Nixon in China
Jun. 18th, 2012 10:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyNixon 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.
When we did the lesson on Chinese history in my Chinese class last semester we learned how to say "historical figure," and the Americans in the room, when asked, all said that Nixon wasn't a major historical figure, but our teachers (from China) said that to them he totally was, because it was after his visit and the normalization of U.S.-China relations that the Reform and Opening Movement (改革开封）really took off, a revolution that is still transforming the globe. I suspect that in the end Watergate--so large in the American psyche, whether you're a believer or a denier--will be a mere footnote to Nixon's global significance, which will result from his getting off that plane in Beijing and smiling forty years ago. The audience laughed a little when Tricky Dick threw up his hands in his trademark salute, but even in the first scene Nixon's aria descends into the paranoia that was his ultimate undoing.
So there's a double level of irony to the grandstanding of Nixon and his desperate thirst to make a mark on history in the opera's opening, because in the end all of his hopes came true. The audience's after-knowledge of what's to come lends a certain poignancy to Mao's melancholy prediction in the next scene, that they (the Americans) are the world to come, and it's already here, and he's right; it's impossible not to sympathize with him a little as he staggers around the stage, seeing the wave of the future through the crack in the dam, just as Zhou Enlai rightfully ends the opera by wondering whether the revolution was worth it and what it really accomplished. In the beginning the chorus sings that "The people are the heroes now," and at the end of Jiang Qing's aria the chorus brandishes copies of The Little Red Book and shouts "Joy!" but China now certainly isn't communist in any of the ways that count, except for the Party's relentless grip on power, and Jiang herself was very much left behind after Mao's death.
The music is an integral and fantastic part of the opera; at times the orchestra, propelled by a score that is very much indebted to Philip Glass, almost rises to the level of a seventh main character. I really like John Adams, and I really like Philip Glass, and I don't mind that the singers' lines and the orchestra's overlay each other without necessarily mixing very often. I particularly liked Adams' willingness to zig-zag into completely different musical styles at will and at need, and the fact that he added some very contemporary instruments, such as saxophones and a synthesizer, to the orchestra in the first place. If I could have one caveat it would be that I would like the score to have quoted The Red Detachment of Women more literally. I also really liked the libretto, which Alice Goodman wrote in rhymed couplets, many of them slant rhymes (such as the opera's last line, which has "grass/grace"). Opera is a very heightened art form, and for me one of the problems I have with English-language opera libretti (or opera presented in translation) is that trying to use everyday diction lowers the opera below the threshold of disbelief. But using poetry puts that necessary distance back in, and also I just really liked Goodman's words. She clearly did a lot of research, and then she made it, literally, sing.
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.
When we did the lesson on Chinese history in my Chinese class last semester we learned how to say "historical figure," and the Americans in the room, when asked, all said that Nixon wasn't a major historical figure, but our teachers (from China) said that to them he totally was, because it was after his visit and the normalization of U.S.-China relations that the Reform and Opening Movement (改革开封）really took off, a revolution that is still transforming the globe. I suspect that in the end Watergate--so large in the American psyche, whether you're a believer or a denier--will be a mere footnote to Nixon's global significance, which will result from his getting off that plane in Beijing and smiling forty years ago. The audience laughed a little when Tricky Dick threw up his hands in his trademark salute, but even in the first scene Nixon's aria descends into the paranoia that was his ultimate undoing.
So there's a double level of irony to the grandstanding of Nixon and his desperate thirst to make a mark on history in the opera's opening, because in the end all of his hopes came true. The audience's after-knowledge of what's to come lends a certain poignancy to Mao's melancholy prediction in the next scene, that they (the Americans) are the world to come, and it's already here, and he's right; it's impossible not to sympathize with him a little as he staggers around the stage, seeing the wave of the future through the crack in the dam, just as Zhou Enlai rightfully ends the opera by wondering whether the revolution was worth it and what it really accomplished. In the beginning the chorus sings that "The people are the heroes now," and at the end of Jiang Qing's aria the chorus brandishes copies of The Little Red Book and shouts "Joy!" but China now certainly isn't communist in any of the ways that count, except for the Party's relentless grip on power, and Jiang herself was very much left behind after Mao's death.
