United States John Adams, Antony and Cleopatra: Soloists, Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra / John Adams (conductor). Metropolitan Opera, New York, 12.5.2025. (ES-S)
Almost six decades after Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra inaugurated the Metropolitan Opera’s new home at Lincoln Center, the company returns to the same tragedy in a radically different guise, presenting John Adams’s version – composed in 2022 with a libretto by the composer that adapts the original text and expands it ‘with supplementary passages from Plutarch, Virgil and other classical texts’.
This is John Adams’s first opera for which he has taken full responsibility for the libretto. Alice Goodman’s incisive texts for Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer remain a model in postwar opera, and Peter Sellars’s assemblages of historical and poetic sources for Doctor Atomic and El Niño gave Adams’s music space to both interrogate and transcend narrative. By contrast, the libretto here feels constrained, but the choice of Antony and Cleopatra may itself be partially to blame. Shakespeare’s play, sprawling and episodic, lacks the introspective soliloquies that give psychological depth to his other tragedies – soliloquies that also offer natural operatic anchoring points. While exploring the tension between history and private emotion in the Mediterranean world of the first century BC, the play hurtles from courtly intrigue to political realignment to romantic outburst with little room for reflection. Adams’s adaptation clings to this structure, compressing the language into brisk, rhythmically driven exchanges that often feel breathless. Characters react more than reflect, trapped in something resembling modern-life agitation, and emotional states are declared rather than developed. Dramatic events follow one another with relentless momentum, giving the score little space to draw out the tensions latent in the text.
Adams’s score bears the hallmarks of his mature style: rhythmically propulsive, harmonically restless yet never too daring, and meticulously orchestrated. It bristles with energy, layering strings, winds and brass in jagged ostinatos and shifting pulses that mirror the dramatic turbulence onstage. Adams, being a master of detail, crafts moments that stand apart. One of them is the combination of celesta, harp and timpani, creating an atmosphere of hushed unease during the announcement of Fulvia’s death. Another is the interlude before the Battle of Actium – one of the rare passages of pure orchestral music – strangely evocative of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Yet for all its technical command, the music mirrors the libretto’s architecture: constantly in motion, intricately worked, but too rarely shaped around inwardness or revelation. The absence of sufficient moments of contrast or emotional expansion – particularly in the opera’s first half – eventually begins to feel repetitive, exhausting rather than deepening the listeners’ attention. Conducting his own score, Adams maintained a taut grip on pacing and orchestral texture. The excellent Met Orchestra responded with clarity and precision.
As has become increasingly customary for the institution, the new production originated elsewhere: first staged at San Francisco Opera in 2022, this Antony and Cleopatra arrives at the Met with the full creative team reprising their roles. Flipping back and forth between Alexandria and Rome, Elkhanah Pulitzer’s staging reframes the opera not as a historical epic but as a study in mediated power and image construction. The production overlays 1930s Hollywood, Art Deco Egyptomania and fascist-era aesthetics onto the ancient world, drawing visual parallels between imperial spectacle and modern celebrity culture.
Constance Hoffman’s suggestive costume designs reinforce the metaphor. Cleopatra is styled as a hybrid of silent film diva, goddess and media icon. Antony, for his part, slips between roles – military leader, lover, public figure – wearing garments inspired by both ancient tunics and Hollywood-era masculine glamour. Caesar’s rise is charted through costume and gesture, progressing from tailored suits to full authoritarian regalia. The visual rhetoric becomes unmistakable: goose-stepping soldiers (in Annie-B Parson’s choreography) and staged public gestures evoke the rise of European fascism. If, for Shakespeare, Caesar (Octavius) is a disciplined and orderly figure, lacking warmth or empathy – a counterpoint to the romantic and tragic grandeur of Antony and Cleopatra’s doomed defiance – here he becomes a prototype of a nationalistic strongman.
This interest in visual symbols extends into the spatial and cinematic logic of the staging itself. Mimi Lien’s relatively sparse set – dominated by two monumental architectural forms that pivot like the blades of a camera aperture – frames each scene as if through a lens, while Bill Morrison’s grainy black-and-white video conjures both mythmaking and menace. At one point, an enormous screen portrait of Cleopatra in full regalia looms over the stage, evoking both Hollywood star machinery and the iconography of state propaganda. Ancient power and modern authoritarianism blur into a single mediated performance – distant, ritualized and hollowed of interior life.
The main draw of this Met premiere was the ensemble of singers, led by Julia Bullock and Gerald Finley, for whom the opera was originally conceived. Both bring presence, control and dramatic intelligence to their roles. Bullock’s Cleopatra is poised and volatile by turns, her timbre dark and centered in the middle range, with a sense of urgency and tonal brightness as the line ascends. Her diction is superb – each word delivered with clarity and shape – though the pacing and register occasionally push her voice toward tension at the top. Finley’s Antony is robust and emotionally frayed, increasingly inward-looking as the character unravels. He traces Antony’s unraveling with authority and nuance, managing to infuse even the more declamatory passages with psychological shading. The voice may no longer have quite the ring it once did, but his control and interpretive insight more than compensate. Together, they establish a credible dynamic of desire and frustration, but the opera offers them few opportunities for lyrical expansion or true intimacy.
Paul Appleby made a vivid impression as Caesar, bringing a clear, well-projected tenor and a sharply etched dramatic profile. His voice, bright and lean, suited the character’s crisp authority and ideological inflexibility. While not traditionally cast as a villain, Appleby leans into Caesar’s cold ambition with a vocal edge that cuts cleanly through the orchestral fabric, particularly in his public addresses. Among the supporting cast, Alfred Walker stood out as Enobarbus, Antony’s loyal lieutenant, offering a sonorous and centered bass-baritone that lent weight to a character torn between fidelity and disillusionment. Jarrett Ott, in his house debut as Agrippa, and Taylor Raven (Charmian) brought presence and clarity to their limited but theatrically important roles. Elizabeth DeShong’s Octavia, though underused, offered a few phrases of beautifully controlled legato that made one wish the part allowed for more.
Antony and Cleopatra marks the fifth Adams opera to reach the Met stage – an extraordinary commitment to a living composer. Yet for all its polish and control, this is not among his most compelling works. One looks ahead with hope that his next opera will restore tension and wonder.
Edward Sava-Segal
Production:
Production – Elkhanah Pulitzer
Set designer – Mimi Lien
Costume designer – Constance Hoffman
Lighting designer – David Finn
Projection designer – Bill Morrison
Choreographer – Annie-B Parson
Dramaturg – Lucia Scheckner
Chorus director – Tilman Michael
Cast:
Cleopatra – Julia Bullock
Charmian – Taylor Raven
Antony – Gerald Finley
Enobarbus – Alfred Walker
Caesar – Paul Appleby
Agrippa – Jarrett Ott
Octavia – Elizabeth DeShong
Iras – Eve Gigliotti
And it’s amplified. So how is it an opera??