How do you take that kind of manic behaviour, of tribal behaviour and turn it into music? I wrote most of the opera in 2016 during the presidential campaign, so I kept running into these harsh reminders that things never really change. Once the gold became more scarce, people started reverting to tribalism and racism and the kind of identity politics that we're seeing right now in this country. As long as there was gold, everybody seemed to get along and all kinds of people came here from everywhere: Chinese, Chileans, Mexicans, Europeans as well as East Coast Americans and people from the Midwest. When I read deeper into the subject, I discovered that it was very much like life right now. Like most Californians, I knew about the Gold Rush, but I didn't really know it in depth. It's about human greed, about idealism, about living on a knife edge between wild material gain and abject personal catastrophe, which really typifies what life for these people in the 1850s was like. There are many things about the Gold Rush that touch on human behavior in very much the same way as another well-known opera (or another tetralogy) about gold does. But I didn't choose this topic for that reason alone. I have seen what to me seemed like resonances between the manic activity that happened in the 1850s here in California and what's currently going on in Silicon Valley. I live only a few miles away from Silicon Valley and I've watched how the tech boom and the hectic over-valuation of digital economy has grown. Is the Gold Rush one of those crunch points in history? But I think that's proving not to be the case РІР‚вЂњ at least I hope so! It does appear that people realize that our Girls (plural)Р’В is a completely different piece of work. Of course my publisher was appalled, for fear that opera companies wouldn't want to go near it because of the potential for confusion.

The title, of course, is just a little wicked. We have the libretto made up of what people actually said, which was a method that we first developed with Doctor Atomic. He thought it might be interesting to take a similar theme, one that particularly attracted me because I've lived in California for the past 40 years, and see if we could craft a version that told the real story with contemporary texts. JA: Peter Sellars was asked to do a staging of the Puccini opera, and when he read the libretto, he felt that it was kind of a period piece and didn't really reflect the realities and the actual events of the Gold Rush. Ahead of his newest opera, Girls of the Golden West, which opens in San Francisco on November 21st, Adams talked to us about the opera, about the Gold Rush and the challenges of writing and promoting new classical music.Р”ВK: Where did the idea of a Gold Rush opera first come from? The operas of John Adams are more performed than those of any other living composer.

John adams girls of the golden west