John Adams’s opera “A Flowering Tree” lingered with me long after the Mostly Mozart Festival presented its New York premiere this summer. Based on a 2,000-year-old South Indian folk tale about a girl, Kumudha, who rescues her impoverished family by transforming herself into a tree, the opera, over all, is mystical and enchanting, with a stylistically eclectic and often intense score.

Yet the opera drags, even though it is not that long: just over two hours, with a short intermission. The perception of time in music can be very subjective, and this is especially true in opera. There is the actual running time of an opera, and the psychological time - how long a work seems to the audience.

Take Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Including two generous intermissions, it is a nearly-six-hour immersion experience. Yet this transfixing work somehow needs to be that long. “Parsifal” is as much a mystical and musical ritual as it is an operatic drama. This mood is set at the start, in the opening orchestral prelude.

A ruminative melodic line in unison strings slowly emerges and calmly outlines motifs that will define the spiritual themes and characters of this mythological story, about a youth, Parsifal, who becomes the new leader of the Knights of the Grail in Gothic Spain. If you give yourself over to the sacred ritual element in “Parsifal,” the work will not have one wasted minute.

But most operas tell stories that require dramatic pacing and structure, like Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier,” which has a tricky blend of comedy and pathos. Some of my favorite operatic moments are in “Der Rosenkavalier.” But this show certainly drags at times. It could easily lose 20 minutes or more.

Mr. Adams’s closest creative colleague for his operas has been the director Peter Sellars, who has a great feeling for opera - and theater - as ritual. But in “A Flowering Tree,” with a libretto by Mr. Adams and Mr. Sellars, the mixture of storytelling and ritual seems askew. How else to explain the ponderous passages - When Mr. Adams puts his inventive musical mind to a moment that calls for ritualized power, “A Flowering Tree” is exhilarating, for example the scenes when Kumudha invokes her god and undergoes her transformation.

Even in the days of Handel, operas combined storytelling, mostly advanced through recitative, with summarizing da capo arias to convey the torments and emotions of the characters. In a way, every operatic aria has a quality of ritual. But this is why the great opera composers knew that if an aria was going to stop the show, to literally put the narrative on pause, then it had better have transfixing music and not run too long.

Mr. Adams is becoming a creature of the opera house, and his work has rightly been hailed as giving the genre an innovative jolt.

But a similarly gifted composer working in musical theater would have had directors and producers standing around during rehearsals shouting at him: “That song for the girl is too long. You’ve got to cut it by half!”

Mozart and Verdi had to deal with such people. And their operas are the better for it.


A rehearsal of “A Flowering Tree,” a new work by John Adams.