“I want them to understand that these were important people, just like the rest of the pantheon of American founders,” she said. Friday’s concert will feature Harmer and baritone John Moore, as well as an orchestra of area freelancers under the baton of former Boston Symphony Orchestra assistant conductor Sean Newhouse.Īsked what she wanted listeners to take away from hearing “My Dearest Friend,” Leonard mentioned two sides of the piece. From 46 of the letters, she eventually crafted a libretto of 14 numbers (plus an orchestral introduction).įinally, Leonard decided to produce the performance herself. She chose letters that detailed the protagonists’ bond, as well as those alluding to crucial moments in the founding of the United States.

Soon she was roaming through the large corpus of letters, more than 1,100, preserved by the Massachusetts Historical Society. From the start, she wanted the piece to cover the span of the protagonists’ lives rather than just a single period. Indeed, the project rapidly took over her life as she dug into the approximately 280 letters in the book. “I am determined to control events,” he said, “not be controlled by them.”

Yet in persevering to bring this serendipitous work to fruition, Leonard can perhaps take comfort in a few of John Adams’s own words. “We joke that if I had written about Thomas Jefferson, none of this would have happened,” said Leonard. The path from that first meeting to the premiere has been tortuous, with no small number of obstacles. More than five years after that fateful meeting, “My Dearest Friend,” a song cycle drawn from a selection of the hundreds of letters between Abigail and John, scored for soprano, baritone, and orchestra, is set to have its first performance on Friday at Jordan Hall. “And from then on,” Leonard added, “we never looked back.”

My dearest friend abigail adams