The item I picked was John Adams’ opera Nixon in China, in a recent (April 18, 2012) telecast streamed worldwide from the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, who according to a Huffington Post article about the production by Amy Lee, was actually a victim of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Tse-Tung (or, as he’s referred to in the modern-day Pinyin transliteration of Chinese, Mao Zedong); according to Lee, at the age of four Chen saw his own mother gunned down on the street. This made him a rather odd choice to direct an opera in which Mao and his premier, Chou En-Lai, actually come off rather well. I’d heard of Nixon in China since its premiere at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987 — in a much more elaborate production than this one, by the way; in Houston Richard Nixon and his wife Pat emerged onto the action in a quite accurate stage set reproducing the fuselage of Air Force One, whereas in Paris an iron staircase gets pushed into position and they make their entrance walking down it. The conductor was Alexander Briger — not that he had much to do aside from keep everyone together, since Adams was still at the height of his Minimalist period when he composed Nixon in China and therefore most of the music consists of simple phrases repeated and repeated and repeated in pretty much the same tempo. (We got enough shots of Briger at work in the pit to note that he wasn’t using a baton, and when he conducted the overture — if you can call it that — he wasn’t even using his full hands, just his middle fingers pointed at the orchestra.) This style led one wag to joke, “What’s the most boring, repetitive opera of all time? Nixon in China, Nixon in China, Nixon in China, Nixon in China, Nixon in China.”
That’s being somewhat unfair to the piece, which does have its lyrical moments and a few big arias for the principals — the one Nixon sings when he gets off the plane about the importance of news and his consciousness of his place in history; the one at the start of act two (Adams broke the opera into three acts but this broadcast played acts two and three without a break) in which Pat Nixon reminisces about her past; and the big one later in the second act in which Mrs. Mao Tse-Tung … well, it’s something about her position of power and her pride in what she’s done with it, though so much of the text was unintelligible she could have been singing in Chinese, or just gargling, for all I could tell. As I noted in my comments on Adams’ later opera Doctor Atomic (a more interesting work than Nixon in China, mainly because its musical style is far more varied), he’s nowhere close to Benjamin Britten in his skill at setting an English text so English-speaking listeners can understand what’s being sung. Charles said Britten’s operas were less a fair point of comparison than the two, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, which Virgil Thomson composed to texts by Gertrude Stein (indeed, the libretto for The Mother of Us All was completed just before Stein’s death and was the last creative work of her life), though even there Thomson was a stronger composer than Adams in making sure Stein’s words were understood — whether or not you could make any sense out of what they were saying, you could at least hear what they were. The comparison is more apt than Charles realized because the text of Nixon in China was also written by a woman — Alice Goodman — and though it’s not quite as elliptical as Stein’s it does delve into a lot of philosophical matters that were almost certainly not on the minds (or the lips) of either Nixon or Mao when they famously met on their state visit in Peking (now called Beijing) in 1972.
Nixon in China is a
fascinating idea for an opera, and I suspect if I could see the original
production by Peter Sellars (which, belying his reputation, appears, judging
from the stills I’ve seen, to have been far more “realistic” than this one) I
might like it better. One thing director Chen did that was interesting was cast
genuinely Asian singers as the Chinese characters — tenor Alfred Kim as Mao,
coloratura soprano Sumi Jo as Madame Mao and baritone Kyung-Chin Kim as Chou En-Lai
— and in general they had to wear far less makeup than the singers playing the
Americans: baritone Franco Pomponi as Nixon, soprano June Anderson (a protégée
of Joan Sutherland and her husband, Richard Bonynge, who took over many of
Sutherland’s big roles at the Sydney Opera and the Met) as Pat Nixon, and bass
Peter Sidhom as Henry Kissinger — who comes off as the real villain of the
piece: he’s rude, obnoxious and (as Amy Lee politely described him)
“salacious,” and one who hadn’t lived through the Nixon years would never have the idea from this opera that back when they
were working together Kissinger was actually considered the voice of reason in
the Nixon administration. Indeed, Pomponi and Sidhom both look like their
makeup people stuck the stuff on their faces with a trowel in order to make
them resemble their real-life prototypes, and Pomponi’s movements when he comes
off the plane are such jerky versions of the actual Nixon’s famous gestures he
looks as if the “Imagineers” at Walt Disney World decided to follow up the
animatronic Abe Lincoln by doing an animatronic robot of Nixon. This is a real
pity because he sings really well, and the makeup and the jerky gestures just
distract from what he’s saying (or singing); in the film Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella looked far less like the real Nixon
but was much more convincing in the role.
