User:Ekawolfram/Nixon in China (opera)

Nixon in China (1985-87) is an opera with music by the American composer John C. Adams and a libretto by Alice Goodman, about the visit of Richard Nixon to China in 1972, where he met with Mao Zedong and other Chinese officials.

The work was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Houston Grand Opera and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It premiered at the Houston Grand Opera, October 22, 1987 in a production by Peter Sellars with choreography by Mark Morris.

The opera focuses on the personalities and personal histories of the six key players, Nixon and his wife Pat, Jiang Qing (spelled "Chiang Ch'ing" in the libretto) and Chairman Mao ("Mao Zedong"), and the two close advisors to the two parties, Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai ("Chou En-lai"). It is composed of three acts. The first details the anticipation and arrival of the Nixon cortege and the first meeting and evening in China. The second act shifts focus to Pat Nixon, as she makes tours of rural China, including an encounter at a pig farm. The second scene includes a performance of a Communist propaganda play, in which first Pat Nixon, then her husband and then Jiang Qing, intercede in the performance. The last act chronicles the last night in China, in which the characters dance a foxtrot, their thoughts wandering to their own pasts.

Musically, the opera perhaps owes more influence to minimalism than any Asian styles. (John Adams adapted the foxtrot theme from the last act into a concert piece entitled "The Chairman Dances", published before the opera in 1985. In the intervening period, Adams switched publishers, hence the Foxtrot for Orchestra being published by G. Schirmer and the opera by Boosey & Hawkes.) The libretto, by contrast, was written completely in rhymed, metered couplets, reminiscent of poetic and theatrical styles native to China.

Scene One
The opera begins at Beijing Airport. A detachment of Chinese troops marches on to the stage and sings a 1930s Red Army song, The Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention. As the soldiers wait, Air Force One lands on the stage - the Nixons and Henry Kissinger disembark and are greeted by Premier Chou Enlai. As Nixon is introduced to various Chinese officials by Chou, he sings the first aria "News". In it, he presents himself as an actor in a great historic event being watched on the news back home in America, and he sings of his excitement and worries of the days to come.

Scene Two
Later, Richard Nixon and Kissinger visit Mao's study along with Chou. While Nixon attempts to present his vision of peace between America and China, Mao is not interested in policy work and leaves the matters to Chou. As Nixon tries to strike conversation with Mao, the latter continually defies the Americans' expectations. He is interested in Kissinger as a fellow philosopher, he renounces Confucius, he speaks in metaphors. The visit is not entirely a success, and the elderly Mao is soon worn out. Chou departs with Nixon and Kissinger.

Scene Three
On the first night of the visit, a great feast for the American delegation is held in the Great Hall of the People. The Nixons and Chou gradually relax in one another's company as good food and strong drink takes its effect. Chou rises to make a toast to the American delegation, full of fulsome praise and wishes for peaceful co-existence. Nixon responds in kind, congratulating the Chinese for their hospitality and recanting his previous opposition to China. The party continues with mutual compliments and toasting.

Scene One
Pat Nixon is being escorted to various showcases of contemporary Chinese life - a glass factory, a health centre, pig farm and a primary school. However, the language of Pat's Chinese guides is stilted and formal - they hint darkly of the repressive side of Chinese life that lies underneath the façade shown to foreign dignitaries. Pat sings an aria of her own hopes for the future, a peaceful future of modesty and good neighbourliness, a future based on the values of the American heartland. In this scene, Pat serves as a counter to the well-meaning Nixon and the sinister Kissinger. Coming from a humble upbringing, she represents the common Americans' desire for friendly coexistence even with a Communist China.

Scene Two
Later that night, the Nixons attend the Chinese opera, to see a ballet called The Red Detachment of Women. The piece is a simplistic display of politicised music-theatre, with the oppressed peasants of a tropical island saved from their brutal landlord by heroic women of the Red Army. The protagonist, Ching-hua, escapes enslavement and joins a communist militia.

However, somehow the main characters are drawn into the opera, each revealing their true nature. The Nixons (especially Pat) sympathize with the plight of Ching-hua, and give her comfort. The actor who plays Kissinger plays the brutal landlord with the same outfit, and this similarity does not escape the Nixons. Finally, when the militia is almost ready to take revenge on the landlord, Madame Mao forces Ching-hua to preempt the shooting of her pistol and exhorts the actors to kill the oppressors, which comes as a surprise to both the audience and the performers. Madame Mao then sings perhaps the most memorable aria of the opera, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung", in which she demonstrates her bloodstained vision of revolution for a communist utopia.

