[1985]

At 25, John Adams left behind his New England roots and the Eurocentric modernism he learned at Harvard to settle in San Francisco. There in that capital of counterculture, influenced by the mysticism of John Cage and the pioneering minimalism of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass, Adams developed his own approach to repetitive cycles and stretched-out forms that bore fruit in the standout works that defined his early career, including Phrygian Gates and Shaker Loops. Soon, though, Adams began to diverge from the ascetic purity of minimalism, making room within his precise sound world for the orchestral opulence and jazzy punctuation that have defined his unmistakable voice since the mid-1980s.

Harmonielehre, composed for the San Francisco Symphony in 1985, marked a pivotal juncture in Adams’ creative path. He took the title—German for “Treatise on Harmony”—from a textbook of the same name that the trendsetting composer Arnold Schoenberg published in 1911, at a time when he was making a case for how music could evolve past the rules of traditional harmony. In Harmonielehre, Adams looked back to the immersive grandeur of music composed around the turn of the 20th century, at the peak of Romantic excess—works like Debussy’s La Mer, Mahler’s all-encompassing symphonies, or Schoenberg’s own gargantuan Gurrelieder. But instead of relying on old-fashioned harmonic progress to shape such large swaths of music, Adams leaned into the new minimalist toolkit of repetitive cycles and superimposed layers that morph over time, proving that a technique known for its cool, meditative restraint could also fuel music as thrilling and saturated as any ever created. 

Describing the untitled first movement in a program note, Adams wrote, “The pounding E-minor chords at the beginning and end of the movement are the musical counterparts of a dream image. ... In the dream I’d watched a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket.”

Work on Harmonielehre coincided with Adams’ interest in the writings of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, “particularly his examination of Medieval mythology,” Adams explained. “I was deeply affected by Jung’s discussion of the character of Anfortas, the king whose wounds could never be healed. As a critical archetype, Anfortas symbolized a condition of sickness of the soul that curses it with a feeling of impotence and depression.” This myth inspired the slow central movement, “The Anfortas Wound,” in which “two enormous climaxes rise up out of the otherwise melancholy landscape,” Adams wrote, “the second one being an obvious homage to Mahler’s last, unfinished symphony.”

Adams labeled the third movement “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie,” and wrote “The Zappaesque title refers to a dream I’d had shortly after the birth of our daughter, Emily, who was briefly dubbed ‘Quackie’ during her infancy. In the dream, she rides perched on the shoulder of the Medieval mystic, Meister Eckhardt, as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted on the high ceilings of old cathedrals.”

Three piccolos, four flutes, three oboes, English horn, four clarinets, two bass clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta, piano, strings