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Nixon in China
Jun. 18th, 2012 10:52Nixon in China. Opera by John Adams, libretto by Alice Goodman. Dir. Michael Cavanagh.
I went with my friend L, who does modern Chinese history, to see this at San Francisco Opera last Friday night. I really, really liked it; in some ways I think it is one of my favorite operas of all.
The plot, such as it is, concerns Nixon's epochal February 1972 visit to China, and along with Nixon the other main characters are Zhou Enlai, Nixon's wife Pat, Mao Zedong himself, his wife Jiang Qing, and that modern byword for pragmatism and power politics, Nixon's avowed right hand man, Henry Kissinger. The opera and the arias within it move generally from mock-heroic grandstanding to the more personal, ambiguous inner worlds of the characters, and I basically loved it from start to finish.
( There's an old Vulcan proverb: only Richard Nixon could go to China. )
Bonus unpopular opera opinion: I don't like Jun Kaneko productions. I just don't. They always look like cheap Mondrian knockoffs and I never find that that particular aesthetic adds anything to the opera I'm seeing. If I want Mondrian I will go to the freaking MOMA, not to the opera house.
I went with my friend L, who does modern Chinese history, to see this at San Francisco Opera last Friday night. I really, really liked it; in some ways I think it is one of my favorite operas of all.
The plot, such as it is, concerns Nixon's epochal February 1972 visit to China, and along with Nixon the other main characters are Zhou Enlai, Nixon's wife Pat, Mao Zedong himself, his wife Jiang Qing, and that modern byword for pragmatism and power politics, Nixon's avowed right hand man, Henry Kissinger. The opera and the arias within it move generally from mock-heroic grandstanding to the more personal, ambiguous inner worlds of the characters, and I basically loved it from start to finish.
( There's an old Vulcan proverb: only Richard Nixon could go to China. )Bonus unpopular opera opinion: I don't like Jun Kaneko productions. I just don't. They always look like cheap Mondrian knockoffs and I never find that that particular aesthetic adds anything to the opera I'm seeing. If I want Mondrian I will go to the freaking MOMA, not to the opera house.
