John Adams’ other operas are about history, twentieth-century history to be more exact, and the men at the center of explosive, polarizing events: Oppenheimer, Nixon, Klinghoffer. El Niño, his opera-oratorio conceived with Peter Sellars, is about story. On its basic level, it is a telling of the Christmas story, pieced together from various sources. But it is also about chains of influence, intertextuality, adaptation and juxtaposition.

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Sellars’s libretto is a collage of texts from biblical apocrypha to medieval mystery plays to twentieth-century Spanish-language poetry, to name a few. Soloists double or split their roles. Mary is played both by the soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, often at the same time; the baritone soloist is Joseph, Herod and God—sometimes morphing from one to another with bewildering speed.

El Niño also has more explicitly feminist messaging; Mary here stands in for all mothers, particularly mothers who bring up children under oppressive patriarchal regimes. Her complicated feelings about pregnancy, loss of bodily autonomy, and being made suddenly into a religious icon take up the majority of El Niño’s first act.

Similarly, Herod stands in for all repressive dictators. The massacre of the innocents, which caused Joseph and Mary to flee to Egypt, is understood through the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, which left hundreds of high school and university students dead after........

© Observer