Talk:Nixon in China/Archive 1

John Adams link
The John Adams link takes one to John Quincy Adams. John Adams composer appears not to have a page. The description comparing the opera to 40s music perplexes me. It sounds almost identical to the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten. What's big band about that? 71.205.216.122 (talk) 08:27, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm planning to add to that. I have a source that says that it's in there because it was the "in" music at the time Dick Nixon courted Pat Ryan.--Wehwalt (talk) 14:00, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Edit request on 23 July 2012
In the reception section, please change "In a more critical vein, The New York Times chief music critc Donal Henahan alluded to the" to: "In a more critical vein, The New York Times chief music critic Donal Henahan alluded to the" This is a minor typo change.

99.229.30.2 (talk) 01:08, 23 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes check.svg Done RudolfRed (talk) 01:49, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Article expansion
Some intensive editing of this article will take place over the next few weeks, as part of a project to develop it into a featured article worthy of this important opera. The editors initiating the project are Wehwalt and myself. We welcom any suggestions relating to the content of the expanded article; please bring your ideas here. As the first step I am posting a detailed commentary on the opera's music; I have for the time being removed the outline "Interpretation" section, though its content may well reappear as the reconstruction proceeds. Brianboulton (talk) 20:23, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, I am presently busy on other matters, but will be joining in the reconstruction within a week.--Wehwalt (talk) 21:21, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
 * My work on this article has been hindered by the loss of my broadband connection between 14th and 20th March, but this has been resolved and I should be able to resume work now. Brianboulton (talk) 13:58, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I am hoping to begin work on the article today.--Wehwalt (talk) 14:12, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I think it is not appropriate to include future performances in a performance HISTORY section. 84.192.235.232 (talk) 23:16, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
 * If they are definitively scheduled, I see no harm and some use, as the reader can get some benefit out of it.--Wehwalt (talk) 23:31, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm working on going over the article to fix a couple of minor typos and stuff. I found out about this through Wehwalt's talk page, but I really don't know anything about opera, so if I accidentally insert something incorrect, please feel free to revert. Most of the alterations I've made have been very minor though, so I don't think I have added anything incorrectly.-RHM22 (talk) 02:13, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your help.--Wehwalt (talk) 04:02, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
 * No problem, there wasn't really much to fix. This is a very unusual opera, or at least seems that way to someone who doesn't know about opera! To be honest, I didn't know that people still wrote operas.-RHM22 (talk) 12:32, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I personally think that very little has been written in the last eighty years, and certainly in the last half century, that will stand the test of time. But we'll see (some of it).  I was not terribly impressed with the music when I saw it two months ago, though the staging was wonderful and Maddalena even has Nixon's mannerisms.--Wehwalt (talk) 12:43, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Potential Page Edit—The Performance History section of the page might want to include the 2012 Eugene Opera production which largely reimagined the production and was less focused on recreating the history of the events on stage than illustrating the psychological journeys of the characters. For example, during the opening moments of the opera, Nixon was shown alone, dressing, preparing, and no plane landed. Pat Nixon did not wear a red dress, and there was little attempt to make the singer portraying Nixon appear as Nixon. In the third act of this production, rather than isolating the characters in their own separate universes, they were placed in the aftermath of the visit, among fallen palm trees and banquet tables. It left it intentionally very unclear as to who was speaking to whom. The production was directed by Sam Helfrich. 207.55.103.150 (talk) 05:13, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Interesting, thanks. I'll look at reviews of it, and see if it got coverage.--Wehwalt (talk) 09:37, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It was reviewed in OperaNews (link here: http://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2012/6/Reviews/EUGENE,_OR__Nixon_in_China.html). On a side note, Eugene's Opera company was the first company with a budget of under one million to undertake the opera. 207.55.103.150 (talk) 04:08, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

A Postmodern interpretation
Adams’ 1985-7 Nixon in China is the last significant masterpiece in music’s evanescence, an example of postmodernism’s Dionysian play, non-intellectual critique and incredulity towards overarching schemes and authority. Nixon’s 1972 visit to China is recent history to relate to closely and within personal memory, and as often with Glass and other minimalists the music is drenched in marvellous nostalgia from the great tonal repertory’s recession, augmented by eclectic influence from Stravinsky, Wagner, Holst and others. Moreover the on-off character of minimalism’s rapid, short motivic writing and frequent sense of wistfulness and loss is reflected in the rise of postmodern simulative binary digital technology and the loss of modern direct unitary analogue.

The conception of Nixon is surrealistic using a play within the play, a poetic couplet libretto after Wagner, iconoclastic repetition of music and words, and indeed famous people not normally singing to each other. Singing though captures the Dionysiac and the sense of being carried by deeper forces in life, as indeed in Greek tragedy. It also examples the Wagnerian total artwork in its integral blend of music, poetry, drama, imagery and dance.

