Harmonielehre

John Adams’ “Harmonielehre”: David Robertson and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony

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American conductor David Robertson, who served as music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2018, is regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of the music of John Adams. He describes Adams’ music in cinematic terms: The main thing that you find in every single one of his pieces is that it is a journey through a landscape. And as you proceed, you see similar types of trees …

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John Adams’ “Harmonielehre” and the Ghosts of Late Romanticism

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A terrifying raw energy, released in thirty-nine unrelenting E minor hammer blows… So begins John Adams’ monumental 1985 symphony in three movements, Harmonielehre. This titanic opening statement, which Adams has equated to “a grinding of gears,” sprang from a strange and vivid dream. For Adams, it brought a sudden end to a “perplexing and deeply disturbing creative block” which had paralyzed him for eighteen months. In his autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, the composer writes, At what seemed like the absolute nadir …

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