The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met

John Adams The Death of Klinghoffer  at the Met today. HERE is a link to Estelle Gilson's review in Opera Today. When it opened at the ENO in London in 2012, reports in the press led one to believe there'd be mass protests. In the event, there was only one protestor, a nice polite gentleman. Maybe he went in and saw the show. He wasn't there when  we left. The subject is emotive, and important, but Adams's treatment is not incendiary. It's the nature of his music. Repetitive, ruminative cadences, which suggest contemplation rather than imposed narrative. Perhaps it's the very anti-drama in this music that provokes response. The subject is even more important now than when the opera was written. The world is altogether a more dangerous place than when the events it depicts took place. It's important that we deal with the issues as objectively as possible because the world isn't suddenly going to get safer soon unless we think about things. HERE is a link to the review I wrote in 2012 for Opera Today


"Adams's abstracted cadences evoke blurred boundaries: endless waves on the sea, the whirr of a ship’s engine, the slow ticking away of time. Unfortunately, this music also evokes tedium. Facts about the hijack of the Achille Lauro are projected onto the stage to keep us alert, but the music is saying something else altogether. Furthermore, Adams sets text counter-intuitively, so syntax is distorted in favour of unsettling stresses in places that would not occur in speech. Because our brains don’t process language in this way, meaning is sacrificed. It’s not good when you have to concentrate on sub-titles to figure out what’s being sung. Alice Goodman’s libretto has been criticized for being opaque, but it closely reflects Adams’s musical technique. Images are blurred and shift shape. In the opening Chorus, it’s deliberately unclear who the protagonist is. Is she a young woman in love or an old woman awaiting death? Or both? It’s immaterial. She’s a composite of millions who have been exiled throughout history".........

"Things pick up in the Second Act, when Adams frees himself from earnest pseudo-documentary. Up to this point the action has mainly been in choruses. Now we have individuals with whom we can identify. Some of the words they sing come from transcripts made at the time, others are imaginative creations. It doesn’t matter. In these arias there’s dramatic reality. Leon Klinghoffer is presented as a likeable hero, and at last the opera has human focus. Alan Opie sings Klinghoffer so he comes over as a strong, reasonable man of authority, establishing a moral compass. The Aria of the Falling Body anchors Adams’s wavering oscillations with emotional truth."

John Adams Nixon in China Prom 72

Because John Adams was conducting his own opera Nixon in China at BBC Prom72, it was one of the season "musts". Any opportunity to hear a composer conduct his own work shouldn't be passed up for the obvious reason that he's the ur-source. On the other hand, composers don't necessarily have objectivity. At the culmination of  the BBC's week-long focus on Adams, objectivity wasn't an issue. Besides, this music works when you give yourself up to the whole experience uncritically.

Nixon in China isn't history. It's curiously distorted even as an outsider's view on events. Kissinger, for example was the prime mover, not Nixon, and certainly not the venal molester Adams depicts him as. Why does Adams mount this vicious, irrational libel?  The very fact that Kissinger didn't get an injunction against this opera speaks volumes. This should be  a clear warning to anyone who thinks this is an opera about modern events. It's not. Nixon in China is a work of such political shallowness that it's pointless to consider it as normal dramatic narrative.

Rather, it's a musing on events  from the perspective of those who have no idea what's going on. "Who are our, our, our..... enemies? Who, who, who are ......our friends?"  Nixon and his entourage might as well be visitors to the Moon, for all they understand about China, or indeed about themselves. "The old, cold, Cold Warriors piloting towards the unknown". It's fashionable to knock Alice Goodman's libretto, but it's a great deal more subtle than you'd assume. Mao Tse Tung mumbles about cranes and cod philosophy. But as Goodman shows, he's weaving mumbo jumbo, while remarks about China's "Manifest Destiny" surface, a sharp dig at US political theory towards Native Americans.

The opera evolves in a series of tableaux - Mao on the sofa, the banquet, the visit to a commune, the ballet. The Chinese are putting on a show that the Americans can't penetrate. The original staging, by Peter Sellars, was so literal that it replicated photographic images of the events, down to minutiae like Mao's spittoon. It reinforced a fixation on irrelevant superficialities. It was  maddening because there is more to this opera than even Adams realizes, I suspect. If Nixon in China is about non-comprehension, the music fits the mood perfectly. Clues, clues, clues, repetition, repetition, repetition.  It's the way the mind turns data over and over, in the hope of somehow making sense oif things.

