But his Harvard-trained intellect is anything but absent. And the telephone won’t stop ringing.Īdams’ prematurely gray hair looks wind-swept, and he blinks through spectacles as if preoccupied, looking every bit the part of an absent-minded, longhaired composer. The family’s dog, a beagle named Flora, races crazily through the house in pursuit of imagined demons. On this morning, his son Sam woke up ill. His wife, Deborah O’Grady, is at the bank trying to resolve complications so that the family can move into a bigger Berkeley home with substantially more studio space. There are too many troubles on the home front. Seated near the 1989 Grammy award for his earlier opera, “Nixon in China,” Adams can’t even recuperate in peace. Next year will witness a staging by the Los Angeles Music Center Opera and a production at the San Francisco Opera.
Yet despite its controversial subject-the infamous 1986 hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro by Palestinians and the murder of an elderly Jewish-American, Leon Klinghoffer, a tourist confined to a wheelchair-Adams’ opera is in the middle of an international run of performances that includes Brussels, France’s Lyon Opera and Vienna and will conclude 1991 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Most modern operas tend to vanish into recording history soon after an unveiling. “The Death of Klinghoffer,” his second ambitious opera in four years, recently premiered in Brussels.
I’m 44, and my body isn’t as supple as it used to be, and I write for eight hours a day and I don’t stand up and I don’t stretch and now I hurt myself.” He rolls his right shoulder like a sore-armed pitcher. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to conduct for several months,” says Adams, who is sprawled on a chair in the tiny living room of his modest Berkeley home. He hurt himself by composing for more than 18 months, seven days a week, hour after hour, writing with pencil, 30 lines to the page, in a narrow upstairs room crowded with a grand piano, a bank of synthesizers, several samplers, a word processor, a printer and a tape recorder. A veteran of art’s most grueling campaign-the creation of a contemporary opera-he has a wound to show for it: tendinitis in his right shoulder.