John Adams’ El Niño: A Modern Christmas Message
The following is a guest post by Senior Music Specialist Kate Rivers.
As thoughts settle towards Christmas and—importantly for the Music Division—we focus on the multitude of sounds that celebrate the season, we are pleased to share manuscript sources for the opera-oratorio “El Niño,” an unusual take on the familiar Nativity story by American composer John Adams (b. 1947).
“El Niño” (The Christ Child), composed in 2000, is a Christmas oratorio (and now opera), albeit one with some twists. “I always wanted to write my own Messiah,” Adams said in an interview for the London Symphony in 2016, referring to Handel’s beloved masterpiece. Adams was among the generations of listeners who grew up loving annual performances of perhaps the most famous oratorio of them all. His love of Handel’s music, the familiar biblical texts, and the cherished nativity story at the root of “Messiah” all came to the front of his mind when, years later, he was commissioned to write a work marking the beginning of the new millennium. “The year 2000 seemed like an appropriate date to write a “Messiah” type piece,” said Adams.
True to traditional oratorio patterns, “El Niño” is a multi-movement work for large mixed chorus, including children’s voices and orchestra, and it is based on religious themes. In addition to conveying the traditional account of Jesus’s birth, as expected in a Christmas oratorio, “El Niño” also offers elements that push the audience to dimensions beyond the familiar biblical plane. For instance, in his autobiography “Hallelujah Junction,” Adams reveals that the birth of his two children held a “numinous power” (p.130) for him, and he touched back on those miraculous, highly personal events when composing “El Niño.”
The composer characterizes the oratorio as a work “about birth in general and about the Nativity in specific…As beautiful as the telling is in the New Testament, it is nevertheless an imagined secondhand experience, written by men (“Hallelujah Junction,” p. 240). Thus, perhaps the most novel element in “El Niño” appears when Adams invites the female point of view onto the narrator’s platform. The opera-oratorio’s text is guided by the words of remarkable female writers such as seventeenth-century Mexican poet and scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (ca. 1648-1695) and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), pseudonym of Chilean writer and diplomat Lucila y Alcayaga. These voices lend a distinctly feminine viewpoint to “El Niño.”
The composer credits the words of twentieth century Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) with providing the spiritual center of “El Niño” through her text “La anunciación” (The Annunciation). A Christmas sermon written by Martin Luther, verses from the Wakefield Plays (fifteenth century English mystery plays), and passages from the Bible, along with numerous other literary works, make up the opera-oratorio’s remaining text. Returning to his love for “Messiah,” Adams notes that Handel’s work “is about birth, optimism, and hope,” and he intended that his oratorio “El Niño” leave us with that same optimistic and affirming outlook (in “The Art of the Libretto,” Paris Review, April 24, 2024).
Our illustrations come from the John Adams Music Manuscripts and Papers, a rich and varied archival collection acquired in 2023, featuring the composer’s handwritten music scores, sketches, correspondence and a variety of other papers and documents created throughout his lifetime.
John Adams Music Manuscripts and Papers Finding Aid
John Adams Music Manuscripts and Papers Catalog Record
John Adams’s manuscripts for El Niño, and his other works, may be examined in the Performing Arts Reading Room of the Library of Congress.
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