Trauma and Problem

“This just might be the great American opera of the 20th century”: despite the conditional tense, the emphasis of the sentence with which Brian C. Thompson ended his review of the second complete recording of John Adams’ opera NIXON IN CHINA under the baton of Marin Alsop cannot be overlooked. Was the critic courageously stating what he perceived as the audience’s consensus, or was he (for whatever reason) being excessively complimentary? Surely it is absurd to speculate whether this might be “the” great American opera of the 20^th century: art is not a sports competition, where winners are honoured in a grand finale on a rostrum. Still, the success of a production in the musical life of the USA, almost exclusively private and without state subsidies, is measured in performance numbers and revenue. NIXON IN CHINA, Adams’ debut as an opera composer in 1987, became a very successful opera, following initial mixed reactions, and has remained the most frequently performed among his seven musical theatre works, the most recent of them being a setting of Shakespeare’s eponymous drama ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, premiered in 2022. Thompson’s remark was certainly not referring to the commercial aspect, even if the history of opera in the United States cannot be separated from it. Instead, the sentence is imbued with the remnants of a trauma that has plagued US composers and music authors since the beginning of their national music history, a trauma elevated by Leonard Bernstein to a question of fate: the wish to write an American opera to stand as an equivalent and equal next to the European motherlode of exemplary works.

Rise and Glory

There is no 19^th-century opera written in the USA in the opera house canon. Only in 1910, three decades after its founding, did New York’s Metropolitan Opera first stage a work by an American composer, Frederic S. Converse’s PIPE OF DESIRE – and to be on the safe side, it was yoked to Leoncavallo’s veristic PAGLIACCI. Two years later, Horatio Parker’s MONA, the first evening-length American opera, was given its world premiere at the Met. Even though its creator (who was also the teacher of Charles Ives, a composer Adams reveres) adhered to a conservative, bourgeois style, the undertaking was a flop. The mere use of the English language was considered daring at the time – to say nothing of the specific sociolects which would and should have reflected the multicultural makeup of American society.

Thus, it took more than two more decades until an American opera premiered in 1935 managed to hold its own against the European repertoire at American opera houses, going on to become a world success under Cold War conditions: this was George Gershwin’s “folk opera” (as he himself called it) PORGY AND BESS, which became a classic despite – or perhaps even because of – the condition that it may only be sung by an all-Black ensemble to this day. Gershwin, however, had been highly successful as a composer of musicals, a genre offering an alternative to the imported European high culture propagated by the Met. It also encompasses the most well-known of all American musical theatre works, Leonard Bernstein’s WEST SIDE STORY of 1956. The fact that the German emigrant Kurt Weill wrote no less than eight major musical theatre works in the USA, which Bernstein and other American composers considered their models, is far less present in the consciousness of directors and opera houses to this day.

During the second half of the 20^th century, it was Philip Glass who became the first American composer to achieve an international breakthrough in the musical theatre field, and it was his opera trilogy created between 1976 and 1984 that did so, encompassing EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH (in collaboration with Robert Wilson), SATYAGRAHA and AKNATHEN. Ironically, all three operas had their world premieres at European opera houses: while this might have served to break the dominance of European musical theatre in the 20^th century on the continent of its origin, it also shed a light on the insecure institutional status of American opera in the USA. The aura surrounding the musical idiom and powerful imagery of these operas then and now is inextricably linked with the rise of musical minimalism and post-dramatic theatre and dance.

Post-Minimalism and Post-Modernism

John Adams’ musical socialization, which began with the American reception of Schoenberg and Stravinsky during his academic studies at Harvard University, was influenced significantly by minimalism after he moved to California. During his youth, Adams had absorbed all the music he encountered on records, in concerts and through his own musical practice: classical and romantic music in the school orchestra where he played clarinet, popular music from jazz (swing and big band) to the Beatles, and not least electronic music. In the wake of the worldwide attention paid to Glass’ and Steve Reich’s works, Adams stablished himself at the latest in 1985 with the orchestral work “Harmonielehre” as the leading proponent of (American) post-minimalism, together with the English composer and conductor Michael Nyman. Two years later, NIXON IN CHINA was his first work for the stage; it had been preceded by his collaboration in Los Angeles with the choreographer Lucinda Childs and the architect Frank O. Gehry on the ballet AVAILABLE LIGHT (1983), in which Adams had demonstrated his affinity to musical and dance theatre by creating a remarkable electronic score.

