Nixon in China
Nixon in China is an opera in three acts by John Adams with a libretto by Alice Goodman. Adams's first opera, it was inspired by U.S. president Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to the People's Republic of China. The work premiered at the Houston Grand Opera on October 22, 1987, in a production by Peter Sellars with choreography by Mark Morris. When Sellars approached Adams with the idea for the opera in 1983, Adams was initially reluctant, but eventually decided that the work could be a study in how myths come to be, and accepted the project. Goodman's libretto was the result of considerable research into Nixon's visit, though she disregarded most sources published after the 1972 trip.
For other uses, see Nixon in China (disambiguation).Nixon in China
English
To create the sounds he sought, Adams augmented the orchestra with a large saxophone section, additional percussion, and electronic synthesizer. Although sometimes described as minimalist, the score displays a variety of musical styles, embracing minimalism after the manner of Philip Glass alongside passages echoing 19th-century composers such as Wagner and Johann Strauss. With these ingredients, Adams mixes Stravinskian 20th-century neoclassicism, jazz references, and big band sounds reminiscent of Nixon's youth in the 1930s. The combination of these elements varies frequently, to reflect changes in the onstage action.
Following the 1987 premiere, the opera received mixed reviews; some critics dismissed the work, predicting it would soon vanish. However, it has been presented on many occasions since, in both Europe and North America, and has been recorded at least five times. In 2011, the opera received its Metropolitan Opera debut, a production based on the original sets, and in the same year was given an abstract production in Toronto by the Canadian Opera Company. Recent critical opinion has tended to recognize the work as a significant and lasting contribution to American opera.
Performance history[edit]
The work was a joint commission from the Houston Grand Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Netherlands Opera and the Washington Opera,[14] all of which planned to mount early productions of the opera.[12] Fearful that the work might be challenged as defamatory or not in the public domain, Houston Grand Opera obtained insurance to cover such an eventuality.[10] Before its stage premiere, the opera was presented in concert form in May 1987 in San Francisco, with intermission discussions led by Adams. According to the Los Angeles Times review, a number of audience members left as the work proceeded.[15]
Nixon in China formally premiered on the Brown Stage at the new Wortham Theater Center in Houston on October 22, 1987, with John DeMain conducting the Houston Grand Opera.[13] Former president Nixon was invited, and was sent a copy of the libretto; however, his staff indicated that he was unable to attend, due to illness and an impending publication deadline.[16] A Nixon representative later stated that the former president disliked seeing himself on television or other media, and had little interest in opera.[10] According to Adams, he was later told by former Nixon lawyer Leonard Garment that Nixon was highly interested in everything written about him, and so likely saw the Houston production when it was televised on PBS's Great Performances.[17]
The piece opened in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Music Critics Association, guaranteeing what the Houston Chronicle described as a "very discriminating audience".[18] Members of the association also attended meetings with the opera's production team.[18] When Carolann Page, originating Pat Nixon, waved to the audience in character as First Lady, many waved back at her.[19] Adams responded to complaints that the words were difficult to understand (no supertitles were provided) by indicating that it is not necessary that all the words be understood on first seeing an opera.[16] The audience's general reaction was expressed by what the Los Angeles Times termed "polite applause", the descent of the Spirit of '76 being the occasion for clapping from both the onstage chorus and from the viewers in the opera house.[20]
When the opera reached the Brooklyn Academy of Music, six weeks after the world premiere, there was again applause during the Spirit of '76's descent. Chou En-lai's toast, addressed by baritone Sanford Sylvan directly to the audience, brought what pianist and writer William R. Braun called "a shocked hush of chastened admiration".[4] The meditative Act 3 also brought silence, followed at its conclusion by a storm of applause.[4] On March 26, 1988, the work opened at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, where Nixon's emergence from the plane was again met with applause.[21]
