Thomas Adès was born in London on 1 March 1971 to a highly artistic family: his mother, Dawn Adès, an art historian, is known for her work on surrealism, the Dada movement, and Latin American art. His father, Timothy Adès, is a poet and translator of French, German, and Spanish literature. This family history is one reason for the composer’s interest in French culture, and was a source of inspiration for some of his work, such as the story of the Spanish conquest of South America told in America – A Prophecy, or his opera adaptation of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.

Adès studied piano under Paul Berkowitz at Guildhall School of Music in London, and in 1989 was runner-up for the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year, but, frustrated at the prospect of being obliged to play unoriginal programs, he abandoned the idea of a career as a concert pianist. He began composing as a teenager while studying with Erika Fox at Guildhall School Junior, and pursued this path at Guildhall under Robert Saxton. He subsequently studied with Alexander Goehr at King’s College, Cambridge. Most of his training, however, came from reading and listening to musical scores, in particular while playing timbales in his time with the King’s College orchestra. By the time he graduated in 1992, he had already composed Five Eliot Landscapes, Chamber Symphony, Darknesse Visible, and Still Sorrowing. He performed his first piano recital in London on 11 January 1993, premiering Still Sorrowing in a performance that drew attention from the music world.

Between 1993 and 1995, Adès was composer-in-residence with the Hallé Orchestra. During that time, he composed his first opera, Powder Her Face, whose premiere on 1 July 1995 sent shock waves through the musical establishment: in a now-famous scene, the lead character, based on Margaret Campbell, the Duchess of Argyle, known as “the Dirty Duchess,” performs fellatio on a hotel waiter. The opera, which has been performed many times since, owes its success as much to the musical virtuosity and dramatic prowess of the score as it does to the scandalous nature of the libretto. Adès’ reputation grew with Asyla (1997), a song of formidable length (it is more than twenty minutes long) written for large orchestra, which garnered him a Grawemeyer Award.

Adès’ career continued its impressive trajectory, and he has won acclaim in nearly every genre but electronic music (he feels that electronic music technology becomes obsolete too quickly). His prizewinning work includes America – A Prophecy (1999) for mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra, Piano Quintet (2000), Polaris (2010)- a “voyage for orchestra”, Totentanz (2013) - a lyric composition for baritone, mezzo-soprano, and orchestra, and two operas: The Tempest (2004), based on the Shakespeare play, and an adaptation of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (2016). In addition, Adès has worked combining music and images in In Seven Days (2008), in collaboration with video artist Tal Rosner, and in Colette, a film he scored for director Wash Westmoreland in 2018.

He became artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts in 1999, a position he held until 2008. That same year, he signed an exclusive contract with EMI, which had already released multiple recordings of his work. Indeed, he is one of the rare composers of our time whose works are systematically recorded and released in the years following their premieres, including DVDs of his operas. In addition to his own music, he has also recorded the work of other composers, including a series of short piano pieces by (Castiglioni, Grieg, Stantchinsky, Kurtág, Janáček, Busoni, Stravinsky, Nancarrow) and Diary of One Who Disappeared by Janáček with Ian Bostridge. He has continued to perform regularly as a pianist, both solo and with chamber ensembles. His preferred collaborators include violinist Anthony Marwood, cellist Steven Isserlis, and tenor Ian Bostridge. He taught himself to conduct his own pieces before expanding his range to include Berlioz, Sibelius, Stravinsky (more as the composer of Rake’s Progress than of Rite of Spring), and Tippett. He has drawn inspiration from Couperin, Liszt (the later work), Janáček, Berg (notably Lulu), and Kurtág.

In his early career, Adès was often described as a successor to Britten. Since the beginning, however, his creative path has continued to surprise, an attitude summed up in a 2002 portrait by Phil Hale that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London: in it, the seated composer, dressed as a raffish dandy, strikes a contorted phose. The highly realistic style of the painting only serves to underscore its distance from reality, as if Adès had been transformed into an object hiding the true nature of its own substance.