Opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2014 production of The Death of Klinghoffer was met by a phalanx of protesters ready for a fight. The opera, by the American composer John Adams, depicts the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound Jewish American passenger. It has been the subject of controversy since shortly after it premiered in 1991, but the response in 2014 was particularly vehement. To the protesters at the Met, the opera was straightforwardly antisemitic—its allegiances were clearly with those of the terrorists. They shouted “Shame!” at entering patrons and heard speeches from politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike—including former mayor Rudy Giuliani. Some protesters had tickets, booing as the curtain raised and periodically shouting to interrupt the performance. One particularly sustained interruption—a man repeatedly chanting, “The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgiven!”—pushed the show to the verge of unraveling before the conductor and performers steadied the tempo and regained control.

Many of the protesters admitted to not having listened to the opera (or having read the libretto), and their precise objections can be difficult to generalize, but overall they add up to the idea that any acknowledgment of Israeli settler-colonial violence (the opera opens with an anguished “Chorus of the Exiled Palestinians”) alongside the opera’s depiction of Palestinian terrorism is tantamount to a justification of Klinghoffer’s violent death, or even an endorsement.

An earlier attack on the opera came at a different reactionary moment: In the immediate aftermath of September 11, a planned concert of the two opening choruses from Klinghoffer by the Boston Symphony was canceled, after which Adams was subjected to one of the most notorious broadsides in contemporary classical music’s history: a front-page essay in the New York Times arts section, “Music’s Dangers and the Case for Control,” by the late Richard Taruskin, the preeminent musicologist of the last few decades, who fairly literally wrote the book on classical music. He argued that Klinghoffer should not be performed because it uses beautiful music to romanticize terrorism—and, in general, that music is too powerful to end up in the wrong hands because of its ability to shape our emotions, “the all but irresistible kinesthetic response that music evokes that makes it such a potent influence on behavior, thence on morals and belief.”

Adams has become perhaps the most important composer of the last 40 years by accepting and using this exact relationship between music and feeling to his own ends. And opera, as an art form, often demands the reconciliation of satisfying, harmonious music with morally troubling subject matter. (Admirers of Mozart’s Don Giovanni have puzzled for centuries over the meaning of the sublime beauty produced by the title character, a rapist and murderer.) In Klinghoffer, any sense of musical comfort and resolution is quickly undermined. The ship’s captain glides along in a smooth baritone, but the last word and emotional peak of the opera belongs to Klinghoffer’s wife, who chastises the captain for his conciliatory attitude toward the terrorists once they leave the ship. And when one terrorist sings, “We are not criminals and we are not vandals, but men of ideals,” it’s immediately undercut by a harsher description of a terrified child. The moments of beauty and harmony aren’t necessarily to be taken at face value.

This restless, uncertain, and ironic quality permeates almost all of Adams’s work. He has consistently pushed classical music to engage with the world of politics and contemporary social issues. But he is hardly an activist and—despite the certainty of the protesters outside of the Met—the ambiguity at the center of many of his greatest works is at the core of his appeal as an artistic and intellectual figure.

After mastering the standard repertory as a precocious teenage clarinetist, Adams trained in composition at Harvard under the tutelage of high modernists, who sought ever-more-avant-garde pathways to reject the hierarchies of pitch that create the familiar musical sensation of tension and resolution. But after some postgraduation years participating in the anarchic 1970s Bay Area experimental music scene, Adams was inspired by an encounter with a homemade cassette tape of Richard Wagner compositions to revisit late romanticism and its turbulent, emotional harmonic language that his teachers had rejected. He merged that older, more traditional vocabulary with some elements of the hypnotic music of minimalists like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, who had sought their own way past academic atonal music with relentlessly harmonious, slowly evolving musical forms. Adams’s mature style reconciled the innovations of the minimalists with the expressive potential of earlier, tonal classical music.

Current Issue

July/August 2025 Issue

While he had a certain distaste for the classical music industry—in particular, he rejected the showy exertions of the San Francisco Symphony’s maestro, Seiji Ozawa—Adams achieved increasing success with instrumental concert music, beginning with the 1978 solo piano piece Phrygian Gates. His breakout came with the 1987 opera Nixon in China, the first work he made with the director Peter Sellars and the poet Alice Goodman. Though he had never composed for solo voice, the grandly surreal dramatization of Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Mao’s China was a sensation and is still regularly performed. Adams followed it with Klinghoffer (another collaboration with Sellars and Goodman) and other politically engaged works. El Niño (2000), his Nativity oratorio, emphasizes an overlooked part of the story of Virgin Mary—her status as a young migrant before the birth of Christ. In Doctor Atomic (2005), Adams and Sellars examined the days before the first nuclear test, embodying dread of the dawn of the nuclear age. The oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012) placed biblical stories alongside modern-day social activism, including labor protests and immigration raids.

