He is renowned for writing politically controversial operas, so what will Adams make of the new US president? On his 70th-birthday tour, the composer talks beatniks, bombs and Trumping Nixon

On the evening of Donald Trump’s inauguration as 45th president of the United States in Washington DC, one of his predecessors – the 37th, Richard Milhous Nixon – was featuring in his own show elsewhere. His historic 1972 handshake with Chairman Mao was being replayed yet again, at Houston Grand Opera, Texas, courtesy of the composer John Adams. With its pounding rhythms, lyricism and poetry, Nixon in China (1987) remains one of the most successful operas of the past half century. Whoever decided to fix its 30th-anniversary revival for inauguration night had a sharp sense of irony, or of doom. Two years after his visit to China, Nixon was impeached.

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Adams, whose 70th birthday this week will be celebrated with a concert at the Barbican, still has a special affection for Nixon in China. It was the work that made his name worldwide with a libretto by Alice Goodman. The brilliant, prophetic, bragging “News” aria – “It’s prime time in the USA, USA, USA” – leaves an indelible impression. It’s sung by the president soon after he and Mrs Nixon step out of Air Force One on to Chinese soil, full of hope and ignorance. “We live in an unsettled time,” the aria continues, turning to introspection, “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”

“The question I’m now being asked, and it’s almost corny,” Adams says, “is will I write a Trump opera? So far I’ve always said a categorical ‘no’.” What drew him to Nixon was his aspect of self-doubt. “Unlike JF Kennedy, say, he came from modest circumstances, a Quaker upbringing, a moral universe. Perversely, Nixon was destroyed by his own uncontrollable paranoia. Trump, however, is not interesting because he’s a sociopath. There’s no empathy. He’s a manipulator. We all have our paranoia. It’s how you handle it that counts. When Obama suspected people hated him he controlled himself and kept his eyes on the prize … ”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Houston Grand Opera’s production of Nixon in China. Photograph: Lynn Lane

Since Nixon in China, Adams has been unflinching in choice of operatic subject matter, always working with his long-term collaborator, the director Peter Sellars. Doctor Atomic (2005), which will be semi-staged at the Barbican in April, conducted by the composer, is about J Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb”. The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) is set aboard the Achille Lauro cruise liner, on which a Jewish passenger was killed by Palestinian hijackers.

Considered antisemitic and pro-Palestinian in some quarters, it caused a row that still flares each time the work is performed. The American musicologist Richard Taruskin attacked Adams for “romanticising terrorists”, calling for the opera to be banned. Taruskin’s colleague Robert Fink led the defence. Writing in advance of the New York Met’s controversial performance in 2014, the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross summed up: “That two intelligent commentators should reach such radically disparate conclusions points to an abiding problem at the heart of Klinghoffer: its pensive, ambivalent attitude toward present-day issues about which a great many people feel no ambivalence whatsoever.”

That multilayered handling of subject matter is typical of Adams. He has also set to music birth (El Niño, 2000), the crucifixion (The Gospel According to the Other Mary, 2013) and the aftermath of an earthquake (I Was Looking at the Ceiling Then I Saw the Sky, 1995). His post-9/11 work On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), for chorus and orchestra, includes a pre-recorded tape with the names of each of the Twin Towers dead recited, by friends and family, including children. It makes for uncomfortable listening but Adams wanted nothing easy, or merely elegiac.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ENO and Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Death of Klinghoffer at the London Coliseum in 2012. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

“I’ve chosen each subject because it engages me. I’m not an ivory tower person who doesn’t want to be sullied. If my work has value, and I don’t know how you value art apart from the technical aspects, it’s because it makes people feel. It’s what music does. I wince at being called a political composer, but I acknowledge that what politics means is power, and that could take any form ... Almost any dramatic vehicle – opera, novel, film – if it’s about power relationships, is political. It’s about a way of life being threatened.”