Perhaps the Proms semi-staging helped because it freed the opera from Sellars' simplistic barriers. In the abstraction, our minds can process for ourselves. This performance showed why there's such a lack of differentiation between the setting of the male parts. You can  recognize Gerald Finley and Alan Oke because they're so familiar but you don't recognize them as Chou and Mao respectively. Robert Orth (Nixon) and James Rutherford (Kissinger) you recognize by voice type rather than personality. Mao is surrounded by a trio of secretaries, and a larger chorus represents the identikit Red Guards, soldiers, dancers. Perhaps Adams is suggesting that the regimentation of the Cultural Revolution applies to Americans too? The machine-like cadences of his music portray conformity to a mind numbing degree, but work perfectly for this concept.

There's more variety in the writing for female voice. Jessica Rivera's Pat Nixon veers dangerously shrill, but that is entirely in character for Pat Nixon. "I come from a poor family" she sings, identifying with the Chinese masses. All her life she's been forced into playing an artificial, decorative role. So when she sees the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, she responds to the dancer who plays the oppressed woman and tries to intervene. To her, the boundaries of art and reality are falling apart. Good for Pat! I thought, though strictly speaking, it's good for Alice Goodman who wrote these words. We don't know what the real Pat Nixon felt. Kathleen Kim sings a sharp Madame Mao, Pat's feistier, nastier counterpart. Kim also sang the role in the superlative Paris (Chatelet) production this year. Read more about that HERE.

The Paris production, the MET revival of 2011 and this BBC Proms concert contrast strongly.  By far the best was Paris, conducted, directed and performed by people outside the Adams/Sellars circle.  This is telling, because the French production approached the opera from a very different perspective.  Less emphasis on unquestioning incomprehension, more emphasis on personality. Through strong casting, the roles emerged as believable characters. Alexander Briger conducted with firm focus, bringing out the psychological dysfunction beneath the OCD-like repetitions. John Adams at the Proms is celebrating 25 years of success. He wrote the opera, so he can afford to indulge. This Prom was a good experience but I ended up listening afterwards to the original Red Detachment of Women (full download here)  It is worrying when you find more depth and colour in a blatantly stylized ballet written for propaganda purposes.  Maybe I'm just in nostalgic mode. But try it yourself. Listen to the rebroadcast of the Proms Nixon in China and then to the anonymous music in the film.  Madame Mao (who was behind the ballet) has the last laugh after all! 

Brilliant new Nixon in China - Paris

A dear friend recommended the Paris production of John Adams Nixon in China. Since the Peter Sellars version upsets me so much I couldn't face watching but now I've got round to seeing it and my view of the opera is transformed. This new production, from the Théâtre du Châtelet, directed by Chen Shi-zheng, is exceptional. It brings out levels of meaning and beauty in Adams's work, and completely reedefines the opera. The trouble with the old Sellars production for the Met was that it was crudely literal: a series of tableaux based on newspaper images, with no attempt to delve deeper. It was so superficial that it put me off the opera altogether (read more here). This new Paris production is completely the opposite, remarkably perceptive about the opera and its meaning.

When Nixon arrived in China in 1972, he was entering completely alien territory. China was an unknown entity to the west. America, at the height of its empire, was confident of its place in the world. Then suddenly, Nixon and his entourage were rocketed into another empire, where American values had no place. They might as well have been time travellers in a sci fi situation. No stupid Air Force One prop here. Nixon and his team materialize in Beijing like visitors from another planet.
 
Forget what Sellars said, even though he was instrumental in the creation of the opera. John Adams Nixon in China is infinitely more nuanced, whether he or Sellars realized it or not. Perhaps Adams intuited the meaning of the opera more deeply than he realized.  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. Glowing gem-like colours which evoke the colours of China - blue greens, azure, red and gold. The two teams of protagonists stalk each other, probing emotionally. Mao himself reveals nothing. He conquered China by being devious: even Zhou Enlai has to watch his back. Nixon knows he's out of his depth, but that's a credit to him. No gunboat arrogance, no shouting at the natives. Compared with modern politcians, Nixon was "no crook".  In Chen's production, Pat Nixon's role is very well developed. She's a sensitive soul who believes what she's told to believe. She's a perfect politician's wife, turned into an emotioinal Barbie Doll for display purposes. When  she comes to China, her cultural bearings are lost and she responds as a human being to the ballet enacted in front of her.  In the process of their China journey, Pat and Nixon learn something of themselves and of the wider world.