It’s strange to say—especially considering his towering stature—but to love Adams’s music is often to wonder why his cultural footprint isn’t larger. The Klinghoffer saga is the oldest of old news in classical music circles, but overcoming sustained right-wing attacks on his career doesn’t seem to have earned him wider recognition or renown. And Adams has not joined the more thoroughgoing minimalists as a touchstone in the art world and for indie and electronic musicians.

As Pitchfork put it the last time it reviewed a new Adams recording, 17 years ago: “Despite having written some of the most moving, resonant works of the past 25 years, Adams probably also bears the unfortunate distinction of being the most important American musician the majority of non-classical listeners have never heard of.” While one can quibble with that characterization, it’s true that Adams remains a central figure within the classical music silo without corresponding fame outside of it.

Not that this seems to bother him one bit—at 78, he has achieved a near-total embrace from institutional classical music, with steady commissions and collaborations with the art form’s biggest stars. He’s currently personally conducting his latest opera, Antony and Cleopatra, at the Met.

Unlike the other usual contenders for the title of greatest living American composer, who rose up out of lofts and art galleries (Glass, Reich) or Hollywood recording studios (John Williams), Adams is a denizen of the concert hall and the opera house—the restless maximalism of his greatest works is at its best live, heard with undivided attention. And unlike the atonal modernism he rejected, his music has a certain populist quality, a fundamental legibility to broad audiences. But keeping track of the rapidly shifting moods and subversions and extensions of musical convention may be an acquired taste: It can seem that the innovations that made his reputation have simultaneously restricted his renown largely to the confines that the classical music world has created for itself.

It’s also not such a mystery why Adams isn’t usually considered a man of the left: He tends to reject the idea that he’s a political composer, and if you come to Adams for straightforward moral judgements and affirmation, you’re going to be disappointed. He’s not a reliable source of public statements, nor is he in the business of giving unambiguous analysis of his own work. The New York Times, in a recent profile, summed up his political focus neatly but vaguely—and it’s telling that the most revealing statement came from an opera singer that Adams often collaborates with, the bass-baritone Gerald Finley, who said only that Adams made opera “a force for social commentary.” There is viscerally much more to it than that, when his music is experienced, but the exact meaning of the political content of his art can have a fluid quality, resisting a firm grasp.

And his latest works have been less socially engaged. The Metropolitan Opera’s general manager once joked that, when Adams composed Nixon in China, his only designs on the Met were “for its dismantlement.” Yet he has now had five of his works performed there, a distinction last achieved by Richard Strauss, a core pillar of the repertory. While the new opera, Antony and Cleopatra, has a searching musical quality, the text is mostly plucked from Shakespeare, with the only contemporary feeling provided by vague gestures to the fascism of the 1930s. When I saw it earlier this month, the rhythms of the original verse consistently undermined the opera’s vocal lines—and not to any dramatic purpose that I could discern. It does not seem likely to go down as one of Adams’s great works.

One interpretation of this phase of his career might hold that a once-radical artist has been captured by Big Classical Music. The genre is in essential ways structurally and aesthetically conservative. It is devoted in part to preserving music and performance traditions from past centuries, and the expense of classical music-making means it tends to have a cozy (if often tortured) relationship to wealthy patrons and corporate sponsors. Any artist wishing to work within the classical music system has to navigate hierarchies of donors and administrators that shape what gets produced. Making large-scale concert music requires compromise, and Adams has mastered this system.

Still, it’s worth considering what Adams has gained by working within the unbroken context of the classical tradition: He’s entered and reshaped the canon himself, which means the most challenging music he has created might just endure. (Luca Guadignino is set to direct an adaptation of The Death of Klinghoffer in Italy next year.) And Taruskin was right: This sort of music does have unique powers to convey feeling. He was just wrong about who should have access to it. It’s one thing to plainly describe the dread of nuclear war, or the reality of the Nakba, or the vulnerability of homeless migrants—but making you feel it deeply is perhaps a more radical thing, and that’s so often what Adams’s music achieves.