Nixon in China
Festival Theatre
Scottish Opera’s performance of Nixon in China is a resounding success. It has already been seen in Glasgow and has only two performances at the Festival Theatre this week.
Nixon in China had its British Premiere in Edinburgh at the 1988 Festival in the Playhouse. I was there, and remember most clearly the opening scene– with The Spirit of ‘76 taxi-ing onto the stage – and later Madame Mao’s coloratura aria “I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung”. The original staging was directed by Peter Sellars with choreography by Mark Morris. They, with John Adams, the composer, and Alice Goodman the librettist, were regarded as four of the US’s exciting young talents. The opera portrayed recent events. Nixon’s visit to China took place in 1972, just 15 years before the opera opened in Houston. In the meantime Nixon had been disgraced by Watergate, and had resigned in 1974 before he could be impeached. Yet Adams decided that this opera was to be a heroic work, and should in no way be seen as a satirical view of Nixon. (For a comparison we might imagine someone writing an opera in 2014 about Tony Blair’s role in the Good Friday agreement …) The libretto and music are deliberately formal. Alice Goodman recollects that it was referred to as the opera in rhyming couplets, even before it had a title. The orchestral and vocal forces are large, if not quite Wagnerian, and it lasts for over three hours.
The opera is certainly about the events - which happened 48 years ago this week - but more importantly for the composer and librettist it’s about character. Goodman says she focused in her research on the period before 1972, and read nothing, apart from the participants’ memoirs, which was written afterwards. There are six named characters, two men and a woman from each country: Richard Nixon, Pat Nixon, and Henry Kissinger; and Mao Tse-tung, his wife, Chiang Ch’ing, and the premier, Chou En-lai. In the original the singers looked so much like the real participants, that audiences gasped as they saw the Nixons descend from the plane. This production adopts a colour-blind approach to casting, and the very talented multi-national cast have appropriate costumes and in the case of the women, hair-styles, for the period, but their facial appearances are not altered.
African-American singer, Eric Greene, in his Scottish Opera debut, plays Nixon. A few surprised murmurs in the audience on his first appearance but by the first interval everyone is talking about his beautiful voice. All the lead singers have their voices discreetly amplified, and it works very well, improving the clarity of the words, and allowing the individual voices to be heard in the complex trios and quartets which are a feature of the opera. Each character reveals a public and a private side to their personalities.
Greene’s first aria, “News has a kind of mastery,” with its urgently repeated staccato “news” at the beginning, is a private soliloquy showing his excitement about the visit. He compares the event in its historic importance to the recent moon landing. Chou En-lai who meets the Nixons off the plane can scarcely interrupt him in his reverie. Nixon’s first encounter with Mao is stilted and gauche. Nixon wants to talk about policy, Mao about philosophy, and Nixon ties himself in knots in the discussion of symbolism. But at the formal banquet that night, Nixon redeems himself in an impressive speech, reflecting on the world of modern satellite technology in which “no-one is out of touch.” He praises the Chinese orchestra for playing so well the American music he loves, and refers to both leaders starting their own ”long march” towards a “single goal.” Like James Maddalena, Adams’ original Nixon, Greene has a lovely baritone, impressive both in the private and public sections. (Nixon’s own voice, though not mellifluous, could be persuasive. Although he famously “lost” the 1960 television debate to John F Kennedy because of his five o’clock shadow, people who listened to the debate on the radio reckoned Nixon was the clear winner.)
Pat Nixon, who sings little in Act I, begins Act II with her visit to a factory and hospital and a farm. Her dialogue with her guides is awkward, but in the aria “This is prophetic!” she blends public and private reflections on life in the USA, some cosy – the farmer putting on the light over the porch, but some disturbing. Her comments on the “Unknown Soldier” are accompanied by projected images of the dead of the Vietnam War. Swedish soprano, Julia Sporsen, completely inhabits the character of Pat Nixon, the quiet woman, who doesn’t enjoy publicity, but who understands the effects of political decisions on ordinary people.
This aria by Pat Nixon marks a shift in the opera from realistic depictions of the actual events to a more impressionistic, sometimes surreal take on them. In the next scene, Madame Mao’s choreographed ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, the surrealism takes over. The ballet itself is beautifully staged by seven dancers. Here I must confess a blind-spot where dance in opera is concerned – I’m always itching to get back to the main action! This ballet is important for the reaction of the characters. While Kissinger (who sings least of all the main singers) makes some lewd comments on the sadism of the male dancers, Pat intervenes to express her horror at the action, and then takes part with the dancers in what has by now become a nightmare sequence about tyranny in which Kissinger appears in the role of the tyrant.
