The L.A. Philharmonics ended its all season celebration of the 70th birthday of composer John Adams by performing on March 3 and 5 the most famous opera of Adams – “Nixon in China.”
Because of the Watergate scandal, former President Richard Nixon was often portrayed as a cartoon villain, SCPR noted. However, his surprise summit in China in 1972 with Chairman Mao Zedong broke 20 years of cold war between Beijing and Washington and impressed his critics. The world celebrates this week 45 years of that historic meeting.
Historical Frame
On Friday, Adams led again the L.A. Philharmonics at the Walt Disney Concert Hall by dropping “Nixon in China” directly into its historical frame, effectively erasing labels such as satirical opera, heroic opera and surreal opera given to his work. It was made possible by the use of actual footage of Nixon’s visit to China used as scenery for the opera, LA Times reported.
Elkahanah Pulitzer, stage director, used 22 transferred reels of super 8mm home movies taken by Nixon’s staff which they found in archives. The stage featured a vintage TV screen, 1960s era, and the films were shown as backdrop. But beyond the footage, LA Times says the most astonishing thing about “Nixon in China” was the integration of the music of Adams, libretto of Alice Goodman and the live cast.
Skeptical on Nixon as Object of Opera
The performance, such as the soliloquies of soprano Joel Harvey, was given more punch as the footage of Pat Nixon’s tour, seen in Act I, showed appropriate images when the libretto mentioned a pig farm, elephant and Chinese schoolchildren. It was good that the singers were placed on a semicircular platform at the back of the orchestra or behind the scrim to give the audience enough distance to see Pat Nixon’s image on the screen.
Adams recalled that Peter Sellers, the stage director, broached to him the idea of the meeting between Nixon and Mao in 1983. He admitted being skeptical because the president was still the object of late night TV jokes. But the more he thought about the idea, the more Adams realized that Nixon was a perfect choice for an opera since the characters were very colorful and the story was about the collision of capitalism versus Communism “which was the great agonistic struggle of the 20th century,” Adams said.