Wagner According to John Adams

The August 25 issue of The New Yorker features a revealing autobiographical essay by John Adams. In it, Adams recounts his formative years as a struggling, avant-garde composer in San Francisco. Near the end of the article, he describes his "Ah-ha!" moment: a mountain drive listening to Götterdämmerung.

What Wagner cared about was making the intensity of his emotions palpable to the listener. His harmonies, restless and forever migrating toward a new tonal center, moved between tension and resolution in an uncanny way that constantly propelled the listener forward. The melodic leaps, always singable, gave shape and direction to the churning harmonies beneath. This was not just music about desire. It was desire itself, and the emotional and sensual power it possessed was inescapable. Wagner's music was grounded in enormous technical and intellectual sophistication, but its overriding effect was something that, I realized, had been absent from my avant-garde experiments: a sense of ravishment.