Born in New England in 1947 and educated at Harvard, Adams has lived most of his adult life in Berkeley, California. He came of age in 1968, a child of the beat generation who as a student lived off his wits and his abilities as a clarinettist, hoovering up any music he came across, from jazz to Beethoven and the minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass, whose work ignited his own, freer modes of expression.

Rock music was also a passion. As Adams recalls in his autobiography Hallelujah Junction, his youth was haunted by the spirit of Jack Kerouac, On the Road and Big Sur (he composed what he called a California “coastal trance” piece, The Dharma at Big Sur, with Kerouac in mind). It was a time of “all-night parties of pot, scotch whiskey and unfiltered Lucky Strikes; we bored like weevils through the harmonic changes and textual minutiae of albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bob Dylan, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, the Electric Flag, Country Joe and the Fish, the Beatles, the Doors and, of course, Jimi Hendrix”. Adams remembers falling asleep on friends’ floors only to “wake up in sweaty clothes, smelling gamey, my glasses bent out of shape, and find that I was already late for class”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Coastal trance … Big Sur Pacific coastline in California, a source of inspiration for Adams. Photograph: Alamy

Today, when we meet in a bleak room backstage at the Berlin Philharmonie, Adams is well-scrubbed, wirily healthy-looking and punctual. All this year he is on the road again, now as a septuagenarian, responding to orchestras and opera houses the world over who wish to mark his birthday. Simon Rattle, an old friend and advocate, has been conducting three Adams concerts with his Berlin Philharmonic. Adams, also busy as a conductor, has worked alongside with young players, coaching and giving talks.

“We [contemporary composers] always have to live with the assessment that what we do is irrelevant, or elite – that classical music is dead. It’s a depressing prognosis, like going to an oncologist and hearing nothing but bad news. One problem is that classical institutions have become so big. They have to spend so much of their time making marketing models or fundraising ... the whole concept of art as something new, stimulating, a provocation, is in danger of being lost. You cannot receive a deep, meaningful experience in a sound bite.” He expects audiences to prepare, to have some knowledge of, or at least interest in, the canon, to understand the context. “If you listen to my music, it might help to know jazz, or Stravinsky are embedded in there,” he says. Or, you might add, the show tunes of the 1940s which both his parents performed, his father a clarinettist, his mother a singer.

John Adams's Nixon in China: 'a genuinely contemporary opera.' From the archive, 25 october 1987 Read more

His next opera will be Girls of the Golden West, premiering in San Francisco in November. The idea came from Sellars, who has compiled the text. “We’d been kicking around various ideas. Peter had been thinking about Puccini’s La fanciulla del West” – based on David Belasco’s gold rush play, The Girl of the Golden West. “Peter got out the score and was appalled at how far from reality the story was. It’s a great tale but treated more like a Jack London novel, ignoring the desperate hopes of these people, all young, in their 20s and 30s – Mexicans, Chileans, European, black free slaves.” Adams compares the lure of California to Wagner’s Ring – a belief that you could go there and pick gold off the ground and make a fortune. “It wasn’t like that at all. It was fake news.”

Will Girls of the Golden West come to the UK? “I don’t know. English National Opera has done everything of mine, but things are so hard for them right now… ” He has had a close relationship with the British music scene, working as composer and conductor with the London Sinfonietta, the LSO, the BBCSO, and was recently named visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London. “I like British musicians, and their incredible skill and alacrity at learning new scores.” It’s widely rumoured that Adams will be a featured composer at the 2017 BBC Proms and before that there is the Barbican’s birthday event. The centrepiece will be his glorious, zany Grand Pianola Music, in which Beethoven goes head to head, as Adams puts it, with “Liberace cocktails”. It’s a bad-boy piece: “like a smirking truant with a dirty face, in need of a severe spanking”. No wonder it remains one his most popular works.

• John Adams at 70 is at the Barbican, London EC1, on 25 February. barbican.org.uk

• This article was amended on 17 February to reinstate the name of Adams’s Nixon in China/Klinghoffer librettist, Alice Goodman, which had been cut in the editing process.