How John Adams Adapted Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra Into an Opera

When his grand new Shakespearean drama takes the stage May 12–June 7, John Adams will become the first composer since Richard Strauss to have five operas performed at the Met. John Adams' partner in translating Antony and Cleopatra, an immortal tale of tragic love, to the operatic stage is director Elkhanah Pulitzer, whose glamorous staging finds connections between the larger-than-life historical figures of the drama and the screen idols of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Bass-baritone Gerald Finley and soprano Julia Bullock star in the title roles, with the composer on the podium for the premiere. Below, Adams himself discusses adapting one of Shakespeare’s most intricate creations.

Of all Shakespeare’s dramas, Antony and Cleopatra is surely the most thematically and formally complex. The two names that grace its title are instantly recognizable, especially for the generations of Americans who, while they may not have read nor seen the play, have nonetheless grown up with well over a century of cinematic evocations of these willful, transgressive lovers. Newcomers to the play will immediately encounter an often bickering couple and perhaps wonder whether their oscillating, bruising relationship is even worth feeling their pain. In Shakespeare’s version, they are two mature adults, light years removed from the virginal youths of Romeo and Juliet, and each has a provocative back story—he one of the greatest of Roman commanders, in his heyday arrogant and self-assured but now drifting into a comfortable decadence; and she a brilliant, alluring, and politically savvy queen who, years before and though still a teenager, had captured the attention of Julius Caesar and had a child by him. They are, in short, two people who have “been there, done that,�� having committed acts both heroic and despicable simply to survive in the brutal world of their time, when hiring an assassin to resolve a family dispute would raise no eyebrows.

As a stage spectacle, the play’s sprawling, at times confusing, scenario (three continents, 40 characters, and 42 scenes, a dynasty in decline and a nascent empire in first bloom) conjures a panorama of political intrigue and military strategy—a literal clash of civilizations. While it may lack the blunt concision of Macbeth and the sustained eloquence of Hamlet and Lear, as a study of power, both between individuals and between nations, Antony and Cleopatra feels uniquely and psychologically modern. This is why I chose it and why I feel that, despite its ancient source and setting, it is an apt companion of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic.

In Girls of the Golden West, I set several short soliloquies from Macbeth, research having suggested that Shakespeare was a popular form of entertainment during the California Gold Rush. That experience with the Bard whetted my appetite, and I, like so many other composers, engaged the risky challenge of setting to music Shakespeare’s language and negotiating the twists and turns of his dramatic plans. I was of course aware that Samuel Barber had his own operatic version of the play, but I didn’t think that one composer could or should “own�� a myth as archetypal as this one any more than one could own Faust or, for that matter, the Passion story.

In 2018, my collaborators, the stage director Elkhanah Pulitzer and our dramaturg Lucia Scheckner, and I set about the daunting task of extracting the core events and essential characters of Shakespeare’s vast canvas.

We compared the play to its source text by the first century biographer Plutarch, being cognizant that Plutarch’s historical spin, like that of Virgil’s, had to be pleasing to his Roman readers. It goes without saying that for purposes of opera, numerous ancillary events and characters had to be either compressed or deleted in favor of a focus on the three main characters, the third of course being the young, “scarce bearded�� Caesar. (In the play, Shakespeare’s “Caesar�� is not the Julius Caesar of Cleopatra’s early liaison but rather his adopted nephew, who at the time of these events was called Octavian, only later to rebrand himself Caesar Augustus). I enjoyed Shakespeare’s take on Caesar, whose laser-focused ambition and precocious brilliance come hand in hand with a humorless, sometimes petulant personality. Like some Silicon Valley master of the universe, he is always on message, always seems to get it right, while the aging, ambivalent Antony, consumed by love and pleasure, goes from one embarrassing defeat to another and cannot even manage his own suicide without bungling it.

I rued the necessary loss of many scenes, not the least of which were the wine-soaked frat party aboard Pompey’s ship and the keenly poignant breakup between Antony and his comrade-in-arms Enobarbus. Many details and critical information that would fly by in a matter of seconds in a spoken play had to be radically reduced, repurposed, or even omitted. We condensed several battles between the Romans and the Egyptians into one. Lines originally spoken by characters absent in our version were given to others, as when in the opening of the play two of Antony’s veteran soldiers, disgusted with their commander’s louche behavior and fascination with Cleopatra, now are sung by an equally annoyed Caesar:

“His captain’s heart / which in the scuffles
of great fights hath burst / the buckles
on his breast, reneges all temper / and is
become the bellows and the fan / to cool a
gypsy’s lust��

A surprise discovery was that, compared with other plays from that astonishingly fruitful late period of Shakespeare’s, Antony and Cleopatra has relatively few stand-alone soliloquies. At one key dramatic point, I found I needed for Caesar some sort of statement or expression of Roman superiority and imperial “manifest destiny.�� There being nothing quite adequately concise in the play to fit that, I went to The Aeneid (in a translation by Dryden) to fill the gap.

