Stagecraft As Soulcraft

By Michael Walsh

It is the most eagerly anticipated, and potentially incendiary, musical premiere of the year: an opera about Richard Nixon's landmark visit to the People's Republic of China that also includes Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai among its cast of characters. Although it is sure to provoke strong emotions and conflicting opinions, Nixon in China, currently on display at the Houston Grand Opera, is the most important new opera since Philip Glass gave voice to Mohandas Gandhi in Satyagraha seven years ago.

At first glance Nixon seems an unlikely subject, treated by an equally unlikely trio of Harvard graduates. Composer John Adams, 40, a minimalist of burgeoning popular appeal, had never written an opera before; Poet Alice Goodman, 29, had never written a libretto; and Director Peter Sellars, 30, was notorious for brassily upstaging the classics, setting Mozart's Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem and Handel's Orlando partly on Mars.

Nixon, however, emerges as neither a political cartoon nor a satire. Instead, it is a daring, complex and ultimately successful examination of the moment in 1972 when West met East on the tarmac at Peking, a heroic opera for an unheroic age. Although historical operas are not unusual (Verdi's Don Carlos, for example), it is rare for a new work to treat personages of such recent vintage. The topic is resonant, for the former President still arouses potent emotions in those whose political consciousness was forged by Viet Nam, Kent State and Watergate. But the Minnesota-born Goodman was only ten years old when Nixon was elected and 16 when he resigned; now living in England, she brings a welcome apolitical detachment to her first major work.

Progressing from the impersonal panoply of statecraft to an almost hallucinatory intimacy of soulcraft, the libretto depicts Nixon as emotionally repressed and socially awkward but acutely aware of his role in history. Mostly written in couplets, the lyrics may sometimes be elliptical, but they are psychologically observant and very singable.

Adams, who a decade ago was writing minimalist essays in broken chords and chugging rhythms, has evolved a more flexible, conventional tonal language, fleshed out with references to past masters (Debussy, Beethoven, Richard Strauss) and even Glenn Miller, as the dramatic situation demands. There has always been a theatricality about Adams' music -- the 1981 Harmonium was a vivid choral setting of poetry by John Donne and Emily Dickinson -- and in Nixon its dramatic qualities have flowered. The figures are sharply characterized: Nixon (James Maddalena), for example, is a gruff baritone whose music is often stiff and halting, while Chairman Mao (John Duykers) is cast as a heldentenor. His body may be weak, but his mind and voice are as vigorous as Siegfried's.

The big tableaux are cannily staged by Sellars, doing his cleanest operatic work in years. The banquet scene in the Great Hall of the People that concludes the first act becomes a brilliantly calibrated choral scene in which toasts of comradeship are punctuated by popping flashbulbs and delirious, crashing chords. "It's like a dream," sings Nixon, and suddenly the picture freezes, as if the hold button had been pressed on a VCR.

The highlight, though, is the Nixons' night at the ballet, where they see a performance of The Red Detachment of Women. Here reality dissolves completely, as first Pat and then Dick is drawn into the politicized morality play onstage. Insouciantly choreographed by Mark Morris in mock socialist-realist style, the dance is a dizzying montage of whirling rifle butts and flashing thighs. The scene builds in energy until, at its climax, Madame Mao suddenly rises and launches into a spitfire aria, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung," that ends in a blaze of coloratura glory.

The contemplative final scene is a series of interconnected monologues and dialogues set in discrete bedrooms on the last night in Peking. Nixon reminisces about his war service, unable to transform his blustery bonhomie into a real avowal of love for his wife; Mao and his wife recall their early days together; the solitary Chou, the power behind the throne, contemplates the revolution. Television icons all, the figures are sliced open to reveal small and lonely human beings.

Despite a sharply divided critical reception, the opera appears to have a bright future. Co-commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (where it will be recorded) and the Kennedy Center, the production will travel to the Netherlands Opera next June and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera in 1989. Like a good politician, it deserves to run for a long time.