This brilliantly intelligent production lifts John Adams opera onto a greater level. Apart from being psychologically more astute than the Met production, this Paris production is infinitely more musically perceptive. Adams's series of repetitions and patterns replicate in the stage movements and choreography. When you watch the rows of uniforms intricately weaving and counter-weaving, it's like hearing the music come alive. Telling details, too, like the Little Red Book turning into streams of folded red paper as the cadres chant slogans.


 Performances are good: indeed the fact that few of the performers are English speakers helps a lot to create atmosphere. Two more days to catch this amazing production on arte.liveweb. Don't miss it. Please also read my analysis of the Met production  and also watch the original ballet on which  the ballet in the opera is based. Full download of The Red Detachment of Women HERE. It does make a difference to know the original ballet, because it's a stylized telling of a very real story of the struggles Chinese people had to undergo. It sets Maoist China into context. It's also a ballet of women's liberation, to which Pat Nixon responds.

John Adams The Death of Klinghoffer ENO

Press reports suggested mass protests against John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer at the ENO. But there was just one polite demonstrator, who'd left by the end of the evening. Perhaps he saw the show. The subject is emotive, and important, but Adams's treatment is not incendiary. It's the nature of his music. Repetitive, ruminative cadences, which suggest contemplation rather than imposed narrative. Perhaps it's the very anti-drama in this music that provokes response.

Adams's abstracted cadences evoke blurred boundaries : endless waves on the sea, the whirr of a ship's engine, the slow ticking away of time. Unfortunately, this music also evokes tedium. Facts about the hijack of the Achille Lauro are projected onto the stage to keep us alert, but the music is saying something else altogether. Furthermore, Adams sets text counterintuitively, so syntax is distorted in favour of unsettling stresses in places that would not occur in speech. Because our brains don't process language in this way, meaning is sacrificed. It's not good when you have to concentrate on sub-titles to figure out what's being sung.
 
Alice Goodman's libretto has been criticized for being opaque, but it closely reflects Adam's musical technique. Images are blurred and shift shape. In the opeming Chorus, it's deliberately unclear who the protagonist is. Is she a young woman in love or an old woman awaiting death? Or both? It's immaterial. She's a composite of millions who have been exiled throughout history. When music and text are both this oblique, the thrust of the drama is lost.  Perhaps Adams wants us to savour each moment in detail,  as we savour life itself, knowing it won't last, but the cumulative effect of the First Act is soporific.

Things pick up in the Second Act, when Adams frees himself from earnest pseudo-documentary.  Up to this point the action has mainly been in choruses. Now we have individuals with whom we can identify. Some of the words they sing come from transcripts made at the time, others are imaginative creations. It doesn't matter. In these arias there's dramatic reality. Leon Klinghoffer is presented as a likeable hero, and at last the opera has human focus. Alan Opie sings Klinghoffer so he comes over as a strong, reasonable man of authority, establishing a moral compass. The Aria of the Falling Body anchors Adams's wavering oscillations with emotional truth.

Michaela Martens' Marilyn Klinghoffer arias are tours de force, the last adding bite. The Captain (Christopher Magiera) in real life handled the situation with cool-headed professionalism. offering his own life to save his passengers, but Adams and Goodman don't dilute the focus from Klinghoffer to make the Captain a hero. Mrs Klinghoffer, in her grief, can't understand why her husband was killed without her knowing. It's a thoughtful detail to include in the opera since in these situations no-one knows everything all the time. Fine vignettes too from Lucy Schaufer (The Swiss Grandmnother), Clare Presland (The Palestinan Mother) and Kate Miller Heidke (The British Dancing Girl), so clueless that she doesn't comprehend the enormity of what's happening. In a much needed twist of humour, Adams adds snatches of pop music around the part.

Baldur Brönimann conducted the orchestra so details surfaced tellingly from the amorphous textures. He's a specialist in modern repertoire and understands how the genre operates. This music is not an undiffrentiated mass.

