The Standard Repertoire: Nixon in China

This post is the sixth entry in an ongoing series about the operas of the standard repertoire. #1 was Eugene Onegin, #2 was La bohème, #3 was The Marriage of Figaro, #4 was Faust, #5 was Rigoletto. For more, see all my posts tagged “opera.”

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Robert Orth as Richard Nixon and Maria Kanyova as Pat Nixon in the Canadian Opera Company production of Nixon in China, 2011.

I’ll get this out of the way: including Nixon in China in a series about the standard operatic repertoire is a bit of a stretch. It’s not performed with anywhere near the regularity of La Traviata or even, say, Jenufa. And the title almost sounds like a punchline: “Richard Nixon: The Opera!” But of the operas written in the past fifty years, I think it has a better chance than most of them of entering the repertoire. It’s just too good to exclude, and I say that with tremendous affection and love. And, if you are of a certain generation, it’s snuck into the culture in other ways: if you, like me, have played a lot of Civilization IV, you might recognize The Chairman Dances¹ as the music that accompanies the in-game Modern Era.²

A brief digression. The past few decades have seen, rightly, a big push to expand the operatic canon, partially for reasons of social justice but also for reasons of “relevance.” Producers of opera, hoping to make the case that opera still matters in Our Modern World, have introduced a series of “biopic” operas about (mostly American) figures from the 20th century they think people will care about, including Steve Jobs, Frida Kahlo, Charlie Parker, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Anna Nicole Smith, JFK, Harvey Milk, and Malcolm X. It’s too early to say which of these will have staying power — a few of them have already sunk, despite expensive productions at prestigious houses, but The Life and Times of Malcolm X seems to have legs — and I’ve always found it hard not to be cynical about them. I saw the Steve Jobs opera in Seattle a few years ago and found the experience very depressing. Opera seems to me to be powerfully unsuited to biography, especially compared to movies (which are themselves imperfect vehicles for this purpose). Opera is good at conveying feeling, not information: the words are necessarily limited and not always easy to make out; musical transcendence often requires slowness and repetition, which stymies swift dramatic action; plus, there are the ordinary limitations of live theater: conveying changing times and places with sets that need to be moved by stagehands and costumes that need to be changed into and out of gets tricky very fast, although creative solutions exist.

And perhaps I’m biased, but even most “traditional” operas about Great Men are dull, dull, dull. It would take a lot to induce me to sit through another Simon Boccanegra, Idomeneo, or La clemenza di Tito (I’ll make an exception for Boris Godunov). This even extends to mythology: the Wotan parts of the Ring Cycle are the most boring stretches by a wide margin. Good opera plots don’t focus on their characters’ achievements but rather let them slow down and surrender to feeling. And the best operas mostly aren’t about history — they’re far more likely to be about women in love.

So what makes Nixon in China work where other operas of its kind don’t? Firstly, it’s not biographical. But also, it doesn’t actually try to say much about the historical significance of the events it depicts, but instead shows its characters (with the pointed exception of Henry Kissinger) in various states of reverie, ambivalence, and yearning. And it’s full of great lines: the libretto by Alice Goodman has received the literary stamp of approval in the form of a printed edition by NYRB Classics, titled History is our Mother (one of Nixon’s lines from the opera).

Nixon in China premiered in 1987 at the Houston Grand Opera in a production by Peter Sellars, who was then coming off some “edgy” enfant-terrible stagings of Mozart classics, like a Figaro set in Trump Tower and a blaxploitation Don Giovanni. It was his idea to do an opera about Nixon. Sellars, the composer John Adams, and Goodman agreed early on that the project wouldn’t be a winking satire, but that they would instead try to find the epic, poetic qualities of the moment and its figures. The result is a bit uncanny. Having any American politician from living memory sing in the epic mode sounds like it would tip into unintentional comedy very quickly, and it’s a real achievement that Adams and Goodman managed to strike the right balance between gravity and irony.

This was one of the first operas I worked on when I was the official blogger/tweeter for the Canadian Opera Company, in 2011. Our production featured the late Robert Orth, who features in most of the sound clips below. I was very proud of this promotional video set to “News Has a Kind of Mystery,” which I cut together from some of the archival footage that was featured in the on-stage television sets:

My then-colleague Gianna Wichelow also wrote this blog post about the makeup needed to transform Orth into Nixon.

Adams was in his minimalist period, and his music for this opera often repeats a motif or phrase over and over with subtle changes, a la Philip Glass. The music is, for the most part, rhythmic and propulsive. Near the opening is a rousing communist choral anthem, “The People are the Heroes Now.”

But his music is also varied, playful, and very tuneful. In the show’s first big solo aria, Richard Nixon finishes with pleasantries and small talk and then slips into a soliloquy, reveling in the knowledge that he’s on the news. “News has a kind of mystery,” he sings — more accurately, he sings: “News! News! News, news, news news, newsnewsnewsnewsnewsnews has a, has a, has a, has a kind of mystery!” Adams uses repetition everywhere, in unexpected rhythmic groupings, to convey exuberance, forcefulness, rumination, worry.

I would rank “News Has a Kind of Mystery” with some of the greatest arias of the repertoire. Most traditional arias allow for one emotion at a time (sometimes two, strictly delineated), but this one journeys through many moods without losing its character. First, we have Nixon’s happiness at his idea of his own achievement (“and though we spoke quietly, the eyes and ears of history caught every gesture, caught every word”) and exaggerated self-regard (“We came in peace for all mankind. I said: ‘we came in peace for all mankind,’ and I was put in mind of our Apollo astronauts”) followed by meditation on the war dead littering the oceans, then an almost childish excitement at being on television (“It’s prime time in the USA, it’s yesterday night, it’s yesterday night!”), then the descent into resentful paranoia (“the rats begin to chew the sheets”). I love “News Has a Kind of Mystery,” I love its careening propulsion, I love singing along to it, it delights me every time (apologies for Spotify paywalls here, it will help if you log in):

In the same mode is Pat Nixon’s aria from Act II, “I Don’t Daydream and I Don’t Look Back.” Again, Alice Goodman’s words, fragmented and repeated, give it a lot of its power. “I treat each day like Christmas… never have I cared for trivialities. Trivial things are not for me, Good Lord! Trivial things are not for me.”

Her big aria, “This is Prophetic,” is more straightforwardly poetic and lyrical (“Let the band play on and on, let the stand-up comedian finish his act, let Gypsy Rose kick off her high-heeled party shoes; let interested businessmen speculate further, let routine dull the edge of mortality.”)

I particularly love the piano sequence accompanying a dance between Chairman and Madame Mao, just preceding Pat Nixon’s last-act yearning: “Oh California, hold me close, hold me close.” Starting at 1:42 in this track:

Nixon in China had a production last year in Paris and is getting one this year in Berlin, which I hope to have the chance to see. I think that it will mostly age well, in no small part due to its ambivalence, its mysteriousness, and its willingness to be a little strange. It’s no easy thing to make an opera about Cold War geopolitics and to make it feel actually — in the best ways — operatic.

1. The Chairman Dances is a Nixon in China “outtake” and is usually performed as an orchestral piece. Most of the themes from the Dances can also be heard in the opera proper.

2. Choice comment from the linked YouTube video: “This song is perfect for capturing the feel of the end of a Civ IV game. Your millions of citizens scurrying like ants in their society of glass towers, perfect smiles and fusion-powered coffee makers, growing aware of the fact that they're three turns away from commiting nuclear suicide. It's as if they're saying, "look at this wonderous thing we've built, what have we done?""