About this Piece

With its inherent malleability, the concerto format has proved especially attractive to John Adams. Concertos figure conspicuously among his orchestral compositions, each one involving a unique approach to the genre’s fundamental scenario of a virtuoso protagonist—or, in the case of Absolute Jest, an ensemble of protagonists. 

Several of Adams’ most searching explorations of the form have emerged from his long partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which for more than two decades has served as a principal forum for his orchestral thinking. 

Even Adams’ concertos for the same instrument differ strikingly one from the other. After the Fall is the composer’s third full-scale concerto for solo piano, following Century Rolls (1996), which he wrote for Emanuel Ax, and Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, premiered by Yuja Wang under Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2019. 

After the Fall reflects a line of orchestral thinking that has taken shape over the course of Adams’ long association with the LA Phil, which dates back to the commission of Naive and Sentimental Music in 1998, a vast, symphony-length work that marked a turning point in his orchestral writing. 

In Los Angeles, Adams found an orchestra—and a city—that responded instinctively to his musical voice. Beginning with his tenure as Creative Chair in 2009, Adams became a central presence at the LA Phil—not only as a composer but also as an advocate, using platforms such as the Green Umbrella concert series to champion a wide range of younger composers and new music.

After the Fall was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, its dedicatee. Ólafsson had made a powerful impression on Adams when he performed Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? across Europe, with the composer himself on the podium. Ólafsson’s deep and thorough knowledge of Adams’ music was immediately apparent. “He genuinely loves my music and knows all of it, not just my concertos,” Adams observes. “When writing for a particular performer, that makes a difference.”

Adams was also drawn to Ólafsson’s interpretations of J.S. Bach, an affinity he alludes to directly in the new concerto’s score. “The extraordinary thing about him is that he has such a wide bandwidth of expressive possibility,” the composer says. “His Rameau and Bach and Mozart have incredible delicacy, and at the same time he can make the piano sound huge without banging it. I tried to incorporate that awareness into After the Fall.”

The title of the new concerto is a multilayered pun that implicitly raises questions of a 21st-century composer’s relationship with tradition. Adams recalls hearing the piano concerto No Such Spring by his son, Samuel Carl Adams. “I was so overwhelmed by it that I really didn’t think I could ever write another piano concerto,” Adams recalls. “So the title is partly a tip of the hat to Sam’s piece: There is no such spring after the fall.”

The double entendre of “fall”—as both the season and the “loss of Paradise”—led Adams to think of the iconic role Pierre Boulez (1925–2016) played in attempting to dictate the future of contemporary music. In an article for The New York Times in 2019 about Boulez’s recently published book, Music Lessons, Adams focused on a comment in which Boulez declared his dystopian view that “the era of avant-gardes and exploration being definitely over, what follows is the era of perpetual return, consolidation, citation.… An ideal or imaginary library provides us with a plethora of models, endless choices and means of exploitation.”

From Boulez’s strict modernist perspective, Adams says, the fall from grace for the present-day artist “is like some Miltonian catastrophe where the nobility of the avant-garde posture is surrendered in favor of some sort of sentimental clinging to archetypes from the past, to a retreat into nostalgia and quotation.” 

While the ideal of the avant-garde was “to push the limit on everything, whether in terms of comprehensibility, of loudness and softness, or of length or density,” Adams points out that he has long felt, when composing, that “there is an aspect in which so many of the fundamental tools of music—harmony, rhythm, timbre, etc.—have in a certain sense already been discovered. What to me is meaningful and touches people is music that does have roots in the past, but that sees the musical experience from a different point of view.” 

After the Fall, like all of Adams’ music, embraces the very things Boulez pronounced to be signs of the fall: “perpetual return, consolidation, citation.” But risks must still be taken—all the more so. In the culminating section of After the Fall, Adams stages the infiltration of the C-minor Prelude from Book I of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. The composer wryly notes that while at work on the piece, Ólafsson was engaged in an international tour comprising 88 performances of the Goldberg Variations: “Something of Bach was bound to leak into my piece, I guess.”  

Commentators will likely focus on the prolonged neo-Bach passage in After the Fall, but—as in Berg’s Violin Concerto—its relation to what has come before is essential to how its comfortingly familiar patterns are perceived. Adams aficionados might be reminded of the artistic dichotomy that he explored in Naive and Sentimental Music—between the search for unfiltered, direct expression and feeling the weight of history.

THE MUSIC

Adams embeds the outline of an archetypal three-movement design within a single large structure. Instead of breaks between sections, they meld together subtly, like the organic forms of Sibelius (a composer admired by Adams). After the Fall opens in a dreamy trance of densely textured strings spread over octaves, with harps, celesta, vibraphone, and tuned gongs producing delicate bell-like sounds. 

The solo piano enters almost at once, reshaping the mysterious chord sequence laid out into brittle, erratic rhythmic shapes that are characteristic of much of Adams’ piano writing here. Executing these with the required precision demands a special kind of virtuosity. 

The soloist remains active throughout, with few passages of respite. The tempo eventually slows as a descending theme is presented, like an angular falling Gymnopédie (but with continually shifting time signatures, beginning with 11/16 in alternation with 2/4). After an agitated central episode, the falling music returns, varied with ever-more-elaborate rhythmic subdivisions and textural accents. 

About two-thirds of the way through the concerto, a recurring quintuplet pattern in the woodwinds remolds itself into the 16th-note perpetuum mobile phrases of the Bach prelude. The solo piano placidly takes up the thread to traverse a new harmonic labyrinth. Rather than a straightforward quotation—this music is distinctly un-neoclassical-sounding—Adams makes the familiar strains feel like a destination that has always been there, buried in the layers of the music. At the same time, its persistence ushers in a sense of enigma. 

Originally, Adams planned a “more glamorous ending,” but he decided that “it just didn’t feel right. The ending of a piece is so important, because, in a sense, you’re really saying what it was about.” The tempo accelerates in a dramatically agitated coda, but the music suddenly wanes, leaving a lone harp to pluck out a quiet, bell-like alarm against sustained string chords—an unresolved echo of the beginning.

—Thomas May