El Nino

John Adams Oratorio El Nino is a fascinating work unlike any of his other large scale vocal oriented works. His three operas draw upon story lines indigenous to the twentieth century. Despite the political intrigue that could potentially be generated from some of the story lines, Adams has taken an objective interpretive approach to the different stories, portraying the events as close to the way they occurred while minimizing his personal viewpoint of the situation.

In El Nino, Adams draws upon 2700 years of literature that deals with the Birth of Christ. Here, his texts range from the prophet Isaiah in the eight century BC to the 1960s and the Mexican author Rosario Castellanos. The texts for this work are in three different languages: Latin, Spanish, and English (as mentioned in the previous blog post, Adams actually learned the Spanish language while writing this work in order to be able to more effectively set the Spanish texts to Music.)

The outline of the events for this story follow the Biblical accounts in the four gospels. Divided into two parts, the oratorio lasts approximately two hours and incorporates orchestra, SATB chorus and children's chorus. The world premiere of El Nino took place at the Théâtre du Chatelet on December 15, 2000 in Paris. The American premiere occurred January 11, 2001 at Davies Hall, San Francisco. The following is a list of the intended instrumentation for performance:

Orchestra
2 flutes (1&2=picc)
2 oboes (2=Cor anglais)
2 clarinets (2=bass clar)
2 bassoons (2nd =contra)
3 horns
3 trombones
2 steel string guitars
1 harp
piano (=celesta)
keyboard sampler (=celesta)
3 percussion (glock, almglocken, crotales, chimes, gongs)
Strings
14 Violins
6 Violas
6 Cellos
4 Contrabasses


While the Messiah by Handel would be an obvious work which El Nino could be compared to, it has some significant textual differences. Handel used only texts within the accepted Biblical Canon (in the Bible, there are 66 books that are accepted as "canonical" with 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament). In Adams work, not only does he draw upon contemporary Mexican texts, but also drew upon the writings of Martin Luther and the New Testament Apocrypha (the New Testament Apocrypha were writings that were rejected by the early church fathers as being uninspired and are not included among the 27 books of the New Testament.)

In an interview about this work, Adams points out that he was brought up in the New England Unitarian tradition, and was influenced by the works of the transcendentalists, Emerson, and Thoreau. Because of this perspective of the upbringing, his interpretations of the events surrounding them tend to be less on the textual fidelity to the events outlined in the gospels, but more towards the moral teachings that they fostered. This, he points out, is due to a antisuperntatural worldview espoused by the above writers. They tended towards an interpretational scheme that allowed them to allegorize and moralize the content rather than accept everything at face value.