Parodic as well as profound, full of historical references and human details that give meaning to a poetic plot based on real events: the meeting between Mao Tse-tung and Richard Nixon in 1972, when the then President of the United States decided to visit the China. A gesture that would mean the restitution of the battered diplomatic relations between both giants and a first step in the thaw of relations between the East and the West in the middle of the cold war.
The audience at the Teatro Real attended a milestone for opera in Spain this Monday: the national premiere four decades after its world premiere in Houston of Nixon in China (1984), the first title composed by the star of minimalism John Adams and the first of which the poet -and today an Anglican priest- Alice Goodman signed a booklet. One hundred and fifty minutes of music that plays with repetitions with their corresponding dialogues and insightful reflections between the characters: the leaders, their partners and their respective squires, that is, Henry Kissinger or the Chinese prime minister, Chou En-lai. The premiere ended with six minutes of applause except for notorious defections, which made a dent especially in the expensive audience of the theater.
With texts in English and subtly amplified, the piece is a fancy narrative that makes use of humor to get closer to an introspective ending in which Nixon dissolves like a sugar cube while he recalls his years as a young soldier in the Indochina war and his subsequent political becoming. While Mao, the bloodthirsty, is known as an icon for posterity. Although his wife, a fanatic of whose crimes in pursuit of the cultural revolution the opera is giving an account of, she does not come off so well.
Emblematic images such as the arrival in China of the Nixon couple and their meeting on the plane with Chou En-lai come to life at the beginning of the show in this production signed by the sensitive John Fulljames, while at times the score tilts towards the Wagnerism of the Ring of the Nibelung... An example of that look at the past that the revision of history implies for John Adams.
Dick Bird's scenography, based on archives, makes the viewer never forget that everything comes from a documented background. And that it is through those sources that the world has gotten an idea of what happened. Not surprisingly, the opera shows a Richard Nixon obsessed by his image and by what the press will say about him and his visit to the enemy country. In fact, he is portrayed in a hilarious way with the help of serialism itself, which invites him to compulsively repeat the word "news" when he realizes that at that very hour it is prime time for television in his country. After all, that trip is for him an electoral maneuver...
And in his first meeting with Mao, Goodman's script plays brilliantly on culture shock. "Don't worry, it's a riddle, not a proof," the president of the republic snaps at Nixon when he stammers at his oriental-style philosophical maxims. "Oh right, Confucius!" "Fuck Confucius!" Launches Mao and his wife in unison. And immediately afterwards, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party reads the primer to capitalism...: "fishers of individuals", "organized oblivion"... At the subsequent dinner, the drink flows and the camaraderie prevails... which shows Kissinger trying to stop his president from proclaiming from a chair that he "was wrong" to oppose China.
When it premiered in 1984 in Houston, the opera was disliked by both Republicans and Democrats. At that time, the former expected a less philosophical portrait of Mao, and the latter, that Nixon would take its toll after the Watergate scandal and the rigged elections that two years after that trip to China forced him to leave office.
But it is that the objective of the opera promoted by the theater director Peter Sellars was not to make any of the representatives of the political bipolarity of his time good or bad, but to highlight the ego engine of both politicians, beyond the fact that one representing capitalism and the other communism. And, as a coda, he also managed in a fabulous third and last act to get them to take off their masks and wonder about the meaning and value of what they had done in life.
In fact, if anyone fits well in this magnificent script by Alice Goodman it is the restrained Chinese premier, Chou En-lai, who ultimately assumes the voice of conscience, and Pat Nixon, the first lady of the White House who openly declares who hates politics and devotes herself like a professional to her tasks as a representative of the American virtues, be it in a little Chinese school or in a pig farm.
His character even has one of the most beautiful arias in the title - "This is prophetic!" (This is prophetic) -, which confirms the grace of Adams in these early operatic works of his, with minimalist and repetitive invoices that are perfectly enjoyable and digestible by the public less accustomed to contemporary music.
Curiously, the role that British soprano Sarah Tynan assumes at the Real -much applauded by the audience at the Madrid arena- has served at the Paris Opera these days to bid farewell to the stage with honors to the historic René Fleming, the American diva who He has made such an excellent career in the gala square. It was also directed from the pit by Gustavo Dudamel who played the four saxophones included in the modern orchestration in abundance.
The one who defended it from the podium of the Real pit on Monday, with millimeter poise, was the South Korean Olivia Lee-Gundermann, who not by chance has specialized in this type of repertoire. This was the second production that she made of Nixon in China, she confessed to La Vanguardia minutes after finishing the opera.
Once again, the opera rises several feet above earthly banality. And in that he abounds with the approach that Fulljames makes. The plot points from the beginning to that deep, human end. The fun of recognizing the characters in parodic situations is not here a rocket that extinguishes when taking off, but the preamble to existentialism. "Let the routine soften the contours of death," says Pat Nixon. And also... "that businessmen continue to speculate."
Egos expand until they become myths. Because when a country does not have thousands of years of history, it uses a mischievous title like Nixon in China to a pop version of Greek myths that have given rise to other operas... Ariadne auf Naxos or Iphigénie en Tauride. Adams himself says it, who is happy with the revival of one of his most celebrated pieces.
The Death of Klinghoffer, premiered at the Monnaie in Brussels in 1991, is the same for the Adams-Goodman tandem. This time based on the hijacking of the Achille Lauro ship by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, with the subsequent murder of passenger Leon Klinghoffer. There Adams made enemies from the Jewish-American community, as he and Goodman remained neutral.
