San Francisco Opera has now commissioned or co-commissioned four of Adams’ five major operas and given the world premiere of the last three. Saturday night, San Francisco Opera, America’s second-oldest opera company after the Metropolitan in New York, began its second century with the world premiere of Adams’ fifth opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” thus cementing the most significant relationship between any opera company and composer in the last century. He was said to have proclaimed that his company would only perform “Nixon” over his dead body. In the audience was the then-head of San Francisco Opera, Terence McEwen, who slept through the first two scenes and ostentatiously walked out before the end of the first act. It was a concert reading of “Nixon in China,” with the singers and piano accompaniment. Thirty-five years ago, John Adams’ first opera, which changed the way opera would be made and matter in America, had its first public workshop performance in a small theater, the Herbst, next door to San Francisco Opera’s War Memorial Opera House.
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