The opening two acts have more clearly delineated statements and melodic sequences but in the third these are spliced and juxtaposed, alongside the music’s referencing of past major composers, such that they are taken less seriously, being treated nihilistically or hypercritically- both the closed sections and what emerges as the portentious tone of Nixon’s and Mao’s ideological stances are mocked. Indeed with such irreconcilable differences the only option is to transcend them to the protagonists’ own simple humanity and a state of play without attempting dialectical critique: the protagonists slide into personal reminiscences aligned with postmodern concern for subjective response.

While the communicative power of the simple harmonic idiom critiques intellectually contrived structures imposed from without, the drama’s corresponding reversion to simple ethical human behaviour and spirit critiques the high politics and belief in overarching ideology. Humanity trumps Cold War ideals of how to organize society particularly as played out in its Chinese atheist cultural setting.

The meeting with Mao indicates the antagonism and irreconcilability of capitalist and communist positions despite their common material values, positions that were to dissolve in postmodern pragmatism. By the final scene and its uniquely calculated anti-climax the attempt at dialectical critique and finding syntheses of opposites for a new ideology is completely abandoned on dramatic and musical levels, even becoming more chromatic and less melodic, art and alienated life having had their day.

Intellectually constructed subjective viewpoints are no route to underlying truth but with subject and object blended in the reciprocal relationship between Self and artwork, the absolute and its self-reference underlying both, an intersubjective, universalizable intuition is. Furthermore most of the best music is in the first half followed by a gradual anti-climax, disrupting linear development and reflective of reactionary postmodern equality: the three acts have the asymmetry of three, two and one scenes each.

The play within the play as with the examples in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet unexpectedly reveals deeper truths about the main play, with simple humanity negating ideology and high politics all as the music follows its own emerging musical, dramatic and human logic over pre-designed narrative schemes; seemingly trivial details in the drama and music have the core interest and significance.

Several play characters get drawn into and participate in the danced play after being shocked by it and the opera’s absolutely phenomenal aesthetic centre is where in reviving a brutalized girl a gun is offered but replaced by a glass of orange juice: spirituality issues from atheistic and materialistic Chinese society via art, the absolute in the relative. The music is influenced by the end of Wagner’s Die Walkure and its human values and reflects minimalism’s summary of the ascendance of tonality’s depth humanity over contrived harmonies’ barbarity and mindlessness; the girl is persuaded into the militia then later denounced while her spirit never changes. Moreover girls as soldiers dance using and trekking with guns, making bathetic ridicule of warfare via their beauty, delicacy and superb choreography.

The plays’ relations undermine the art-life dichotomy and art as counterbalance to life’s tensions, accompanied by the music’s repetition and juxtaposition of inwardly related non-linear ecstatic ideas; the play within the play is also an instance of repetition, static self-referentiality and its infinite fascination. The understandable tonality and expressive idiom as grounded in folk music is a movement towards life itself and away from high modernist reflectivity of life while the attempts to rationalize politically and architectonically hold up until the juice but disintegrate from there into the third act when there are only people and their vulnerability. This less memorable but carefully act parallels the musical and social decline in modernism, post-tonality and postmodernism. The reminiscences only meaningful on subjective levels are blended across the protagonists in intersubjective Dionysian unity, singing in counterpoint even though in separate rooms, away from crazed Apollonian principles.

In Nixon as with many great artworks all the initial participants were outstanding with extraordinary commitment, the work bringing out their best because they sensed its value and self-creation under independent aesthetic imperatives: composition, libretto, singing, conducting, playing, acting, choreography, dancing, direction are in the 1987 Houston production and subsequent recording superb and inexhaustibly watchable.

Also as with other films of enormous aesthetic interest in terms of social critique such as The Wicker Man and The Devils it has mysteriously never been officially released in full. The 2011 Metropolitan recording not to mention the 2008 Alsop recording, is on the finest levels a statement of infinite loss, horrific brainlessness, unspeakable evil and terminal disease, with the participants at one with the inhumanity and frenetic empty eyed psychosis of computer simulation; humanity is truly at an end point.

Sean McHugh (talk) 16:47, 19 August 2012 (UTC)


 * How do you propose to improve the article? -- AnonMoos (talk) 01:05, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

