Harmonielehre

This 40-minute symphony was the work with which California composer John Adams freed himself from an 18-month creative block—and did so with sophisticated style. Harmonielehre takes its title from Schoenberg’s 1911 textbook and marks Adams’ radically anti-modernist celebration of tonal composition, employing a symphony orchestra and the late-Romantic chromatic harmony of Schoenberg and his contemporaries. The influence of Wagner’s Parsifal (1882), Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), as well as Schoenberg’s own gigantic Gurre-Lieder (1913) are all at play here—combined with the pulsing rhythms of Minimalism. After the pounding exposition and propulsive repetitions of the opening E Minor movement—inspired by a dream of an oil tanker rising up out of San Francisco Bay and rocketing into the sky—the second movement, inspired by the legend of the immortal Fisher King in Arthurian legend, draws us into an altogether more melancholic atmosphere that echoes the bleak soundworld of Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony (1911) and the anguish of Mahler’s Tenth (1910). The serene third movement—inspired by Adams' dream of his daughter, nicknamed Quackie, riding through space on the shoulders of a medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart—embraces the tensions of Wagnerian harmony and builds to a final, triumphant climax. When it was first performed, in San Francisco in 1985, this dreamy, at times surreal masterpiece was criticised by those who felt it was trying to turn back the clock to the music of a bygone era, while others felt it was tainting the stripped-back aesthetic of Minimalism. But from a purely musical standpoint, few can deny how this larger-than-life piece, crammed with dazzling dramatic contrasts, is the perfect showcase for Adams’ supremely inventive command of orchestral colour.