The world premiere of Nixon in China last October in Houston was the focus of extraordinary press attention and public interest. More than fifty critics were there from around the nation; the event even made CBS's Sunday Morning. And not without good reason. For once, a new opera was inaugurating a new hall, Houston's Wortham Theater Center. The Houston Grand Opera had joined with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Kennedy Center in commissioning a new piece from the combined talents of composer John Adams, director Peter Sellars, and British poet Alice Goodman. What they got was a true product of today's pedigreed talent, a Postmodern exercise in flat actualities, an old news story refracted through an indifferent lens and set to the pulsing monody of a suspended-animation score.
It was not precisely an opera. Where opera relates drama primarily through the medium of classical singing--its literary and staging aspects being fundamentally secondary--Nixon in China balanced visual, textual, and musical elements to present a meditation of sorts on recent history: the 1972 visit of President Nixon to China that began the current thaw in Sino-American relations.
The opera was Sellars' brainchild, and his studied static staging dominates the work. The spare movement and plain, sometimes frozen, gestures conspired to make the slow progress of this nondrama "real" in the sense that television is real. What viewers took away with them was not the memory of this aria or that ensemble, but the curiously quasi-documentary sense that what they had watched was merely a reworked television news program with sonic accompaniment. This was not the first musico-dramatic work to deal with recent characters and events--Anthony Davis' X lyricized the life of black leader Malcolm X in 1986--but it was the first major production to issue from within the narrowly defined aesthetics of Postmodernism and merge with the cultural mainstream to feed the contemporary notion that the outer life of news events is more real than the inner lives of people. With Nixon in China, Postmodernism and Minimalism become officially sanctioned aesthetics in the service of a new subgenre: "News-Sing," it might be called. The only event to interrupt the sludgy flow of the work was choreographer Mark Morris' stunningly danced paraphrase of a socialist-realist Chinese ballet, The Red Detachment of Women.
The score by forty-year-old Adams has elsewhere been termed Romantic, but it is not. Its brilliance is that it is quasi-Romantic. Through the constant consonance of its Minimalist harmonies and the massive sonorities of a pseudo-Wagnerian orchestration, Nixon in China fools the average listener into believing he is hearing music of the Western tradition. In fact, he is hearing a contemporary perception of Western music, without its essence. While music from Monteverdi to Mozart to Verdi was dynamic, Adam's score is, by prevailing standards, acceptably static and therefore harmless for the lazy-eared individual who cannot countenance dissonance and the rock-weaned opera neophyte used to simplistic harmonic progressions. Indeed, the two-chord hemming-and-hawing of Pat Nixon's second-act aria is enough to make the Beach Boys seem complex--and Romantic.
Goodman's libretto makes President Nixon out to be a flawed but sincere peace seeker, casts Pat Nixon as an empathetic wife-victim, skewers Henry Kissinger at every available moment (his exit lines concern how to find the toilet), and fashions a veritable legend out of Mao Tse-tung, who comes off as a
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