-known Gnostic Infancy Gospels. These "pseudo-gospels" (as the Church so calls them) were written at roughly the same time as the New Testament Gospels. Some are like children’s stories or fairy tales, while others are every bit as serious and probing as the official gospels. In the Gospel of James, for instance, there is a psychological shading, a subtlety about human relations, even humour, that is not so apparent in either Luke or Matthew. I was attracted to the portrait of Joseph in the Gospel of James because he demonstrated more human foibles, weaknesses of a middle-aged male that I immediately recognized all too well. in the wonderful scene where he discovers Mary’s pregnancy he is suspicious, accusatory and unwilling to accept what Mary is telling him. He can only think of how this scandal will reflect poorly on himself. So this makes his leap of faith, when it finally comes, all the greater.

Another scene from the same Gnostic sources provided me with an image that is unforgettable. It is the moment before the birth, and Joseph suddenly realizes that the entire earth has stopped and is frozen in a state of suspended animation. The birds have stopped singing, the water ceases to flow, people are frozen in the middle of a simple gesture like eating or tending to an animal. It is a moment of absolute stillness, the prelude to the birth and all calamity and joy and sorrow that is about to come into the world. There is nothing quite like this scene in the Bible itself. It’s like one of those infinitely detailed landscapes from the Middle Ages where a whole community of people, peasants, lords, children, animals and their surroundings are caught in lovingly depicted precision.

The title of El Niño, the "little boy", conjures up images of hurricane-force winds…

My choice of title is admittedly provocative, given the association people have of late with storms and violent weather. In Guatemala it must surely come with a bitter association of a catastrophic natural force which caused terrible misery and grief for millions of poor people only a few years ago. But that association is right. As Sor Juana so often says, a miracle is not without its alarming force. Christ was referred to as the "Wind", a kind of temptest that blows away all that comes in its path and transforms it. Herod knows this. We all know it when a child comes into the world. It comes with both the potential to do evil and the power to bring love.

The work appears closest in form to a traditional oratorio. But theatrical stagings for it are also planned. How do you view it, and did this affect the way you created the music?

I want the work to be flexible and not necessarily tied to any one way of presentation. Having Peter Sellars do a staged version was part of the origin of the piece, but I also look forward to experiencing the piece simply as a concert work in the manner of Messiah. I am also concerned that this not be a "site specific" piece tied to the Christmas season. The subject is obviously too big to be forced into any particular calendar period.

I am indebted to Jean-Pierre Brossmann for his encouragement to create this piece. He provided the early moral support that I needed to take on such a large project. At one point several years ago, when I was on the verge of dropping the idea, he even flew to London to argue passionately for me to continue. Other people who have had important roles to play in the creation were Kent Nagano, a long-time advocate of my music and the conductor who brought The Death of Klinghoffer to life; Peter Pastreich, the former executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, who provided the enthusiasm for that organization’s involvement; Linda Golding of Boosey & Hawkes, my publisher; Jane Moss of Lincoln Center; and of course Peter Sellars, my longtime collaborator and friend, and the person to whom El Niño is dedicated.

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