Classical Iconoclast says the Paris production of Nixon in China is both meaningful and beautiful. I suggest the recent San Francisco version was neither (although still vivid and engaging):
Chen Shi-zheng's production gets to the soul of the opera. No silly reproductions of newspaper photos, instead a set as stylized as the interaction between the two sets of politicans. They are playing a kind of psychological chess, sizing each other up in a formal game of greetings and entertainments.
Sellars steered well clear of meaning by focussing on decor. For Chen, meaning is the whole purpose. The set is simple, but exquisitely beautiful.
The Proms has John Adams conducting Nixon in China "semi-staged." I don't really know what that means but I assume it means singing and orchestra but not the good/bad multimedia special effects that we just saw in San Francisco. It was certainly a vivid production, even if sometimes disorienting and buggy.
While Nixon in China may be a candidate for canonical status, I have my doubts after having now seen it again last week in SF after first seeing it in LA back in the 80s. While this latest production was vivid, there were enough troubling moments.
And then there was the stupid stuff. When the projection designer Sean Nieuwenhuis wasn't creating imaginative atmospherics, he displayed American flags flapping in the wind, as if applying for a job at one of this summer's political conventions. Exaggerated makeup and wigs turned characters into caricatures. A series of portraits, morphing Nixon into Mao wound up with something resembling a Photoshopped Jack Benny. Though he's a Chinese artist, Wen Wei Wang was responsible for the staid choreography of the opera's Red Detachment of Women parody. The silly dances made for Richard and Pat Nixon, Mao, Chiang Ch'ing and, most egregious of all, Henry Kissinger should not have been allowed by the TSA to cross the border from Canada to the U.S. Still, this was Nixon in China.
I also found the dancing distracting and still don't know what to make of the morphing banner.
On the other hand, melodies! I had an ear-worm of News Has a Kind of Mystery for several days this week, which was not unpleasant.
Over 20 previous aworks posts on Nixon in China here. A page of the intro text to the opera here.
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.
One negative, one mixed, and one positive view of the Metropolitan Opera production...
HurdAudio: It was the composition of Nixon in China that fell flat for me. I've noticed that John Adams has built a career upon taking compositional ideas from other composers (borrowing heavily from the language and sound of Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach for Nixon in China or lifting from Charles Ives's Central Park in the Dark in My Father Knew Charles Ives) and heavily diluting the sound. Gone were the additive processes and static elaborations of Glass. All the sharp corners and dissonances filed down to a consonant sheen.
Out West Arts: Nixon seemed like more of a wish about where this company should have been twenty years ago than an actual statement about where it's headed now...But Nixon is equally about the hallucinatory as well, and Adams and Sellars clearly reveled in the off-kilter version of the world they generate in Act III. And crazy, in and of itself, can sometimes be enough to justify a work or performance and the Met's new/old Nixon in China is often satisfying if not overwhelmingly so.
The Big City: If the goal of the piece was to document the meeting between a craven, petty failed president and one of the great villains of the twentieth century, then there is no way the opera would have the effect it does. And that effect is utterly mesmerizing and extraordinarily moving. It works with such power because it’s an opera. That’s a useful tautology. It’s an opera from the ground up, a musical drama that integrates libretto, music and staging from the initial conception. Everything works together, everything is done for a reason.
Kinderkuchen for the FBI on today's Nixon in China (which I skipped at the local multiplex due to my slothful nature and competing desire to watch the Ohio State basketball team lose):
I love Nixon in China. I love the minimalist idiom which always enhances the action. I love the "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung" aria. I love the incomprehensible philosophy always lurking in the background. I could live entirely without the hand job in the last scene.
In fact the whole last scene is extremely anticlimactic. It was said several times that this is a modern masterpiece, and I am almost persuaded. The people being interviewed were pleased to be performing this opera on the day after the Revolution in Cairo. They made Mao and Chou seem to realize that revolution is only for a moment, like life generally.
Amidst Santigold, Sex Pistols, and (Lisa) Stanfield among others, musicwhore likesNixon in China:
Nixon in China is engaging, sometimes even exhilarating, even if the idea of a US diplomatic trip to a Communist country during the Cold War seems like unlikely operatic material.
This reminds me that I was on a walk in a Palo Alto neighborhood back then and saw a TV showing the opera.
SFist interviews John Adams, as he is conducting El Nino with the San Francisco Symphony this week. Interesting tidbit at the end:
[SFist] We read that SF Opera will do Nixon in China soon.
[Adams] I've heard that they're planning to do it sometimes in the future. David Gockley told me about his desire to produce it. Beyond that, I don't know any more details.
I wish they would do Glass' Einstein on the Beach but Nixon in China might be enough to get me to take off the headphones and leave the house...
Mark Swed doesn't have much good to say about the most recent production and recording of Nixon in China, at least compared to the original by director Peter Sellars:
...watching a cutesy, ham-fisted attempt at literalism from a fanciful opera proved hardly revelatory when I saw this production five years ago in St. Louis.
Fortunately, Carpenter’s self-serving rewriting of history isn’t likely to have much effect. Sellars' production is, after 22 years, still with us. Crowds flocked to it, and critics celebrated it, when staged in London a couple of seasons ago. And long last, the Met will mount Sellars' production next season, with Adams on the podium.
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