Trivial things are not for me

Contemplating my life choices at Nixon in China

Nixon in China at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2024. Photo by Thomas Aurin.

The past few weeks have brought about multiple significant upheavals in my personal and professional life, some of which were desired and planned for, others of which were not. This week finds me discombobulated and out of step, but with some of the optimism that comes with looking down a newly open road.

This past week I spent in Berlin, wrapping up some job duties and saying goodbye to colleagues. I’m leaving a management-track job in favor of something more purely technical and analysis-heavy, and am looking forward to finding out how that suits me. The books I’ve been reading this month include Nabokov’s Despair, Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart, and John Ganz’s When The Clock Broke, all of which have suited my mood in different ways. Movie-wise, I’ve been sticking to my old comfort watches.

On the final evening of my trip, I went to the Deutsche Oper Berlin to see a production of Nixon in China, which has over time become one of my favorite operas (I wrote about it previously here). Going to the opera in Germany is a bit of a different beast from going in the USA. While New York City can support only one major opera company, Berlin has three, all with full seasons. And while most opera productions in the USA fall somewhere between old-fashioned costume-fests and modestly adventurous updates, many German opera stagings range from “heavily revisionist” to “baffling.”

When I worked for an opera company over a decade ago, the relationship between the creative powers and the audience sometimes seemed adversarial. Much of the audience wanted costume-fests, but the creative administration wanted to push boundaries. The first production I worked on was an imagining of an Aida that dispensed with all the Ancient Egypt dressing and relocated the action to a mid-century, vaguely Middle Eastern dictatorship. The triumphal march was replaced with a dream ballet that included dancing skeletons and a military massacre. On opening night there were boos; the customer service desk fielded angry patron calls for months. I fervently defended the production, which I found subversive, intelligent, and moving. And I felt some disdain for the people who mostly wanted to see repeats of the great classics: true connoisseurship, after all, sometimes means learning to value what is interesting over what is beautiful but bland. But for this Nixon in China I found myself in the opposite position.

This wasn’t my first rodeo with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which has a reputation for directorial excess; last year I saw both an unusual but very moving Fidelio and a gleefully bonkers Don Giovanni that incorporated golf balls, stationary bikes, and Mickey Mouse hats. Part of me loves when I feel like the director is trolling me, especially during something like Don Giovanni that I’ve seen at least five times and am likely to see five more.

But this production of Nixon in China was the first time I’ve seen an operatic production that displayed, in every moment, open contempt for the source material. It was conceived and executed by a collective named Hauen und Stechen (“Hitting and Stabbing”). Many opera productions attempt to fashion the crude, melodramatic storytelling of their original librettos into something smarter and more sophisticated; this production took a rich and contemplative work and labored, excruciatingly, to dumb it down.

Nixon mentioned that his party stopped in Hawaii on the way to China; therefore they were costumed in luaus. Pat Nixon, in “I don’t daydream and I don’t look back,” sings that she treats each day like Christmas — therefore she was costumed in a Mrs. Claus outfit and attended by the Grinch. No nod at all to the enigmatic and heartbreaking line, “trivial things are not for me.” Madame Mao’s aria about how when she appears the people hang (on her words) — accompanied by some noosed-up sparkly cowboys. There was fake blood, nudity, phallic symbols, a kick line. At every moment the stage was laden with miscellaneous Americana: Mount Rushmore, dancing hot dogs, Star Wars costumes (including Mao’s big entrance as Jabba the Hut), cowboys, and prizefighters. Very few things were recognizably Chinese (though some were German). The tone was mocking, contemptuous, and satirical throughout, without any discernable theatrical argument.

It felt righteous to defend subversive, non-traditional productions against conservatives; it was a bit less comfortable for me to be in the position of saying, “This seems to run counter to the meaning of the work” and “I don’t like seeing the things I love distorted and mocked,” sentiments not so different from those furious Aida patrons a long time ago. I think this production was bad, but perhaps I’m also getting older and more sentimental. Part of my disappointment was that Nixon in China isn’t performed very often and it’s unlikely I’ll have many chances to see it in the future. I’ve seen so many bad Don Giovannis that a Star Wars version could never rattle me; this one felt like a true missed opportunity, even a waste. Lacking both in aesthetic pleasure and intellectual depth, I’m just not sure who productions like this are for.

Even though I hated the production, I’m still glad I saw it. Sitting there in the dark, I did take some satisfaction in contemplating how fitting it felt. I am exactly the kind of person who would find herself in a packed and indifferently climate-controlled brutalist opera house watching The Chairman Dances performed by a trio of dancing shrimp, hating it while wanting to weep with exhaustion, exhilaration, disappointment, and hope. So many life choices led me to that avocado-upholstered theater seat! Let’s see where they take me next.