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America: A Prophecy, Op. 19 (1999)
Thomas Adès (b. 1971)
Thomas Adès' meteoric rise to international musical prominence in a period of barely a dozen years has been an astonishing phenomenon. He was twenty-two in 1993 when he gave his first public piano recital in London and there has been an unusual consensus among critics of his originality, musicality and importance. A conductor as well as a pianist of formidable talent, Adès is currently artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, music director of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Britten Professor at the Royal Academy of Music.
Born in London, where he now lives, Adès' most obvious musical talent was initially as pianist. He studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and composition with Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School of Music, and then went on to read music at King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1992 with a double-starred first. That same year, he became composer-in-residence with the Halle Orchestra (1993-5). His most performed work, Living Toys, was commissioned for the London Sinfonietta and its London premiere (under Oliver Knussen) prompted widespread critical interest and acclaim. The Cabrillo Festival performed three of Adès’ works in the 2003 season, “ . . . but all shall be well,” Darknesse Visible and Concerto Conciso, and his orchestral work Asyla in 2004.
America: A Prophecy was composed in 1999 as one of six works from such composers as Hans Werner Henze and John Corigliano for a “Message for the Millennium” commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and its music director Kurt Masur. The project was funded with generous support from the Francis Goelet Fund. Masur and the New York Philharmonic introduced America: A Prophecy on November 11, 1999 in a concert that featured four of the commissioned works. The piece is for orchestra, mezzo-soprano and chorus, although the use of the chorus is discretionary and has not been included in tonight’s performance. Commentator Paul Griffiths wrote the following note in 2004:
Prophets had better be historians. As one of six composers invited by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic to provide “messages for the millennium,” for performance on the eve of 2000, Adès turned his gaze from a thousand years ahead to five hundred back, and looked for his message in the events of the Spanish conquest of the Maya in the Yucatan peninsula. A benign civilization, living in harmony with nature, was destroyed by looters. Or, looking at the case differently, a people in bondage to priests and princes was liberated to join the modern world of advancing knowledge, technology and self-determination.
Music can have it both ways, and Adès’s does. The Maya music of America: A Prophecy, as it first appears, is both blissfully simple—a rotating pattern of three, then four notes—and constricted, dogged, numbed in sensibility. As it changes and develops, it maintains this duality, becoming at once exuberant and a stern exercise in control. Similarly, the Spanish music, when it bursts in halfway through, after forewarnings, abound not only with bellicosity but with a wild, free excitement, pushing up into the flamboyant decorations, for three trumpets, one of them small, extra-high.
This whole passage is based on an “ensalada” (a musical salad of popular melodies) entitled La Guerra, written by the Spanish composer Mateo Flexa (or Flecha), quite possibly at the very time, the 1530s-40s, when the Maya were being subdued-released. The militant Christianity of the choir’s text comes from the same source. But while Adès lets the words speak (or sing) for themselves, he sets the music prismatically, bending rhythms and harmonies, adding whole new sways of texture, and making his own edit that includes one incursion of Maya music.
One of the ironies of the piece is that there is no real Maya music to be quoted—not only because the Spanish did everything they could to obliterate everything Mayan but because there was no musical notation before they came. Words, though, did survive, passed down and copied through the centuries, and these, from the books of the chilam balam (jaguar seers), provide Adès with the text for his mezzo-soprano’s prophecy-lament. She sings like a seer indeed, mostly in slow, sure phrases in the strong middle register, increasing in speed only as she registers alarm that “they will come” (words to which she takes up the initial Maya motif). Her song could well be the sacred chant of a lost culture: it leans towards old modes, with a flavour of B Dorian early on, and yet ensconces itself comfortably in the rainbow world of Adès’s harmony.
So does the Maya music of the introduction. This wobbling, warbling iteration is soon embraced in—and part of—a forest polyphony, between a bass line that develops into a hubbub in the low wind and a high treble, traced overhead (to quote another Adès title) by piano with string harmonics. As all these things collide and set up interference patterns, in between breaks for the voice, marches of downward chords join in, until the whole hyper-alive texture vanishes up into a counterpoint of camel bells. A second section—the dream sequence—starts with wide-oscillating flutes and slow contrapuntal streams, like currents in a sluggish river, of which the voice becomes one. Then, as the singer exactly repeats “O my nation,” intimations of the Spanish music lead up to the full-scale musical battle alla Flexa, after which destruction is graphically portrayed in the musical imagery and in the shredding of the Maya ostinato. There follows, as a separate movement, what is both elegy and hard awakening. Instruments partly echo the singer’s beautiful melody, as if trying to imitate it and not getting it quite right, until trumpets triumphantly take it over. Finally comes the singer’s rueful assurance that “ash feels no pain,” and the chilling of ember to ash in four final chords.
Suggested recording:
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Thomas Adès
EMI Classics B0000C17Q8
Texts to Adès America: A Prophecy
I. Mezzo-soprano
Oh my nation
Prepare
The people move as if in dreams
In his bed the governor weeps.
It is the end of all our ways.
Oh my nation
Prepare
They will come from the east
To break with a cross
Your gods, your fathers, your children.
Your cities will fall.
Your trees will be scaffolds,
They will rule from the backs of your fallen.
Prepare.
II. Mezzo-soprano
Burn, burn, burn
On earth we shall burn
We shall turn to ash
Drift across the land, over the mountains, out to sea.
Weep, weep, weep
But know this well:
Ash feels no pain.
Mezzo-soprano text: from the books of Chilam Balam (Mayan in English translation) including an adaptation by the composer of text from The Destruction of the Jaguar by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.
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