Act Three
On the Americans' final night in Beijing, it has become apparent to all that there will be no great breakthrough -- the Shanghai Communiqué is no more than words, a face-saving formula for the world's press to buy into. The main characters look back over their lives -- the Maos and the Nixons look back to the struggles of their early years together. The Nixons reminisce on Richard's time in the navy during WWII, and the Maos talk about their revolutionary years. Their lives and the meeting were difficult, but both are in the end inconclusive. Only Chou looks deeper, asking "how much of what we did was good?", before casting doubts aside and wearily carrying on with his work.

Conception
John Adams and Peter Sellars had the idea of an opera, but not traditional opera based on mythological or fantastical stories. Neither did they want a relatively inaccessible opera made by avant-garde composers, like Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach. They decided to have a traditionally heroic opera, with larger-than-life characters and sweeping motions of history. However, the choice of setting was the the then-recent event of Nixon's visit to China. Once they obtained Alice Goodman as the librettist, they started intense research on the actual historical events, scouring the memoirs and news clips and other records available, so that the opera would actually be based on the real history.

The entire opera was envisioned not as "CNN opera" as it sometimes has been called, but as an unflinching view of both the good and the bad of the Chinese and the Americans. The Nixon visit did eventually lead to normalized relations between the two nations, but at the time is was not much more than a publicity stunt. No real diplomatic agreements were made, but it was a terrific public relations stunt. Reflecting the reality, the first aria is Nixon singing about how the news back in America is broadcasting this event and the opera ends with nothing resolved for either side. On the Chinese side, the visit took place during the Cultural Revolution, a period of great turmoil. Under a Utopian promise of a clean slate for the future, countless people were being purged and China was in a constant mess. But to make a media-friendly visit, all those problems were simply swept under the rug. Accordingly, in the opera, Pat takes a tour of various Chinese sights and is delighted by the sights; however, there is an undercurrent of tension in the guides' singing.

The role of women was also planned to have more importance than in other operas. Of the main characters, two are women, and they are most definitely not simply accessories to the men. Pat was closely modeled after the real Pat Nixon; although she had a small public profile, in private she had a strong sense of justice, as compared to her political husband. Act II, scene I is dedicated entirely to her, and she has a chance to flesh out the person Pat Nixon as the character Pat Nixon in the opera, whereas Richard Nixon only has the "News" aria to himself; everything else is sung with other characters. In contrast, the other major woman, Madame Mao, had a tremendous public influence. Many of the terrors of the Cultural Revolution came under her orders, and accordingly her role in the opera was planned to be not inconsequential.

Quotes

 * Nixon: "News, news, news, news, news -- has a... has a...has a... has a kind of mystery has a...has a... has a kind of mystery."


 * Nixon: "At the edge of the Rubicon, men don't go fishing".


 * Nixon: "Who, who, who, who are our enemies? Who, who, who, who are our friends?"


 * Chiang Ch'ing: "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung who raised the weak above the strong. When I appear[,] the people hang upon my words".


 * Chou En-lai: "Your flight was smooth, I hope?" Nixon: "Oh, yes! Smoother than usual, I guess".


 * Chou En-lai: "How much of what we did was good?"


 * Mao: "Among the followers of Marx, the extreme left, the Doctrinaire tend to be fascist."


 * Mao: "Founders come first. Then profiteers."


 * Chorus: "The people are the heroes now. The behemoth pulls the peasant's plow."


 * Kissinger: "Premier, please, where's the toilet?"


 * Chiang Ch'ing: "We'll teach these motherfuckers how to dance."


 * Nixon: "History is our mother, we best do her honour this way." Mao: "History is a dirty sow: If we by chance escape her maw she overlies us." Nixon: "That's true, sure, and yet we still must seize the hour and seize the day."


 * Mao: "We no longer need Confucius. Let him rot."


 * Mao: "The world to come has come, is theirs. We cried 'Long live the Ancestors!' once, It's 'long live the living!' now."


 * Mao: "You want to bring your boys back home." Nixon: "What if we do? Is that a crime?" Mao: "Our armies do not go abroad. Why should they? We have all we need."

Reception
Nixon in China is often considered Adams' most significant work and one of the major operas of the 20th century. Even after the end of the Cold War that served as the opera's backdrop, both the music and the libretto stand out for their sophistication and accessibility.

The reputation of the opera was to a significant measure driven by the 1988 recording with the original cast and the Orchestra of St. Luke's conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch Records 79177), a strongly casted, vibrant performance by musicians with great personal commitment to the piece, not only among the soloists but also among the orchestra and chorus. Baritones Sanford Sylvan (Chou) and James Maddalena (Nixon) stand out for particularly fine performances.

Since the year 2000, several new productions of the opera have been staged and well received, including a noteworthy 2006 production by the Chicago Opera Theater. In 2005, a few pieces from Adams' opera were selected as part of an eight-hour soundtrack for the computer game "Sid Meier's Civilization IV", representing the modern era.