John Adams
“Harmonielehre”

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1947, John Adams differs in many ways from his composing contemporaries. “On a purely technical level, my music doesn’t seem as complicated as that of many other contemporary composers,” he has remarked. “My musical ideas have never required the complex forms we usually expect from serious composers today.” While his works often dispense with grand formal architecture, they possess rhythmic drive and employ traditional harmonies combined in unexpected ways. Moreover, unlike many of his peers, Adams has achieved widespread success with his music and ranks among the most frequently performed composers of our time.

Adams is generally associated with Minimalism, as his works avoid sharp contrasts and instead flow in a continuous stream, characterized by steady rhythmic patterns and long melodic arcs. The same is true of his orchestral piece Harmonielehre, written in 1984/85, which marked the end of a prolonged creative crisis. Having grown restless with the limitations of minimalist procedures, Adams sought a new direction. He found it by fusing the minimalist techniques of repetition and gradual development with the orchestral language of the late 19th and 20th centuries. “The shades of Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, and the young Schoenberg are everywhere in this strange piece,” Adams has said. “This is a work that looks at the past in what I suspect is ‘postmodernist’ spirit.” The title itself alludes to Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 theoretical treatise Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony).

The work was inspired by a dream: Adams saw a massive oil tanker gliding through San Francisco Bay, which suddenly, with tremendous force, lifted off like a rocket into the sky. The entire first movement follows a kind of inverted arch form: highly energetic at the beginning and end, with an expansive, rhapsodic middle section that Adams described as being “full of Sehnsucht”. The second movement, The Anfortas Wound, unfolds in slow tempo. Though it nods to Wagner’s Parsifal, Adams emphasizes that his inspiration lies primarily in the original 12th-century French Grail legend. The lively third movement, Meister Eckhardt and Quackie, begins with shimmering rhythmic patterns from which a sweeping string melody emerges. The title, too, comes from a dream: Adams envisioned his newborn daughter Emily – affectionately nicknamed “Quackie” – riding on the shoulders of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, whispering the secret of grace into his ear.

In Harmonielehre, Adams achieves a remarkable synthesis between the expressivity of late Romanticism and the procedures of Minimal Music. His ability to merge these seemingly opposing aesthetics into a coherent, radiant sound world accounts for both the fascination and the extraordinary success of this music.