Adams made no secret of the ground-breaking importance that SATYAGRAHA especially had for him. In it, he saw reflected the special situation of composers in the second half of the 20^th century, who may draw upon all the styles developed throughout musical history, as well as new ones. The term and practice of post-minimalism are thereby part of a post-modernism that came to dominate Western culture since the 1970s, first in the field of architecture and then the other arts. To this day, it has polarized cultural theory: to some, it plunders history, destroying traditional standards; to others, it achieves a long-overdue democratization of the aesthetic sphere. Since this opens the door to accusations ranging from epigonality to plagiarism, it is therefore necessary to remind ourselves that it is not the content of an artistic concept that decides its success, but its implementation. In this regard, Adams’ treatment of pre-existing musical material is highly innovative and virtuosic, continuing the path of a creative eclecticism which Ives and Bernstein trod before him. Furthermore, the definition of “Americanism” in US-American music at the time NIXON IN CHINA was composed was subject to great change, ranging all the way to total rejection of this goal by composers themselves. Maximum approximation to European opera was followed in the 1930s by the demand – equally illusory and ideologically charged – for a national musical idiom that all Americans would understand equally, a demand replaced after World War II by a demand for the cultural hegemony of American music.

Summing up the ideological battles about the “true” identity and mission of American musical theatre in the 20^th century, it is unsurprising that the heterogeneity of the musical idiom of NIXON IN CHINA caused vehement discussions. Was this diversity the seal of Americanism, a triumph of an aesthetic democracy which Ives had anticipated and John Cage implemented, or was it a case of sinning, a watering-down of the original rigor and purity of minimalism with borrowings from Hollywood, musical and European operas from Mozart to Wagner? The controversy surrounding the following opera, THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER, on the other hand, was explicitly about its political content, which earned Adams and his collaborators Peter Sellars and Alice Goodman the accusation of latent antisemitism. Due to the incident this opera is based on, the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship “Achille Lauro” on October 7, 1985 by Palestinian terrorists and the murder of the Jewish-American hostage Leon Klinghoffer, this opera has a nightmarish topicality – yet at the moment, it is hard to imagine an opera house that would dare to present a new production.

“Zeitoper”*  and Timeless Opera

This, however, is not to say that NIXON IN CHINA has already sunk to a historical low. On the contrary, the opera allows us to check and doublecheck our image of a globalized world; the three creators of the opera – besides Adams, the director Peter Sellars, who contributed the original idea, and the librettist Alice Goodman – have often been accused of having painted an all-too idealized image of the two powers, the USA and China, and their representatives. Such facile criticism from today’s perspective should consider the historical and musicohistorical conditions under which these two operas as well as DOCTOR ATOMIC (2005) were written. All three operas, which in sum make up a trilogy similar to Glass’ operas, or perhaps – more adequately described – a triptych, share not only the joint authorship of the team Adams/Goodman/Sellars. (Goodman did end their collaboration over DOCTOR ATOMIC, but Sellars, who then wrote the libretto himself, used some of her material.) Another decisive factor is that they were all based on current topics of burning importance, tales that concerned the entire world, in principle.

In English, the genre is sometimes called “CNN Opera” – a term as pragmatic as it is slightly pejorative, and a term rejected by Adams. It refers to CNN, the first station in the world to feature only news, which began broadcasting in Atlanta in 1980. In the case of NIXON IN CHINA, the opera began with the idea the director Sellars suggested to his authors Adams and Goodman, a subject which enjoyed a media attention that could hardly be topped. Adams, who deplored Nixon, initially rejected the idea. In general, the advantage of a direct and robust public echo for such a choice of topic is countermanded by the disadvantage of a short artistic half-life. This aspect was already articulated by Kurt Weill, who, like other young composers of the Weimar Republic, wrote so-called “Zeitopern” focusing on daily, even banal subjects. Paul Hindemith and Marcellus Schiffer used their comic opera NEUES VOM TAGE (1929) to illustrate the manipulative power of the media over human feelings in a sarcastic, almost cynical manner. In NIXON IN CHINA, there is also a bizarre and humorous persiflage in the brilliant ensemble scene (with chorus) at the end of the first scene of Act I, when Nixon keeps repeating the word “news” incessantly, hysterical and stammering, intoxicated by his media fame, while the Chinese prime minister Chou En-lai tries in vain to be noticed at all (“News has a kind of mystery”).