I remember reading an interview with
John Adams in which he said that he had deliberately made the music for Richard
and Pat Nixon when they’re alone together sound like Glenn Miller because he
was at the top of the music world when they were dating, though the intimate
scene between them (one of the best parts of the score, dramatically if not
musically) just sounds like Adams stuck a few more saxophone parts onto his usual
style and thought that by doing so he’d make it sound like a big band. Madame
Mao’s big aria has become the most popular set piece from the work — apparently
a lot of modern-day sopranos use it as an audition piece — though to my mind
Pat Nixon’s aria seemed a lot more moving, not just because you can understand a lot more of the text (I
hadn’t realized how much the English subtitles the Met ran during Doctor
Atomic were a help — this broadcast, of
course, featured French subtitles
since it was a French production) but because Pat Nixon’s inner emotional life
is such a blank in terms of anything on the public record that Alice Goodman
was free to depict it pretty much however she wanted without fear of
contradiction. (I’ve noticed that throughout American history the First Ladies
seem to have divided into ones who actually took an active role in their
husbands’ administrations — Abigail Adams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy,
Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama — and the
ones who were just stay-at-home wives: Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Pat
Nixon, Laura Bush; and the distinction doesn’t seem to have anything to do with
their or their husbands’ politics: the idea you might have that because
Democrats are generally more sensitive to women’s concerns Democratic First
Ladies would be more “activist” than Republican ones doesn’t hold up.)
Nixon
in China is an interesting opera, one which
attempts to make more political, social and philosophical statements than it
actually does, and some of the ironies behind it are based on what happened to
the characters after the events of April 1972: Nixon was driven from office in
the Watergate scandal (though he returned to China after his resignation and
met Mao again, and reportedly Mao asked him, “Why did you let yourself get
hounded out of office by Congress? Why didn’t you just dissolve Congress and
declare martial law?” — and Nixon supposedly responded, “Gee, I never thought
of that”); Mao died in 1976; his widow fell from grace as part of the “Gang of
Four” that tried to continue the highly socialist agenda of the Cultural
Revolution; and with Mao dead China eventually took the capitalist road and the
repressive apparatus Mao and his government had created to keep the Communist Party
in power now began to be used to ensure the profits of Western companies who
outsourced their manufacturing to China by keeping workers from organizing
unions and demanding higher wages. By the 1980’s, when Adams, Goodman and
Sellars (who was a collaborator in terms of suggesting ideas for the libretto
and working out his production while Adams and Goodman were still writing) were
working out Nixon in China, some
of this was already history — certainly Mao’s warnings against letting China
become capitalist again just because it was now once again in a relationship
with the world’s leading capitalist power ring oddly true today now that China
has swung from one of the most egalitarian to one of the most inegalitarian societies on earth — and the irony that
Mao is running a dictatorship but claims to be representing “the people” while
Nixon is running a nominal democracy (while he was rigging the election process
to draw the weakest opponent possible and ensure his own election through a
variety of political frauds and repressions of which the Watergate burglary was
just the tip of the iceberg) but governing largely like a dictator is a
powerful, though unstressed, subtext of the piece. So are the philosophical
pretensions of both Nixon and Mao.
It’s harder to be objective about the
singing per se in a production of
Nixon in China than it is in a
standard-repertory opera, though I was amused that the two women were cast with
singers with far bigger international reputations than any of the males in the
cast, and June Anderson’s portrayal of Pat Nixon was the high point for me not
only because Anderson (despite some shakiness in her voice that wasn’t there a
quarter-century ago when she first emerged into stardom) was the best singer in
the cast but because her role was the most interesting and the music more
flattering to her voice than any of the others’. Say what you will about the
Minimalist musical style of Nixon in China, it at least is strongly rhythmic and has a sort of news-program theme
urgency about it: one really does
get the impression of important world-historical events being enacted before
your eyes — and the long ballet sequence in Act Two (has anyone else noticed
that Nixon in China is structured
like a 19th-century French grand opera, with a big opening chorus,
introduction arias for the principals, and a major ballet in the second act?)
has proved so popular that Adams extracted an instrumental suite from it,
called The Chairman Dances, which
has become one of his most popular symphonic works. I’m not sure how history
will view Nixon in China, or what
future generations will make of it once all the people who actually lived when
Nixon and Mao did are dead, but for me it’s an interesting piece even though my
feelings about Nixon in China are
inevitably bound up with my feelings about the real events it depicts!