"Hang" pause
Great article! congrats. I'm curious about the L.A. Times article's suggestion that after the June 4, 1989 incident, Sellars added a pause after "the people hang" (upon my every word). In the original Nonsuch recording (1988), the pause after the word "hang" is already there. I didn't notice a difference in the 2011 Met Opera performance, and I doubt that Sellars would be altering Adams's music. Maybe P.S. is misremembering? I'd think it should be removed or at least qualified in the article. (I know the opera quite well). -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 04:08, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I think User:Brianboulton added that bit.  He was out yesterday but I'll drop a line at his talk.  I also saw the Met production, only time I've gone in the last ten years.--Wehwalt (talk) 11:01, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
 * No, I didn't add it; this is the relevant edit. Brianboulton (talk) 15:54, 26 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, don't I look silly. I have no objection to deleting that bit, since there seems to be doubt.--Wehwalt (talk) 15:56, 26 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I deleted but it's been reverted as OR, sigh, but the two scenes are musically identical in the 1987 production ( at 0:30) and in the 2011 production (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMQeJmKK2w] at 0:25) -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 15:07, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm OK with removing it, the example of the "pause" is not necessary for the article, and in dubious cases, I routinely keep information out. Verifiability doesn't override common sense.--Wehwalt (talk) 15:11, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the Timothy Johnson Nixon in China book discusses the passage on p. 142 but doesn't talk about any revision in subsequent performances. However, he does not cite the LA Times "Rethinking Nixon" article in the Bibliography. Nonetheless, the silence on this matter in a nearly 300 page book on the opera is telling. -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 20:31, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Do you think that no change was made, even to things other than "hang"?--Wehwalt (talk) 20:36, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * That book sounds worth getting.--Wehwalt (talk) 20:38, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * A: I'm not sure. Of the 5 citations of the L.A. article, four have nothing to do with revisions.  On the revisions, I know that in the 2011 Met production supertitles (or Met titles to be precise) were allowed and the Great Performances 1987 production had no subtitles, so I have no reason to doubt that it was first changed in the LA production.  The Met production had an intermission after both 1st and 2nd acts (the Boston production had one intermission in the middle of Act 2); it seems a minor detail in any case.  As far as darkening the opera overall--if it was done (possible) then it's been reversed in the Met production; to my mind it was no darker than the original (but that I can believe would be OR).  The biggest thing that the article currently lacks is a discussion of the Johnson book (Timothy A. Johnson, John Adams's Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011) ISBN 978-1-4094-2682-0) which discusses the music of the opera within a framework of Neo-Riemannian operations and symbolic gestures.  I can add a bit on that if people would like.  It's a pretty thorough book and while some pages are not profoundly revealing if you know the opera well, on a whole it's compelling, insightful, and a great read.  It brings in many citations of historical literature that illuminate passages in the opera.  (The way he uses old-style spellings for the Chinese characters in the opera and modern Romanization for the historical figures is brilliant)  -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 20:48, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * We wrote it before the book came out, looks like. I am somewhat reluctant to spend $100 for a copy but I will look into where I can find it on WorldCat.--Wehwalt (talk) 20:59, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Hm, a college library about five miles from my home. I'm away this week but possibly I can review it next week.--Wehwalt (talk) 21:02, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Not trying to criticize this FA, by any means. Just wanting to point out places where it could eventually become out of date if not addressed at some point. -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 22:29, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Updating is necessary. I'll get ahold of it a week from Tuesday, I think.--Wehwalt (talk) 01:12, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I've got it but I have not yet found time to work on the article.--Wehwalt (talk) 10:22, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 6 September 2012
Please add the following to the end of the "...in HD transmission to movie theaters worldwide on February 12, 2011.[28]" sentence in the Performance history section: "The work was performed for the first time at the BBC Proms in London on 5 September 2012."


 * Certainly, just as soon as a newspaper or the BBC reports upon the performance. I see that it is on the schedule, and also that it was semi-staged and conducted by Adams.  I saw your earlier phrasing, and please be aware that we do our best to keep up with things, but it is necessarily hit and miss.--Wehwalt (talk) 00:16, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I've added a sentence to that effect now.--Wehwalt (talk) 17:20, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Regular or electric pianos?
The orchestration page at boosey.com specifies two electric pianos (alongside the sampler), the printed score itself, however, calls for two "pianos". Does anybody know more? -- megA (talk) 12:39, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Ref/restoration
Question -- uncited language ("where the descent of the plane was again met with applause") was removed per wp:v, and then reverted and restored with a ref to a bio of James Maddalena. I can't see where in the bio it supports the statement that was re-added. Perhaps someone can point it out. --Epeefleche (talk) 12:58, 1 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Epeefleche, I assume you're talking specifically about the Washington DC performance? See this review from The Age, which is not currently used as a reference, but perhaps should be. I'd add it myself, but don't like monkeying with FAs and their super-fab-formatted refs. Voceditenore (talk) 14:10, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Infobox?
I wonder if it's time to revive the 2013 infobox? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:55, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Not until there is a broad consensus on their use in such articles.--Wehwalt (talk) 02:05, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Calling for "a broad consensus on their use in such articles" is stacking the deck a bit, isn't it? Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 02:38, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Carmen? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:06, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Adding The Rite of Spring to compare, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:37, 14 July 2015 (UTC)


 * No objections for this article, it seems, taken to article, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:09, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

Now a FA in Chinese Wikipedia
I have translated this article to Chinese Wikipedia here and promoted to FA status, and I want to thank User:Wehwalt for his effort to write this amazing article. --Jarodalien (talk) 08:26, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

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A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
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 * President Nixon meets with China's Communist Party Leader, Mao Tse- Tung, 02-29-1972 - NARA - 194759.tif