Nixon in China (1987). John Adams /as musically compelling/

Lisa Hirsch on Nixon in China in San Francisco:

Goodman's libretto is not a narrative of the events of Nixon's 1972 trip so much as it is a fantastical, poetic, and often quite funny meditation on what the participants might have been thinking or feeling during particular incidents, from the commonplace to the paranoid to the oracular to the nostalgic.

...But listen you must, because Nixon is as musically compelling as anything to reach the operatic stage in the last century.