25 years have passed since John Adams’s Nixon in China premiered in Houston, having been commissioned by the then-general director of Houston Grand Opera, David Gockley. Mr. Gockley is now the general director of San Francisco Opera, and he has brought Nixon in China to its first performances at this company. Although a number of operatic luminaries consider it to be one of the finest operas of the 20th century, it would be OK with me if San Francisco waits another 25 years before doing it again.
The opera is based on Nixon’s historic trip to China Feb. 21-28, 1972. I can’t quite say “tells the story of” because there is little story line—i.e., no plot. The opera comprises a series of vignettes of the trip:
Act 1: Nixon’s arrival, meeting Chairman Mao, the banquet
Act 2: Pat Nixon’s visit to several venues, the ballet “The Red Detachment of Women”
Act 3: The principals reflect on their lives
As I mentioned in my review of the Met HD broadcast of Nixon in China, no one falls in love, no one dies, so what makes this an opera? Well, it does have many of the trappings of opera: a title reminiscent of such works as The Italian Girl in Algiers and Iphegenie in Tauride; it has a prelude, choruses, arias, and a ballet; and it has an ensemble finale of the sort that Mozart used frequently. But as for drama—well, there’s not much of that.
I can’t resist a couple of juicy quotes from contemporary reviews:
“Nixon in China works to redefine the concept of boredom.” (Donal Henahan)
“There are only three things wrong with Nixon in China. One, the libretto; two, the music; three, the direction. Outside of that, it's perfect.” (Marvin Kitman)
Nevertheless, given the level of critical acclaim for the opera, I tried my best to see what I (and others) are missing. I attended three lectures on the opera. I attended the dress rehearsal and today’s performance, and will attend another performance shortly. (I did not purchase a recording, nor did I read “John Adams’s Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives” by Timothy Johnson.)
The staging of the beginning of Act 1 was quite effective. At first we saw just a projection of a cloudy mist drifting by, then an image of Air Force 1 (a Boeing 707) emerged. The projection grew larger, and a single window was illuminated to show Nixon in his seat. The plane then banked to the right, and the viewpoint shifted to the head of the runway in Peking. The plane passed overhead and touched down, complete with puffs of smoke from the wheels. The projection changed again to show the nose of the plane swinging around to its final position, then the scrim was raised to reveal a cutout of the nose, wing, and an engine. A stairway was rolled up to the plane and Nixon descended to ground level and was greeted by Chou En-lai.
Act 1 scene 2 portrayed the meeting with Chairman Mao, who was old (78) and unstable on his feet. The set consisted of not much more than some straight-backed chairs and a round table. Scene 3 was the banquet in the Great Hall of the People, with a number of round tables with chairs, and waiters scurrying back and forth. There was also a very tall lectern, probably 12 feet in height, from which first Chou En-lai and then Nixon delivered short arias.
In Act 2 scene 1, Pat Nixon visited various points of interest: a glass factory, where she was presented with a small elephant figurine; a health clinic; a pig farm; a schoolyard; the Ming Tombs. Here the chorus carried placards on poles, with Chinese characters (no subtitles!) on one side and blank on the other side. When the blank sides were turned to the audience, images of glass elephants, injections, pigs, and schoolchildren were projected on them.
One of my lecturers mentioned the difficulty of the music: “there’s never more than 5 seconds where the music stays in the same time signature.” Well, that’s not something that I hear, but I grasped the difficulty of the pig farm scene. The chorus sang “pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig” very rapidly, and my mouth gets tired just thinking about it.
Act 2 scene 2 was the ballet The Red Detachment of Women. There were three or four rows of bleachers, with the principals sitting in the first row and the chorus behind them. In the background was a large hammer and sickle; the image separated at one point to show a large image of Chairman Mao. One lecturer pointed out that this was where the opera devolved into fantasy, “from which it never recovers.” Henry Kissinger left his seat to walk on stage and paw at the prima ballerina; he then ran off stage and returned dressed in the same costume as the landowner (?), and gave the order “whip her to death!” Ultimately Chiang Ch’ing (Madame Mao) held a pistol to his head and shot him; he wound up with his head resting against the prompter’s box. I was unable to make any sense of Kissinger’s involvement in the on-stage action, or of the Nixons’ sympathetic involvement with the same prima ballerina.
Act 3 opened with many of the props from the earlier acts on stage: the airport stairway, the 12-foot lectern, bicycles from Act 2 scene 1, chairs and serving tables from the banquet. Gradually they were cleared away and replaced by six triangular towers, with black-and-white photographs of the actual historic characters (Kissinger, Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-Tung, Chiang Ch’ing, Chou En-lai) on two sides of the triangle. There was no chorus in this act, just the principals wandering on and off stage, singing reminiscences of the Long March or Nixon’s WWII experience. Chou En-lai got the last word, wondering “whether what we did was good,” and the act closed with each principal standing at the base of his or her tower.
Our cast:
Chou En-lai: Chen-Ye Yuan
Richard Nixon: Brian Mulligan
Henry Kissinger: Patrick Carfizzi
Mao Tse-Tung: Simon O’Neill
Pat Nixon: Maria Kanyova
Chiang Ch’ing: Hye Jung Lee
Conductor: Lawrence Renes
Director: Michael Cavanagh
All of the singers had studied their characters well, and were proficient in imitating their mannerisms. The outstanding singer was Hye Jung Lee as Chiang Ch’ing; she had a “barn burner” of an aria in Act 2 scene 2, “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung,” which I have heard compared to the Queen of the Night’s arias in Die Zauberflöte. According to the composer’s directions, all of the principals were miked, but I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been told.
The orchestral music was quite fine. John Adams rejected the precepts of most “modern music” and wrote music that people could actually tolerate listening to. I heard many echoes of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (which I love); at one point in the ballet there is a section that sounded like very lush Richard Strauss or maybe even Rachmaninoff; the opera ended with music that reminded me of “Neptune the Mystic” from The Planets by Gustav Holst. And the vocal lines were lyrical, rather than jumping vast distances from one note to the next. The staging was decidedly superior to that seen earlier in the Met HD broadcast. But the libretto, such as it is, still leaves me wondering “Huh? What’s that about? What sense does that make? What’s the point?” I’ll give this one a gamma, and will go again, not so much because I want to see it again but rather I want to continue trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.
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