Harmonielehre

Program notes

About the Work

Harmonielehre is the piece that brought John Adams national attention as an orchestral composer, and it began with a block. In the early 1980s he was unable to compose for about eighteen months. Then came a dream. In it he watched an oil tanker in San Francisco Bay turn upright and lift off like a Saturn rocket, the rust colour of its hull visible as it rose. ‘Shortly after,’ he recalled, ‘I sat down in my studio to find the powerful pounding E-minor chords that launch the piece.’

The score was written in 1984 and 1985 for the San Francisco Symphony, where Adams was composer-in-residence, and that orchestra gave the first performance under Edo de Waart on 21 March 1985. It lasts about forty minutes, is laid out in three movements, and is a symphony in all but name.

The title is borrowed from Arnold Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre, the treatise on tonal harmony that he published in 1911, before his own music parted company with tonality. Adams called the choice ‘part whimsical, part an acknowledgement of my puzzling father-son relationship to the master’. His piece takes the opposite road from Schoenberg’s. In his memoir Hallelujah Junction he describes it as ‘a statement of belief in the power of tonality at a time when I was uncertain about its future’, and as a once-only attempt to marry the chromatic harmony of the turn of the twentieth century to the rhythmic and formal procedures of minimalism. The pulsing repetition of Steve Reich and Philip Glass is still there, but it now carries the long melodies, huge climaxes and saturated orchestral sound of Mahler, Sibelius, Wagner and the young Schoenberg.

Adams has insisted that these echoes are not ironic borrowings. Writing the piece, he said, felt like ‘channelling the sensibilities of those composers I loved and finding contemporary form for their special harmonic worlds’.

Sir Simon Rattle has lived with this music for more than thirty years: he recorded it with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1994. ‘Harmonielehre’, he says in the LSO’s introduction to these concerts, ‘is the equivalent to John as the Firebird is to Stravinsky.’

What to Listen For

The first movement has no title and runs to about seventeen minutes, close to half the piece. It opens with the E minor chords of the dream, hammered out in repetition, and they return as a landmark. Between them the music runs on fast, motoric figuration that passes from one harmonic region to the next. The movement is shaped as an arch: at its centre the engines fall away and a long, yearning melody unfolds, a passage Adams has described as ‘full of Sehnsucht’. Then the energy of the opening comes back.

The second movement, ‘The Anfortas Wound’, is the dark centre of the work. Anfortas is the wounded Fisher King of the Grail legend, familiar to opera-goers from Wagner’s Parsifal. Here the minimalist machinery stops. The opening is slow and bare, close in mood to Sibelius, with a high, lonely trumpet line over a desolate landscape, and the music climbs by slow degrees to two climaxes of harsh dissonance in which Mahler is never far away.

The finale, ‘Meister Eckhardt and Quackie’, comes from another dream. Adams saw his baby daughter Emily, whose nickname was Quackie, riding on the shoulders of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart and whispering the secret of grace into his ear. The movement begins with a quiet, rocking shimmer from which a sweeping string melody grows. From there the pulse gathers and the full orchestra is drawn in, and after the bleakness of the slow movement the work ends in a blaze of light.