A scene from John Adams' Nixon in China (Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)
[Feb. 7, 2011]- It’s been 24 years since composer John Adams, director Peter Sellars, and librettist Alice Goodman (not to mention choreographer Mark Morris) first brought Nixon in China to life; not at Metropolitan Opera back then, of course, but to the Houston Opera.
So to see this work finally take flight at Lincoln Center, with Sellars make his very belated directorial debut at the Metropolitan Opera and with Adams’ Doctor Atomic first appearing at the Met barely more than two years ago, is a heartily welcome gesture. (Indeed, not only was Adams greeted with rapturous applause and shouts when he mounted the podium at the performance I attended, but when James Maddelena and Janis Kelley first appeared on stage as Richard and Pat Nixon, descending from their “Spirit of ’76” plane, they were greeted as warmly as conquering heroes before either had sung a note.)
As Sellars has pointed out in interviews, so much has happened since 1987, including the publishing of a revelatory book published by Mao’s doctor that chronicles the Chairman’s’ intrigues and, as Sellars put it to Playbill, “the nonstop orgies of murder, sex, and loneliness in the Forbidden City” and Madame Mao’s 1991 suicide. We also now experience Nixon’s visit as 21st-century observers, when lines such as “our plunge/Into the New York Stock Exchange/Will line some pockets here and there” feel very different indeed, given the current political and economic context of Sino-American relations.
Given that Maddelena has been singing Nixon for nearly a quarter century, it’s hard to think of an artist who is still better suited to this role, even as he now sings it in his fifties: there’s something about the way he inhabits this character’s awkwardness, his moments of both grandiosity and his grasping towards actual greatness that still makes him pitch-perfect.
The coloratura ferocity Adams provides for the soprano role of Chiang Ch’ing, Mao's wife, is a technical high-wire act. It is sung in this production by South Korean soprano Kathleen Kim, who swerved between being an enraged martinet and a sultry siren as the role demands. Mao's wife started out her adulthood as an actress, and Kim embraced Chiang’s public and private personae with great relish:
Less showy but perhaps even more intriguing was soprano Janis Kelly, who brought out the heretofore unknown inner pathos of Pat Nixon, a woman who seems as disoriented in having been thrust into public life as she is on this jet-lagged trip to Asia.
Henry Kissinger is not that much of a role vocally speaking, but bass-baritone Richard Paul Fink (who played Edward Teller in Doctor Atomic) brings a wonderful physicality to the National Security Advisor—the way Fink carried his neck and shoulders alone tells the audience so much about Kissinger. (Fink also has a turn as Kissinger doppelganger in Chiang Ch’ing’s staging of The Red Detachment of Women, a cartoon-cutout caricature complete with a menacing, twirling mustache painted on his upper lip.) A far meatier role goes to Mao, whom Adams casts as a heldentenor; the wonderful tenor Robert Brubaker bifurcates Mao's presence between a frail, elderly body and a strong, clear voice that is by turns philosophical, avaricious, and self-aggrandizing in the extreme.
There’s a great deal of out-and-out theater in Nixon, and Peter Sellars’ staging is full of insight and humor even in more simple visual jokes, such as when a group of camera-ready students are literally wheeled in and out of Pat Nixon’s immediate sightlines in a rolling Potemkin village.
Underneath the score’s luminosity is music that is at by turns dazzlingly propulsive and humidly languid, particularly in Adams’ evocations of the white big-band sounds that Nixon and his wife loved so much. Nixon is nothing short of a marathon for the pit instrumentalists, fiendishly difficult and stamina-sucking stuff: “a long ride in a fast machine,” as one of the Met musicians joked to me pre-performance.
Just as after the 2008 premiere of Adams’ Doctor Atomic at the Met, I came away literally lightheaded; there is something about one of the central preoccupations of Adams’ operatic output—the interior, psychological drama of individuals who are both creating and caught up in the web of history—that leaves one dizzy. Adams has long steadfastly denied that he and his collaborators create “CNN operas”; instead, in Nixon, he and Goodman delve into the interior lives of these real historical figures in ways that 24-hour news feeds never can. Can you imagine any contemporary politician music in front of the heat and light of TV cameras musing that “news has a kind of mystery”?:
Browse more editorial features here
by Anastasia Tsioulcas
Featured Albums