The staging, however, was much less sensitive. Directed by Tom Morris with designs by Tom Pye, it tried to give shape to Adams's oblique non-forms by over-emphasizing the literal, perhaps to create the sensationalism Adams and Goodman avoid. The dance sequences are awful, completely at odds with the story. This subject is not a game. It is more than just a struggle over a country, it's part of the eternal struggle between haves and have-nots. In this production, the Palestinians raise their fists in the classic gesture of the oppressed, For a moment it looks like a Nazi salute. What the hijackers did was evil, but it does not follow that the poor should not act, whoever they might be. The scenes where Finn Ross's video projections fill the stage are far more effective, and being semi-abstract, are more faithful to Adams's idiom.

The Death of Klinghoffer has its longueurs but it's an important statement. Twentyfive years after the Achille Lauro hijacking, terrorism is, if anything, more widespread and more savage than ever before. Twin Towers, the school in Beslan, the cinema in Moscow, and Utøya. Is there something to be learned from The Death of Klinghoffer? Many thanks to the ENO for giving us a chance to hear for ourselves. FULL REVIEW and details in Opera Today

photos : copyright Richard Hubert Smith, courtesy ENO

Barbican 2012 2013 Opera and Vocal

Hooray for the Barbican, going for baroque on baroque! The Barbican is ideal - big enough to afford top performers, small enough not to overwhelm the aesthetic. Even though soloists haven't yet been announced, it's likely that Les Talens Lyriques Lully Phaéton, cond. Christophe Rousset on 8/3/13 will be a highlight - just 15 months to go! Another relative rarity - Handel Imeneo on 29/5/13. It's not Blockbuster Handel, but more delicate, and the cast is excellent - Rebecca Bottone, character soprano par excellence who lifts everything she's in. Already I'm looking forward to what Robert Hugill will write about this (read his review of a much less stellar performance).

David Daniels will sing in that and also in Handel Radamisto (10/2/13) with Harry Bicket, English Consort, Luca Pisaroni, Patrica Bardon and Elizabeth Watts - infinitely stronger cast than the ENO staging. Two Les Arts Florissante performances - John Eliot Gardiner conducts Handel Belsahazzar on 13/12/12 and Paul Agnew conducts Monteverdi Madrigals Book 5 on 15/6/13. It's JEG's 75th birthday next March, and he's celebrating by conducting Stravinsky Oedipus Rex.

If baroque don't rock your boat, there's a full Grieg Peer Gynt 15/12/12 with Miah Persson, Ann Hallenberg, Johannes Weisser, BBCSO and BBC Singers and the wonderful Marc Minkowski. Although everyone knows bits of Peer Gynt, hearing it as a whole is extremely rewarding. And just the thought of Miah Persson singing Solvieg's Song gives me goosebumps.

Donizetti's Belisaro (28/10/12) with Mark Elder, BBCSO and an interesting Poulenc Les animaux modèles (26/4/13) with readings and video projections, which can be fine, done well. Stéphane Denève conducts the BBCSO.

Re British opera, you could go for Britten The Turn of the Screw (Andrew Kennedy, Sally Matthews, Colin Davis,16/4/13) but far more unusual would be the Oliver Knussen double bill, Where the Wild Things Are and Higgelty Piggelty Pop!  (3/11/12). It's a matinee, because they were inspired by books Knussen's daughter used to read.  Although this will be a must for people with kids, it's also a good outing for those who don't have them, since this kind of zany good humour is so Knussenesque. He mostly conducts these days but he's a pretty good composer too.

Wild card: John Adams The Gospel according to the Other Mary, a Barbican co-commission. (16/3/13). Adams can be variable, see Nixon in China, but the subject's very tricky. Gustavo Dudamel's first big, big opera premiere with the LA Phil and Peter Sellars directing. Maybe it will be good, but my gut instincts are that this constellation will bring out fashion victims in force.  Two weeks later, Valery Gergiev conducts Szymanowski Stabat Mater and Brahms German Requiem. Will Gergiev bring us back to earth? He has his merits, and could say much in Szymanowski.

Recitals with Juan Diego Florez, Joyce DiDonato, Renée Fleming,  Elina Garanca, Cecelia Bartoli and Magdalena Kozcena.

Tomorrow : Barbican orchestral 2012-3. Please also see Barbican 2011-2 vocal and Barbican orchestral 2011-2, as 2012 has only just begun! For link, see here.

