Literary critic Ron Rosenbaum now thinks of John Adams’s 2005 work as “the Emperor’s New Opera.” He found that “the music and the sets couldn’t have been more effectively dramatic. But the libretto, the words [assembled by Peter Sellars] … They were pedestrian, speechifying, and painfully simplistic (when not embarrassingly schlocky as in the “love scenes”). […] I began to wonder whether opera follows different rules: Because words are sung, do they transcend any bombastic triviality, any wounding awfulness?”