Hindemith and Weill, of course, were trying to ennoble the “Zeitoper” by referring to Mozart, who had – in their eyes – transformed tales of daily life into universal truths about human life. Adams too (and Nyman even more ardently) professes himself as being of the Mozart school, here by sneaking in a casual but undeniable reference to the model at the very beginning. Nixon’s very first appearance – his answer to Chou’s question whether his flight was “smooth” – contains a melisma on the word “smoother”: it is a quote, only slightly altered, from Figaro’s famous aria addressing Cherubino in the first act of LE NOZZE DI FIGARO, “Non più andrai”. Tellingly, it is the melodic phrase setting the words “Narcisetto, Adocino d’amor” [little Narcissus, Adonis of love] in which this occurs. Nixon’s arrival in Beijing, awaited with such tension, depicting the immediate present on stage (without any pre-story), is catapulted into music history by means of the Mozart quote. This alienation happens (at least) once more, but now as an allusion to Wagner, when Adams conjures up the “magic fire” of DIE WALKÜRE in Act II at the Archimedean point when Pat Nixon steps into the action.

Politics and Myth

In musicals, the references to daily life was what drew audiences into the theatre from the very beginning: Broadway was not a moral institution, but served the purposes of entertainment, often employing the instrument of satirical exaggeration of social and political deficits. NIXON IN CHINA is not the first work created by American musical theatre about an American president. In 1931, the stage author George S. Kaufman (who would go on to write film scripts for the Marx Brothers), Ira Gershwin as the lyricist and his brother George enjoyed enormous success with the musical OF THEE I SING; the formula of the story about the campaign of the fictitious presidential candidate Wintergreen for votes (and love) followed the tried-and-true model of the satirical operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan. The same team had already come up with the previous musical STRIKE UP THE BAND (1927), which was also about politics: the USA declares war against Switzerland. The “Yankee Doodle rhythm” found there has a late echo in the foxtrot “The Chairman Dances”, sung and danced by Mao Zedong and his fourth wife Chiang Ch’ing, which attained great popularity in an orchestral version Adams extracted from the NIXON IN CHINA even before its premiere. It remains an open question whether Adams plays ironically with the clichés of musical exoticism or even sympathizes with them. The musical ambiguity may fit in with the surreal nature of the scene, and ultimately the opera as a whole, but it also prevents it from being categorized as a political opera, a genre to which Hartmann, Nono and Henze, for example, contributed important examples in the 20^th century. A comparison with SATYAGRAHA, however, also feels misplaced: conceived as a didactic piece about Gandhi’s life story and the effect of Tolstoy, Martin Luther King and Tagore, Glass’ music is marked from the beginning by a ceremonious and august tone, formulating a clear political and humanistic message of unshakable faith in the power of truth.

“Zeitopern”, musicals and many operettas may be considered “anti”-operas, as they destroy the pre-eminence of the myth inextricably linked to opera since its 17^th-century beginnings, which found its high point (for now) in Wagner’s musical dramas. Such a counter-movement already surfaced in the plethora of stories engendered by the French Revolution, all critical of their times. Mozart’s LE NOZZE DI FIGARO and Beethoven’s FIDELIO, two of the most famous works in opera history, resulted from these subjects, followed by the tendency in 19^th-century Grand Opéra to set to music historical subjects as thinly veiled references to the present political situation – suffice it to mention Meyerbeer’s LES HUGUENOTS. NIXON IN CHINA continues this line, but now as a spectacular attempt to merge current relevance and myth – or even force them together. The first spectacular aspect is the decision to put figures of public life that were real (and alive at the opera’s premiere, with the exception of Mao Zedong and his wife Chiang Ch’ing) on stage. The choice of the historical meeting – already historical in 1987 – between Nixon and Zedong puts world history on stage, and thereby inevitably the myths associated with the two superpowers. Goodman and Adams relativized the dimension of world history and its heroes by concentrating on the four main characters, the couples Nixon and Zedong-Ch’ing: the audience cannot be sure whether it is seeing representatives of competing political systems or persons of flesh and blood. This ambivalence is essential to the opera’s functioning, and is demonstrated perhaps most impressively by Adams and Goodman in the character of Chou En-lai, who delivers the opera’s closing monologue. The portrait of Henry Kissinger, on the other hand, appears insufficiently complex, reduced to a part-grotesque, part-demonic buffoon. When NIXON IN CHINA was presented at the Metropolitan Opera in 2011, Kissinger refused to attend, reportedly saying: “I believe I have a sense of humour. But it has its limits.”