After the opera's European premiere at the Muziektheater in Amsterdam in June 1988, it received its first German performance later that year at the Bielefeld Opera, in a production by John Dew with stage designs by Gottfried Pilz.[22] In the German production, Nixon and Mao were given putty noses in what the Los Angeles Times considered "a garish and heavy-handed satire".[10] Also in 1988 the opera received its United Kingdom premiere, at the Edinburgh International Festival in August.[23]
For the Los Angeles production in 1990, Sellars made revisions to darken the opera in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. The original production had not had an intermission between Acts 2 and 3; one was inserted, and Sellars authorized supertitles, which he had forbidden in Houston.[10] Adams conducted the original cast in the French premiere, at the Maison de la Culture de Bobigny, Paris, on December 14, 1991.[24] Thereafter, performances of the opera became relatively rare; writing in The New York Times in April 1996, Alex Ross speculated on why the work had, at that time, "dropped from sight".[25]
The London premiere of the opera took place in 2000, at the London Coliseum, with Sellars producing and Paul Daniel conducting the English National Opera (ENO).[26] A revival of this production was planned for the reopening of the renovated Coliseum in 2004, but delays in the refurbishment caused the revival to be postponed until 2006.[27] The ENO productions helped to revive interest in the work, and served as the basis of the Metropolitan Opera's 2011 production.[28] Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, had approached Adams in 2005 about staging his operas there. Gelb intended that Nixon in China be the first of such productions, but Adams chose Doctor Atomic to be the first Adams work to reach the Met.[29] However, Gelb maintained his interest in staging Nixon in China, which received its Metropolitan premiere on February 2, 2011.[30] The work received its BBC Proms debut at the Royal Albert Hall in London on September 5, 2012, although the second-act ballet was omitted.[31]
While a number of productions have used variations on the original staging, the February 2011 production by the Canadian Opera Company used an abstract setting revived from a 2004 production by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.[8] Alluding to Nixon's "News" aria, the omnipresence of television news was dramatized by set designer Allen Moyer by keeping a group of televisions onstage throughout much of the action, often showing scenes from the actual visit. Instead of an airplane descending in Act 1, a number of televisions descended showing an airplane in flight.[32]
Adams conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Los Angeles Master Chorale for performances of the opera at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2017 during a series of concerts celebrating his 70th birthday. This "musically and visually dazzling reimagining of the piece" [33] included Super 8mm home movies of the visit to China (shot by H. R. Haldeman, Dwight Chapin, and others) projected onto a giant screen with the appearance of a 1960s television set. In some scenes the historical footage was a backdrop that was artfully synchronized to the live cast in the foreground, in other scenes the actors were lit from behind the translucent screen appearing inside the TV, adding to the surreal experience. The props and other details were simple but effective, including the miniature souvenir program designed after Mao's Little Red Book.
Despite a recent proliferation of performances worldwide, the opera has not yet been shown in China.[8]
Houston Grand Opera is again producing the opera in 2017 on the 30th anniversary of the world premiere to mixed reviews.[34][35][36]
A new production was premiered at Staatsoper Stuttgart in April 2019.
Music[edit]
Nixon in China contains elements of minimalism. This musical style originated in the United States in the 1960s and is characterized by stasis and repetition in place of the melodic development associated with conventional music.[44] Although Adams is associated with minimalism, the composer's biographer, Sarah Cahill, asserts that of the composers classed as minimalists, Adams is "by far the most anchored in Western classical tradition".[45]
Timothy Johnson contends that Nixon in China goes beyond minimalism in important ways. Adams had been inspired, in developing his art, by minimalist composers such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, and this is reflected in the work by repetitive rhythmic patterns. However, the opera's complex harmonic structures are very different from the simpler ones in, for example, Glass's Einstein on the Beach, which Adams terms "mindlessly repetitive"; Johnson nevertheless considers the Glass opera an influence on Nixon in China.[46] As Glass's techniques did not allow Adams to accomplish what he wanted, he employed a system of constantly shifting metric organizational schemes to supplement the repeated rhythms in the opera. The music is marked by metrical dissonance, which occurs both for musical reasons and in response to the text of the opera.[47]