Gerald Finley and Julia Bullock in *Antony and Cleopatra* David Ruano / Liceu Opera Barcelona

Every operatic adaption of a famous text is fraught with difficult, often painful decisions. Composers set out with the intention of absolute fidelity to the original, but both musical and dramatic concerns immediately get in the way. It’s messy business. If it isn’t, the end result is likely to be dull and rigid. The demands of musical phrasing and harmonic closure occasionally required me to invent a line or two of my own faux-Bard, risking the displeasure of Shakespeare purists, but so far my insertions have largely gone undetected by audiences, and I hope my confessing this won’t launch a libretto Where’s Waldo? among future listeners!

I was able to take heart from looking at the quicksilver alchemy of librettist Arrigo Boito’s treatment of the Falstaff comedies for Verdi. Lucia Scheckner was creative in mining fragments from other Shakespeare plays, such as The Taming of the Shrew, Henry V, and Richard II, to extend or enrich certain moments. And when the need for filling in critical narrative data threatened to bog down the opera’s natural flow, I could remind myself that music, being the most psychologically precise of all the arts, has the unique power to replace event with feeling, and that a single change in the harmony can convey more emotional and psychological meaning than dozens of lines of text.

After 40 years of setting texts in three languages, I wish I could say I now have a formula, but I don’t, and perhaps that’s a good thing. The influence of American popular music has for sure had a stronger effect on my way of putting music to language than anything I may have learned from the great European classical tradition. I grew up listening to my mother singing Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter while she was cooking or doing housework or taking part in local amateur musicals. In my youth, it was impossible not to hear Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald on the radio, and by the time I got to college, the great era of early rock and soul had begun. In the best of all this music, whether it was the Beatles or Stevie Wonder or the Supremes, text, melody, and harmony were married together in a perfect unity. I now see that in my own treatment of text I hewed closely to that model, responding not just to the rhythm of a word or phrase but to the sound of the individual syllables themselves. I never had the least interest in conventional operatic fioritura, nor was I inclined to utilize virtuoso “extended�� vocal techniques that became the rage in midcentury avant-garde works.

When I listened to many classic 20th-century atonal works—whether by Schoenberg, Berg, Berio, or Boulez—their often-punishing sequences of intervallic leaps, easily accomplished on a piano, to me communicated a feeling of physical and emotional stress when sung. Such treatment of the voice was germane to express madness or exaggerated emotional states (Erwartung, Wozzeck, Le Grand Macabre), but it seemed to me that the anatomy of human vocal cords wants naturally to fall in with the acoustical laws of resonance—what we in the Western tradition call tonality.

When in Doctor Atomic I came to set the John Donne sonnet “Batter my heart, three- person’d God,�� the monosyllabic verbs, “knock, breathe, shine ... break, blow, burn�� felt to me like strokes of a hammer, and I treated them as such (much to the horror of a Donne scholar who protested that in so doing I’d destroyed the scansion of the poem!).

Shakespeare, of course, is so inherently musical that the internal rhythms all but suggest their own melodic shapes. That doesn’t mean, however, that everything to my American ears falls in neat, tidy symmetrical units. I hear his texts in distinctly different ways than, for instance, Handel or Benjamin Britten would. We composers all try to honor the text in our individual way, and mine often can drive singers to despair as they cope with miniscule irregularities in the rhythmic structure; difficulties, I’m happy to say, that usually disappear and feel natural once the music has become internalized.

In comparison with all my earlier stage works, Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most actively dramatic. There are fewer stand-alone set pieces (arias, choruses, etc.). In their place, I tried to maintain a fast-moving interaction among the characters. These characters, rather than pondering in song their doubts, designs, or motivations, act on them directly. In this sense, although it is of course musically much different, the model of “sung drama�� that Debussy imagined in Pelléas et Mélisande is probably the closest to my aims.

It is hard to imagine a more risk-prone art form than opera. With so many elements at play—music, text, image, acting, movement, lighting, narrative tension—even the most experienced composers are unable to perfectly project in advance how everything will play out when a work reaches the stage.

These Metropolitan Opera performances represent a version more succinct and fluid than previous presentations in San Francisco (2022) and Barcelona (2023). Passages that at first seemed to me critical to the story while composing, once they got on stage, turned out to be dispensable and could be cut, making a tighter dramatic arc. But from the very start, I knew that Antony and Cleopatra, a story of big events happening to big and complex personalities, would require an equally big telling. To my mind, this current version best honors those requirements.