The music is an integral and fantastic part of the opera; at times the orchestra, propelled by a score that is very much indebted to Philip Glass, almost rises to the level of a seventh main character. I really like John Adams, and I really like Philip Glass, and I don't mind that the singers' lines and the orchestra's overlay each other without necessarily mixing very often. I particularly liked Adams' willingness to zig-zag into completely different musical styles at will and at need, and the fact that he added some very contemporary instruments, such as saxophones and a synthesizer, to the orchestra in the first place. If I could have one caveat it would be that I would like the score to have quoted The Red Detachment of Women more literally. I also really liked the libretto, which Alice Goodman wrote in rhymed couplets, many of them slant rhymes (such as the opera's last line, which has "grass/grace"). Opera is a very heightened art form, and for me one of the problems I have with English-language opera libretti (or opera presented in translation) is that trying to use everyday diction lowers the opera below the threshold of disbelief. But using poetry puts that necessary distance back in, and also I just really liked Goodman's words. She clearly did a lot of research, and then she made it, literally, sing.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-18 18:24 (UTC)It's a pretty great opera, but it's such a big and ambiguous subject that I think it's never going to wholly satisfy.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-18 18:34 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-18 18:51 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-18 19:04 (UTC)I…don't think you're wrong to intuit some kind of Puccini citation, but (and this may be an artifact of this production's staging) to me the secretaries are way more non-entities than Ping, Pang, and Pong were in Turandot. Which may be a commentary on something. But the other thing is that I know very little of Mao's last years, and the secretaries could be straight out of the historical record rather than a communist caricature? Which, I don't think they go terribly far down that road. What did you think of them?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-18 19:21 (UTC)My read on the echo is that it's a commentary more on Nixon's expectations than it is on the truth of Puccini. Adams is hinting at the popular Western image of China, the veil that Nixon and his entourage are finally ostensibly piercing. But even as Nixon meets these people as people, the cultural gap means that some part of him (and us) still reads ordinary bureaucrats as creatures out of Puccini. We can't help but exoticize.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-18 18:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-18 20:33 (UTC)But I had a really hard time following the libretto, and I think I'm slowly piecing together the bits that I didn't quite grok while watching. E.g. I knew about Watergate but never specifically associated Nixon with paranoia, so the whole internal turmoil of his character was a bit of a black box to me. Nor did I know that the wave was a trademark of his! (Me: "Is...that supposed to be some sort of commentary on politicians as performers?!")
Basically, I spent this opera not getting why the audience was laughing or laughing at bits that no one else was laughing at...
Questions I still have--maybe you can weigh in on them:
- Was all the Bible/Western canon-quoting from the Chinese characters supposed to be a comment on Mao's habit of quoting Western philosophers, some sort of signifier of China acting as a mirror to the U.S., or something else entirely?
- Were the three secretaries supposed to evoke the Furies?
- Was Kissinger stepping in the place of decadent aristocrat in the ballet supposed to allude to Western powers involvement in late Qing or was it something else entirely? Was Kissinger really that creepy? (As a personality I mean; I was aware of his creepy political/foreign policy positions but have no sense for him as a person.)
- Was Pat Nixon's compassion for the peasant woman supposed to be ironic? I thought so, but the program sort of implied that it was an honest moment of sincerity...
- Did Richard and Pat Nixon have marital problems?
- Did Richard Nixon really have some sort of war trauma that he never got over or was that just an extrapolation?
- Was the uniformity of the haircut/uniform in the chorus a deliberate comment on the U.S. perception of Communist China or just a design choice?
- Is it also deliberate that Zhou Enlai was the only Chinese character played by a Chinese person? (Normally, I would just chalk it up to casting pool issues, but this being SFO, I am left to wonder whether it was in part a deliberate choice.)
- How much of the repetition in the libretto was a parody of opera, a parody of political buzzwords, a parody of actual speech patterns, or all of the above?
I did think that there was added poignancy to the opera given how different modern China is now, and the bits of video showing that modern China as a backdrop to Mao's incoherent fixation on revolution was pretty great. But that was pretty much the only part of the opera I actually understood. --;
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-18 23:13 (UTC)- See above for an alternate theory on the secretaries. The Fates seems interesting too as an idea.
- I think Kissinger stepping in to the opera is a commentary on the Western powers in China more than anything else. I'm not personally aware of any allegations of Kissinger being a creeper sexually, just politically and morally.
- The impression I have received of Pat Nixon is that she was a bit off-beat at the best. I think she is being sincere at that point but they literally have no concept of what the ballet actually means (which is why Jiang Qing flips out in her aria, apparently). As for their marriage, the best commentary I ever heard on the image of it was the SNL skit from like 1978 when Dan Ackroyd is playing Nixon wandering the halls of the White House late at night just before he resigned (at one point he actually went out to the reflecting pool on the Mall and started ranting at people? Nixon had massive issues) saying to the portrait of JFK something along the lines of, "A president having sex in the White House! Nothing like that ever happened in this administration!" He was also in the war and I think his experiences as depicted were accurate, though I don't know to what extent the trauma lingered.
- My impression of the uniformity of the haircut/outfit is that this is both the Western perception of China at that time and also possibly historical reality, though it would take a historian of actual communist China to tell you to what extent the propaganda images matched reality.
- I have no idea about Zhou Enlai being played by a Chinese person. That seems odd to me too.
- I think the libretto is parodying political language explicitly. The other stuff I'm not sure about.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-19 16:16 (UTC)I think the reason that I personally didn't pick up on any allusion to Ping, Pang and Pong was that even as caricaturized as they were, Ping, Pang and Pong actually seem relatively fleshed out characters in that they have opinions and thoughts not in line with the authority. Whereas the secretaries parroted Mao to the point where it almost started to seem difficult to tell whether they were just repeating Mao or feeding him his lines. (Which is where I started to get the Furies/Fates association from.) But I'm certainly not discounting the idea, since the opera seemed to function in some part as a parody of opera in general.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-20 04:02 (UTC)