The New York Times critic Allan Kozinn writes that with Nixon in China, Adams had produced a score that is both "minimalist and eclectic ... In the orchestral interludes one hears references, both passing and lingering, to everything from Wagner to Gershwin and Philip Glass."[48] In reviewing the first recording of the work, Gramophone's critic discusses the mixture of styles and concludes that "minimalist the score emphatically is not".[49] Other commentators have evoked "neo-classical Stravinsky",[50] and concocted the term "Mahler-meets-minimalism", in attempts to pinpoint the opera's idiom.[51]
The opera is scored for an orchestra without bassoons, French horns, and tuba, but augmented by saxophones, pianos, and electronic synthesizer. The percussion section incorporates numerous special effects, including a wood block, sandpaper blocks, slapsticks and sleigh bells.[52] The work opens with an orchestral prelude of repetitive ascending phrases, after which a chorus of the Chinese military sings solemn couplets against a subdued instrumental background. This, writes Tommasini, creates "a hypnotic, quietly intense backdrop, pierced by fractured, brassy chords like some cosmic chorale", in a manner reminiscent of Philip Glass.[28] Tommasini contrasts this with the arrival of Nixon and his entourage, when the orchestra erupts with "big band bursts, rockish riffs and shards of fanfares: a heavy din of momentous pomp".[28] Gramophone's critic compares the sharply written exchanges between Nixon, Mao and Chou En-lai with the seemingly aimless wandering of the melodic lines in the more reflective sections of the work, concluding that the music best serves the libretto in passages of rapid dialogue.[49] Tommasini observes that Nixon's own vocal lines reflect the real-life president's personal awkwardness and social unease.[28][48]
The differences in perspective between East and West are set forth early in the first act, and underscored musically: while the Chinese of the chorus see the countryside as fields ready for harvest, the fruits of their labor and full of potential, the Nixons describe what they saw from the windows of the Spirit of '76 as a barren landscape. This gap is reflected in the music: the chorus for the workers is marked by what Johnson terms "a wide-ranging palette of harmonic colors", the Western perspective is shown by the "quick, descending, dismissive cadential gesture" which follows Nixon's description of his travels.[53]
The second act opens with warm and reflective music culminating in Pat Nixon's tender aria "This is prophetic". The main focus of the act, however, is the Chinese revolutionary opera-ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, "a riot of clashing styles" according to Tommasini, reminiscent of agitprop theatre with added elements of Strauss waltzes, blasts of jazz and 1930s Stravinsky.[28][49] The internal opera is followed by a monologue, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung" in which Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife, rails against counterrevolutionary elements in full coloratura soprano mode that culminates in a high D, appropriate for a character who in real life was a former actress given to self-dramatization.[a] Critic Thomas May notes that, in the third act, her "pose as a power-hungry Queen of the Night gives way to wistful regret".[9] In this final, "surreal" act[55] the concluding thoughts of Chou En-lai are described by Tommasini as "deeply affecting".[28] The act incorporates a brief foxtrot episode, choreographed by Morris, illustrating Pat Nixon's memories of her youth in the 1930s.[55][b]
Critic Robert Stein identifies Adams's particular strengths in his orchestral writing as "motoring, brassy figures and sweetly reflective string and woodwind harmonies",[26] a view echoed by Gregory Carpenter in the liner notes to the 2009 Naxos recording of the opera. Carpenter pinpoints Adams's "uncanny talent for recognising the dramatic possibilities of continually repeating melodies, harmonies and rhythms", and his ability to change the mix of these elements to reflect the onstage action.[58] The feel of the Nixon era is recreated through popular music references;[59] Sellars has observed that some of the music associated with Nixon is derived from the big band sound of the late 1930s, when the Nixons fell in love.[3] Other commentators have noted Adams's limitations as a melodist,[49] and his reliance for long stretches on what critic Donal Henahan has described as "a prosaically chanted recitative style".[60] However, Robert Hugill, reviewing the 2006 English National Opera revival, found that the sometimes tedious "endless arpeggios" are often followed by gripping music which immediately re-engages the listener's interest.[61] This verdict contrasts with that of Davis after the original Houston performance; Davis commented that Adams's inexperience as an opera writer was evident in often "turgid instrumentation", and that at points where "the music must be the crucial and defining element ... Adams fails to do the job".[38]
Notes
Other sources