Stream: Nixon in China
Wednesday’s broadcast opera from the Met was the 2011 Nixon in China by John Adams. I watched it yesterday, five weeks after I’d seen Scottish Opera’s new production at the Festival Theatre. The two performances make a fascinating comparison and confirm my view that this is one of the major works of the twentieth century. The Metropolitan Opera is a conservative house, and 2011 marked the opera’s premiere in New York, twenty-four years after it opened in Houston, Texas, and long after it had been seen in other North American venues and in Europe. (It had its UK premiere at the 1988 Edinburgh Festival). Five of the original team in the Houston performances were also involved here: John Adams, the composer, who conducted, Peter Sellars, who directed, (and also directed the filming of the live stream) Mark Morris, the choreographer, the costume designer, and James Maddalena, who first played Nixon when he was 33 and has played him round the world, returned to the role (now aged 57)
In the intermission interviews, baritone Thomas Hampson (unusually un-gushy for a Met interlocutor!) cast interesting light on the conception of the work, and its subsequent re-incarnations. Sellars, as is well-known, first thought of the idea for the opera – Adams took a bit of persuading only a dozen years after Nixon’s resignation that he would be a suitable subject. When Hampson asked why Nixon, Sellars said he was interested in the idea that someone can turn around and change everything he’d ever been – that Nixon, a Cold Warrior was the President who went to China. By this stage in his career, Sellars had a history of controversial productions of classic opera, especially Mozart. Sellars, who maintained in 2011 his “enfant terrible” persona with spiky shock of hair and extravagant loose shirt, is, as one of the singers said, “a force of nature” and spoke enthusiastically about Adams’ music: how he can turn the emotion round in the course of a bar as Mozart does; how he includes tenderness, and seriousness but also some fun; how there’s dangerous intense stuff lurking below the surface.
Adams himself, in contrast to Sellars a debonnaire elder statesman, spoke about his different musical treatment of the different characters, giving Nixon staccato, repeated phrases. He saw Mao, he said, as an over-the-top-helden tenor! Maddalena said he’s enjoyed his long acquaintance with the role because it was always changing, mainly he joked, because “Peter can’t remember what he did the last time!”
A final gem in the interviews form Adrianne Lobel, the stage designer, who said she’d prepared for the first production by studying photographs from the 1972 news coverage. To her surprise she found less in the US weekly news magazines about the historic visit to China than she’d anticipated. In fact, most of them had Liza Minelli on their covers, as the film of Cabaret was released that week! (Not an unhistoric event in itself– high on my list of best 20th century musicals)
This Met production was billed as a new production, but I’m not sure how new it was. Credit is given in the programme notes to English National Opera for the use of their sets and costumes. They performed Nixon, to critical acclaim in 2000 and 2006, in what was described as a version of the original production. There’s a lot more on the performances of the opera over its thirty-two-year history in the excellent Wikipedia entry. Possibly because its collaborators were young when it opened, they have often been involved in later performances, and though there have been changes in presentation of characters (as Sellars, Adams and Maddalena confirmed) essentially this Met production stayed pretty close to the 1987 original.
The Scottish Opera production, though not the first to employ a more abstract staging, marked a clear move away from one of the opera’s original principles – that the characters should be presented as they were in February 1972, and there should be no reference to anyone’s subsequent history.
So the Met version begins with the aeroplane’s descent and the Nixons’ appearance on the steps (in 2011, as in its early performances, greeted with applause from the audience as well as the assembled stage dignitaries!). The people’s chorus (a sign of the times, multi-ethnic) gives way to Nixon’s reflections on the event’s significance “News, news, has a kind of mystery.” The scene changes during the aria to Richard and Pat’s room, a set which often acts as a retreat for the couple before and after public events.
The Scottish Opera production begins in an archive where multiple boxes are searched by the chorus who eventually set up a slide projector on which black and white images of the historic events are shown. A revolve stage was used in Edinburgh, for television sets on which a taxi-ing plane is shown, before the Nixons’ arrival, yes, down a flight of aircraft steps but these appear in a gap between the shelves at the back of the stage.
