Genius, Explained: Classical Music, by the Book

As a young man, John Harbison once plowed through every one of Dickens's novels. Soon after, he set about tackling all 37 of Shakespeare's plays; that second reading marathon led him to write his first opera, A Winter's Tale (which the Boston Modern Orchestra Project will perform on 3/20 at the New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall). With a Pulitzer and a MacArthur under his belt, the 70-year-old MIT professor usually is lauded for the expressive range and versatility of his compositions. But it's his incessant bookworming that makes him the model musician for our aggressively literary city.

Once a promising poet, Harbison writes his own librettos (a rarity), and he's adapted texts as diverse as the Bible, F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction, and Czeslaw Milosz's poetry. Unlike Philip Glass's minimalism, Harbison's style isn't forbiddingly conceptual; indeed, his lush soundscapes seem to tell a story even when wordless. And like most avid readers, he shares current literary obsessions with fellow bibliophiles—not too hard to find in a city that counts the Athenaeum library among its top social venues.

BACK STORY  Harbison has bookishness in the blood. The son of a Princeton historian and a French-lit scholar, he traces his catholic cultural interests to some childhood neighbors, postwar émigrés who taught at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study.

SYNTHESIS  Harbison casts a wide net to find the right musical voice for each adaptation. For example, his Jazz Age opera, The Great Gatsby, is heavily influenced by his time as a piano-playing bandleader. "To me, Thelonious Monk is as great a musician as Stravinsky."

FLUENCY  Adept in German, he learned his first Goethe poems through Schumann. He's humble about his proficiency in Italian, though—despite basing a work on (his own translation of) Eugenio Montale's poetry.

PATIENCE  Harbison doesn't choose literary sources; they choose him. "You want the text to be haunting you," he explains. Is there a white whale that's eluded his adaptation abilities? "I won't know it until it swims by."