Stage and Reality

The opera’s centrepiece, therefore, is a “play within the play”, a device for which André Gide coined the phrase “mis en abyme” in 1893, pinpointing the artificiality of the situation on stage, which epic and surreal theatre were invented to dissolve only a few years later. The action includes a ballet performance – choreographed for the world premiere in Houston by Mark Morris – given in honour of the Nixons. It threatens to spin out of control when Pat Nixon confuses stage and reality and exhorts her husband to save the imprisoned and tortured female ballerina-heroine from a henchman who seems the spitting image of the Secretary of State Kissinger, also part of the delegation. This ballet refers to a real work, the ballet-opera THE RED WOMEN’S BATALLION, created by a collective in 1964, one of eight model operas selected by Chiang Ch’ing to represent the political and aesthetic ideals of the Cultural Revolution. Adams refuses to write imitating or complicit music, instead confronting Pat Nixon’s real fear with the play-acted brutality of the interior narrative. Chronologically placed approximately in the middle of the work, this interweaving of two levels of action is the dramatic and sonic high point of the opera. It also offers an exemplary demonstration of Adams’ method of making infinitely inventive use of superimpositions of all kinds – harmonic, rhythmical and sonic-instrumental ones. This leads to dense textures, shot through on different levels with surprising shifts and disturbances, thereby reflecting the absurdity of the action which Alice Goodman depicted so artfully in her libretto. The purely instrumental beginning of the opera, which opens with a rising scale in church mode beginning on A and then harmonically and rhythmically synthetizes standstill and motion, has no need to fear comparison with the RHEINGOLD prelude regarding the refinement of its construction and suggestive power of its sound. The end of the opera is the exact opposite, with its ethereal rising scales in the strings, leading into a sonic no-man’s-land and merely suggesting an (almost inaudible) E-flat-major sphere as a final sound. This suspended, melancholy atmosphere is also reflected in Pat Nixon’s aria “This is prophetic” in Act II, which begins with a corresponding Es-flat-minor sound and turns into the opera’s emotional centre. Adams’ symbolic and highly differentiated use of key signatures is part of a tradition that ranges all the way from Wagner via Bartók, Berg and Britten to post-modernism.

Expectation and Disappointment

NIXON IN CHINA fulfils all the expectations of a traditional opera, yet disappoints them at the same time. The musicologist David Schwarz has pointed out that all the traditional ingredients – arias, duets, ensembles, choruses, instrumental interludes and even the occasional sound-painting – can be identified, but that the music has no real goal, amidst the unpredictable changing of atmospheres and techniques. Sometimes, the orchestra acts as if it were performing Wagner’s musical dramas, in darkly murmuring and “knowing” tones; then, with the appearance of a saxophone quartet and keyboards, it sounds naïve and saucy. The first act consists of three scenes, the second of two, the last of only one. This focusing enables Adams to dedicate himself extensively to the ensemble movements. So do the protagonists form the centre of attention after all, and is the music showing us that we are still dealing with people, as fallible and monstrous, as small-minded and megalomaniac as they may appear? The stylistic hybridity of NIXON IN CHINA, i.e. the fusion of minimalism and musical, operetta, Hollywood film scores and liberal borrowing from European opera history, countermand such an interpretation along the lines of individual psychology – as does the refusal to pass judgment on the political actions and actors depicted. The fact that the creators of NIXON IN CHINA did not resolve these contradictions, nor were they seeking to do so, constitutes the fascination of this opera – as does its appeal to keep examining them critically.

 

*Translator’s Note: Zeitoper, literally “opera of the time”, is the German term used for the 1920s operas of New Objectivity.

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag