I'm blacklisted, says opera maestro

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Composer John Adams accuses US of paranoia and says its security forces are following him

John Adams, one of the most revered living classical composers, has claimed that he is blacklisted in his native America and is being followed by the security services.

The 61-year-old musician has accused the United States of being in the grip of a political and moral panic and has complained that he is now grilled by airport immigration officers whenever he flies home because of his controversial reputation.

Adams made his name 20 years ago with his opera Nixon in China. Although it is now regarded as a landmark in modern music, the opera made headlines when it opened because it was heavily critical of the former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Then the content of The Death of Klinghoffer, Adams's 1991 opera about the Palestinian Liberation Front's 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, provoked a storm of protest for its treatment of the murder of a disabled Jewish passenger.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters yesterday, Adams said he was now 'blacklisted'. 'I can't check in at the airport now without my ID being taken and being grilled. You know, I'm on a homeland security list, probably because of having written The Death of Klinghoffer, so I'm perfectly aware that I, like many artists and many thoughtful people in the country, am being followed.'

The suggestion that Adams, who received a Pulitzer Prize for the choral work he wrote to commemorate the victims of 9/11, does not feel welcome in his own country will send shock waves through the musical world. The impact of his remarks will be amplified by the fact that his 2005 opera Doctor Atomic has its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera tomorrow, in a production directed by British film-maker Penny Woolcock.

During the interview, presenter Petroc Trelawny asked Adams if he felt that America was living through an age of paranoia that resembled the McCarthy era of the Fifties.

'Well it is, and of course Congress has continued to sign off on these Patriot Acts that continue to clip the wings of human rights,' said Adams, adding that poets, novelists and musicians with left-wing leanings are often watched, including, he said, the American composer Aaron Copland, who was 'hounded' all his life. 'I'm sure the FBI had a large file on him. So we artists assume that we are being followed.'

Adams - whose autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, is out this month - was born in New Hampshire in 1947. His mother was a Democratic volunteer in the crucial presidential election primaries held there every four years. 'She was a passionate liberal and I've always had a fascination with political life,' he said.

Adams went to Harvard in 1966, but abandoned his music studies for a factory job because he wanted to compose. His success was crowned following 9/11, when the New York Philharmonic invited him to compose an 'aural monument' to the victims of the terrorist attacks. His choral ode, On the Transmigration of Souls, was premiered by the orchestra in 2002.

However, Adams believes that the Republican administration manipulated the memory of the attacks. '9/11 was a very glamorous event,' he said. 'I'm using the term in a very ironic sense - 3,000 people being killed; it's a terrible tragedy, but in the scale of human tragedy it's very small.

'I think Americans went into what the novelist Philip Roth called "an orgy of narcissism" as a result of 9/11 - we kept replaying those images and kept re-reminding ourselves of what an indignation and how horrible and terrible that event was. And then, of course, we struck out by invading the wrong country.'