ENO 2011 2012 season - daring! detailed summary

PREVIEW of Ca;luigula HERE.  REVIEW follows shortly. Has the ENO ditched gimmicks for really classy opera? The new 2011-2012 ENO seasons returns to the older tradition of genuinely challenging opera, presented without thrills. The two significant items are Detlev Glanert's Caligula and Wolfgang Rihm's Jakob Lenz. Glanert and Lenz are the most significant living composers in Germany. They're extremely well regarded. The dominance of English language media means that anglophones are insular. But Germany was, and is, where it's happening in music. So ENO, despite it's English language remit, is doing a huge public service by bringing Glanert and Rihm to London. These could be landmark productions.

Glanert and Rihm are huge names and always feature in new music events. (Rihm's more avant garde, Glanert more accessiible).  In fact, they're so significant that they've been featured at the Proms. Rihm was the subject of a BBC Total Immersion last year. (read HERE and HERE). Regular visitors to this site will know them well which is why I've written so much about them in the past (use search box and labels at right)

Detlev Glanert is one of the few students Hans Werner Henze ever took on, so that in itself is an indication of how interesting he is. Like Henze, he loves music that "acts", also a good sign. Caligula, one of Glanert's many operas, grew out of  Theatrum bestiarum, a commission from the BBC for a gala piece using the Royal Albert Hall 's massive organ.  Caligula was an eccentric psychopath, so becoming a Roman Emperor gave him free licence to run amok. The opera's about how he bullies those who stand up to him. It's vivid and quirky, imbued by Glanert's warped but pointed sense of satire. Caligula's mad, and a tyrant, and the opera isn't all laughs. It's been revived several times. I caught it in Frankfurt in 2009. Read about it in more detail HERE. The production then was stupid, but the opera is good and will support a much more incisive staging. ENO is using Benedict Andrews, who did Monteverdi's Ulysses as Reservoir Dogs. Thank goodness, because the last thing Caligula needs is a director who thinks it's trite comedy. If Andrews takes his cues from the music this time, he could do something great.

Rihm's Jakob Lenz is an early (1977) chamber opera. Rihm went on to write lots more music theatre and music that incorporates voice. It's just that his orchestral and chamber music is so astoundingly good that it eclipses all else. Jakob Lenz was an eccentric writer who became insane. The opera is based on a play about him by Georg Büchner who wrote Woyzeck, now known as Wozzeck. It's only one act, so I'm not sure how it's going to be presented. Indications are that it's being done as a stand alone at the small Hampstead Theatre. Below I've posted a clip of Rihm's Jakob Lenz as a taster.

The ENO has a wonderful John Adams/Philip Glass tradition, so the new production of Adams's Death Of Klinghoffer will be a must.  When it premiered it caused a furore, hitting headlines ordinary operas can't hope to achieve. The subject's still controversial, so maybe it's a blessing that it's on in February 2012, before the Olympics, when it might be a bit too close for comfort.

Wonderful, too, that ENO are doing even more thought provoking work about serious issues. Mieczysław Weinberg's The Passenger starts 19th September 2011. When it was at Bregenz last year, Opera Cake wrote about it so vividly that it felt like you were actually there in the audiernce with him. Read him HERE This is what music writing should be like! Maybe we're getting the same production, but in English. What a scoop!

Altogther 11 new productions, which is soome kind of record in these straitened times. They include classics like Billy Budd, Rameau's Castor and Pollux, The Marriage of Figaro and The Flying Dutchman.  Much has been made of "four living composers" in the media but it's misleading. Although it's unethical to judge someone you haven't heard, I don't think Damon Albarn is anything near Glanert, Rihm or Adams. Because Albarn, Wainwright and others are heard at the Linbury, there's clearly a niche market for rock and pop composers branching into opera. But that doesn't automatically translate into cutting edge "new music". Like or not like, we need to know the difference or end up looking stupid.
 Photo above : Mike Quinn


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John Adams Nixon in China Met Opera analysis

Chairman Mao (Mao Tsetung) meets Richard Nixon, President of the US in 1972. It's the subject of John Adams's opera Nixon in China which has come at last to the Met in NY after 23 years. Having lived through those times from a different perspective I was worried the opera might be crass, but no problems. John Adams and Peter Sellars (who directed the HD film) are to real history and to China as Sarah Palin is to geopolitics because you can see Russia from Alaska.

