A Flowering Tree

A Flowering Tree was commissioned for the 2006 Vienna New Crowned Hope Festival to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Adams became involved at the behest of the director - and longtime friend/collaborator - Peter Sellars, who organized this visionary event and extended invitations to musicians and artists of various disciplines from around the world.

Given the festival's global sensibility, Adams took the framework of Mozart's The Magic Flute, a tale of physical and spiritual transformation, and created a new work with a parallel scenario by adapting ancient Indian folk tales and poetry. The libretto, co-written with Sellars, is sung in English, except for chorale passages written in Spanish especially for the Scola Cantorum de Caracas - "an extraordinary amateur chorus," as The New York Times has called them, based in Venezuela - who were brought over to perform at the premiere. Adams was making a deeper point with his bilingual text: "Using two languages is also a reaffirmation of my feeling that we are living in a time of global cultural awareness, with all its pain and wonder."