There’s no doubt that the New York performance benefits from the clarity of the “realistic” opening. Yet after this, I found the production rather clunky. Overall it continues to be more realistic than Scottish Opera’s, with a “real” jade elephant presented to Mrs Nixon, and a “real” stone statue of an elephant elaborately pulled onto the stage. (“The symbol of our party,” Pat sings delightedly, to audience laughter.) A back gauze with distant trees is used in outdoor scenes. But there’s an old-fashioned use of red velvet curtains as a backdrop, and a front curtain is drawn to denote the end of scenes. (Sellars, as film director of this performance uses a blackout after each Act – which I also found clumsy.) In contrast Scottish Opera’s use of the revolve and the flexible warehouse set, on which images are projected, provide a more fluid stage environment for an opera which moves from the realistic to the dream-like.
The stage movement of groups of the chorus and the main characters at the Met tends to be ponderous, with little use of stage machinery. The classroom with children in situ which slides on and off the stage during Pat Nixon’s tour in Act II is a good example of a device that could be used more often. Mark Morris is the choreographer, and his influence is felt on two occasions Firstly Mao’s three female secretaries who parrot his words in the Act I meeting, perform stylised movements, ranging from a type of semaphore (or bookies’ race-course tic-tac) to rapid swirling windmills when things get more heated. By this point Mao has joined in the arm movements, as if conducting. It’s a bizarre Sellars/Morris quirk which I’ve seen in other of their operas. It’s certainly eye-catching but I’m not sure what it means! In contrast the secretaries in the Scottish opera production are relatively static. In Act II Morris’s dance choreography for Madame Mao’s ballet is stunning. The female dancers are en pointe, and the shocking story told, I think, comes over more clearly than in Scottish Opera’s modern dance version. It culminates in the famous high stepping female soldiers which featured in early publicity shots.
Overall though, I prefer Scottish Opera’s version as the way forward for productions of this opera we approach half a century since the visit to China. For modern audiences, some context is required – on stage, not just from programme notes. Scottish Opera’s use of images is the masterstroke here. They’re largely old photographs, projected on facsimiles of old technology. We’re not flooded with images but these gradually increase in number based on hints in the libretto. For example, allusions to the Vietnam war, when Pat Nixon sings about soldiers. In the last act, Nixon’s and Mao’s reminiscences about their pasts are accompanied by appropriate pictures both from their past and from their future – Watergate, Nixon’s resignation and his coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes.
If I seem to be too critical of the Met production, I should say that musically it was pretty wonderful. Having the composer conduct the score was a bonus, and it is a marvellous and inventive score, in which, as Maddalena said, there is always more to discover. His performance is worth seeing. He knows the character inside out, and, shows that although at times pompous, he can be touching in his naïve excitement. Maddalena’s voice seemed frayed in the upper register, but perhaps he was having an off-night. Scottish soprano, Janis Kelly, who also sang the role at ENO, is terrific as Pat Nixon, pill-taking and nervous before her public events, holding a perfect smile during the ballet until she cracks. Robert Brubaker, as Mao, is stronger voiced than Scottish Opera’s Marc Le-Brocq in Act I, providing a different interpretation of the character – wily and opinionated, but pretending to being frail, compared with Le Brocq’s sick old man on the brink of senility. The best male voice is Canadian Richard Braun as Chou En-lai. He speaks at the interval of Chou’s knowledge of his impending death from pancreatic cancer. Braun’s actions allude to this as he struggles painfully to his bed in Act III. Kathleen Kim, as Madame Mao, mouths along with enthusiasm to the chorus’s words which accompany the Act II ballet before launching into her devastating aria, in which she is never still, pointing out passages in her Little Red Book to justify each successive act of torture.
Next week’s broadcasts are already on the Met’s website. You can also vote for operas to be chosen for future Friday night performances from an extensive list.