In Act III Pat and Nixon reminisce about their early wartime married life when Nixon was based in the Pacific. In this lyrical scene, Nixon reveals his terror when under attack by the Japanese, “I said goodbye to you then… That was the time I should have died.” Pat lets him take over the reverie, increasingly cheerful as he recollects his camaraderie with the men, playing poker, and organizing a hamburger stall. James Naughtie’s programme note is titled “The President who perplexed people”, and in the opera he remains so to the end.
Before looking at the Chinese characters, I should say more about the staging and the music. Director John Fulljames’ staging takes a bit of getting used to. To be fair, little could compete with that plane arriving onstage, but the gloom of the opening only gradually reveals that this is an archive in which members of the chorus are scurrying around to find photographs. These are put on an old-fashioned projector to be shown on the back wall where towering industrial shelves of boxes produces a grid-like effect. The scene resembles not so much a library as the warehouse section of Ikea. For a few minutes Adams opening bars of rising scales seem wasted. And why is Mao’s coffin being carried across the stage? But shortly, the revolve stage (used effectively throughout the production) fills with televisions showing the descent of the plane, and the large well-drilled chorus sings the rhythmic “The people are the heroes now.” (If you leave the theatre whistling a tune, it’ll probably be that one!) No plane, but the shelving parts to reveal the steps down which the Americans descend.
The production continues to make much use of boxes, but the staging proves much more fluid than I at first feared. Pat Nixon’s gift of an elephant in Act II arrives in a box, and later the boxes are piled up to suggest the ancient stone elephant in the park. More importantly the grid structure of the shelving continues to be used throughout for the projection of historic images, some still photographs, deliberately placed on the screen – we can see the fingers of the operators – and some newsreel shots. Although the images in earlier scenes reflect Adams’ and Goodman’s intentions to keep the action in 1972, later shots show the deterioration of Nixon’s reputation after that date though images of the Vietnam War, Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and his coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes. This seems appropriate to a modern production of the opera, and acts as a pointed backdrop to the Act 3 duet between Nixon and Pat described above.
The music, in the capable hands of Portuguese conductor, Joana Carniero, is magnificent throughout. In her first appearance with Scottish Opera, she maintains the pacing and textures of the complex score with a large orchestra and big chorus. The music of course often has the pulse typical of minimalism, but Adams shows a great range of styles. Everyone will find their own descriptions of favourite moments. I detected a bit of ragtime and some Wagner, maybe allusions to Beethoven’s Fidelio quartet in the last act… The orchestra is in many ways conventional but contains a bank of saxophones and two pianos. Principal timpanist, Jo McDowall, produces interesting percussive effects including brushes. The voice amplification helps us to fully appreciate the power of the orchestra which can work with the singers without fear of drowning them out.
The opera’s most striking individual aria is Chiang Ch’ing’s coloratura “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung.” It ends Act III, partially redeeming the moral authority of the Chinese characters after the violence of the ballet. I saw Hye-Youn Lee, the Korean soprano who plays Chiang Ch’ing, stun the audience at Cardiff Singer of the World in 2011 when in glamorous evening gown and holding aloft her Little Red book she guaranteed her place in the final with her show-stopping performance of this aria. Tonight she’s dressed in a drab Mao suit and glasses, but her performance is just as stunning. The pianos with high woodwind provide some interesting accompaniment.
She’s the last of the Chinese characters to make an appearance, and the most formidable one! Her husband, Mao Tse-tung is as perplexing as Nixon. His first conversation with Nixon finds him reluctant to commit in private and enigmatic in his public speech. He’s obviously frail. He’s accompanied by a chorus of female secretaries which act as “backing group” when he sings. Is this leader of millions fully in control? The English tenor, Mark Le Brocq, sings beautifully, and emphasizes the frailty. In Act III, Mao is restored to full vigour in his duet with his wife. The Chinese couple recall their earlier life during the early Communist era. Unexpectedly perhaps the couple dance. This tender scene happens onstage at the same time as the Nixon’s duet. The resulting quartet of voices may not give us any final statement about the characters but provides a beautiful finale.
I’ve left till last the figure that I know least about, Chou En-lai. His is the first and last solo voice we hear. A diplomat, “Your flight was smooth, I hope,” he greets Nixon,” his private thoughts are left till the end of Act III. “I am old” he sings “and cannot sleep forever/Like the young”. He is the one left to wonder “How much of what we did is good?” Australian baritone Nicholas Lester is generally a benign if imposing presence on stage. But there was one telling moment. At the end of Act I the banquet descends into drunkenness. The chorus carouse, Nixon is tactless, even Pat is tipsy. In the background on the screen, we see Chou En-lai’s face in a movie clip on a loop, sober and ever watchful.
I’ve made reference in this review to the printed libretto, and the sleeve notes of the original 1987 recording, copyright Alice Goodman and Michael Steinberg.
