12 February 2011: Adams, Nixon in China
Metropolitan Opera Live in HD. Conducted by the composer, John Adams. Production, Peter Sellars; set design, Adrianne Lobel; costumes, Dunya Ramicova; Lighting, James F. Ingalls; choreography, Mark Morris. Chiang Ch’ing, Kathleen Kim; Pat Nixon, Janis Kelly; Mao Tse-tung, Robert Brubaker; Chou En-lai, Russell Braun; Richard Nixon, James Maddelena; Henry Kissinger, Richard Paul Fink
I was prevented by the press of other work from writing up this opera until almost two weeks after the date. I’m sorry that some of the details of this intense experience have fled my mind. All the same, this is a remarkable work, in a remarkable production. It was somehow especially interesting that the composer of the opera was himself conducting it. One had the sense that the entire production was, so to speak, issuing from his mind. Everything seemed to be on track, in tune. And that is saying a good deal, considering the kind of music that Adams writes, and considering also the momentous historical event that the opera commemorates, and reexamines.
This is an historical opera, of course, but unlike most historical operas, which tend to generalize historical moments, this one begins on an exact date: Monday, 21 February 1972. On this fateful morning, at an airfield outside Peking, President Nixon and his entourage arrive and disembark. They are met by Premiere Chou En-lai and a small group of officials. The two shake hands. And so Nixon’s visit begins on a propitious note. An hour later, Nixon has a meeting with Chairman Mao, and there follows a great banquet and many toasts. Thus, the first of three acts. There are three scenes in that act, each the subject of full-stage setting on the great stage of the Metropolitan Opera. The second act is taken up with touring and entertainment. In the first scene Pat Nixon tours the Peking glass factory and other show places, the pride of the Chinese state. That evening, the Nixons attend a performance of a ballet devised by Mao’s wife, called The Red Detachment of Women. As the plot summary explains, “The ballet entwines ideological rectitude with Hollywood-style emotion.”
Here we are presented with the deep chasm that yawns between the Chinese and the Americans, who are surprisingly unsophisticated about what this ballet about a downtrodden peasant girl is supposed to mean. Pat Nixon, who appears unable to tell the difference between a stage play (or ballet) and real life, is shocked and horrified by the treatment the dancer receives, and they are drawn awkwardly and in an embarrassing way into the action itself. This is not exactly what the wife of Chairman Mao had in mind, and she sings, aggressively and offensively, “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung,” with full choral backing. This is a kind of high point, thematically speaking, of the opera, and the music truly pulls out all the stops. But we are left at the same time with an impression of the Nixons as insufficiently knowing, unsophi