Sellars tells Thomas Hampson in one of the intervals that 22/2/72 was as important to world history as 9/11. No. It's not a cosmic struggle between east and west. Nixon needed to end the Vietnam war and Taiwan was a historic millstone. China didn't have much to gain or lose either way (though it bugged the Russians). But Nixon in China works as a study of political gullibility. Both sides are manipulating the media to fool each other. It's a game of tactics. A sharp diplomat reads the codes. Notice the white vase on the floor by Mao? Why do Nixon (James Maddalena) and even Chou Enlai (Russell Braun) look appalled? The white vase is a spittoon, which Mao uses frequerntly. Old men used such things then, but it's also symbolic of what Mao thinks of the world.

This production is based on historic photos of real events so the designs (Adrianne Lobel) are eerily unsettling. Costumes (Dunya Ramikova) are so accurate they must have been custom dyed. Mao looks uncannily healthy, but we know he often used body doubles not just because he was a sick man but because he was a creep. The big banquet is there and the Potemkin schoolchildren are there, though the moment where Chou feeds Nixon with chopsticks is underplayed in the opera. Feeding guests prize titbits is basic good manners in China, but Chou was also making a political point.  What might be tasty to Chou just might be something Nixon won't eat.

Adams's music drones like the hum of a giant machine, which is appropriate enough for a society reduced to automatons, but would benefit from being edited judiciously. What really saves the opera is the word setting. The libretto (Alice Goodman) is brilliant. She uses stock phrases like "Manifest Destiny" in quirky ways. Usually the term is US expansion to the west. Here, it's China in Vietnam. Similarly sound bite phrases are dissected and re-arranged so they sound like gibberish. Which is exactly how the media uses what really happens. Nixon's speech on arrival is brilliantly well written in this way. The libretto makes the opera, bringing depths that the charcaterizations altogether lack. Sellars's statement, that the libretto is poetic in the way that Yeats, Eliot and the Chinese masters are, is utter nonsense, though.

Maddalena's Nixon knows he's out of his depth when he talks sense, but Mao doesn't care. He's obviously done his homework since he refers to Wang Ming and other political heavies whom Mao carefully excludes. If only politicians still did briefings based on proper risk assessment. Blair told the world he was right to invade Iraq because he asked God, and God said nothing. Nixon would be weeping that things have come to this. Watergate was small cheese compared to what happens now. Nixon comes over as well meaning, and a decent man who's too polite to question the gibberish Mao spouts. Philosophy? Trolls  also speak in riddles. Maddalena created the role in 1987 so deserves much respect. If his voice is aging, so be it, for this is one of the keynotes of his career and deserves being commemorated on film.

Robert Brubaker as Mao Tsetung is excellent. Despite his crisp new suit Brubaker exudes sleaze. I don't know if the scene where he gropes one of his aides was in the original production, but it's necessary now from what we know of Mao's private life. Russell Braun's Chou Enlai was as stiff as a corpse. Admittedly the man himself was unwell but it was nearly 4 years before he died, struggling to the end. He, too, isn't quite as innocent as portrayed. Neither was Henry Kissinger (Richard Paul Fink) a buffoon who can't even find a toilet.

So what's behind the flights of fancy ? What is Adams trying to say and what point is he trying to make?  Surely not something as banal as "in bed we dream"? Pat Nixon (Janis Kelly) comes over as unbelievably naive, though she can't have been since she was a pillar for her husband, even if it came at a price. Pat and Tricky Dick werer tough political animals, so why does Pat lose it when she sees something that's obvioulsy not fake?  The ballet being shown is The Red Detachment of Women, (click link for full download), also faithfully depicted in accurate detail (kapok trees, palms)  It's full blown propaganda, mixing ballet, didactics and the stylization of Chinese opera.

If only Adams, Sellars and Goodman had thought through these ideas instead of merrily making things up. They hint that all's not well when Pat pops pills, but that's not enough. Nixon's reminiscences about The Pacific are pointlessly irrelevant. Hainan is not Guadacanal, and even if it was, the issues are completely different.

The formidable Chiang Ching is so well realized by Kathleen Kim that she stole the show. She was an outstanding Olympia in the recent Met Les Contes d'Hoffmann. Wonderful, searing high notes, meant to grate on the nerves. She's the one who ran the Cultural Revolution while Mao was senile. Chou nearly lost his job. So why is she turned into a sex siren? Of course we know she was an actress when she met Mao but he went through wives and mistresses like other men change shoes. Maybe it helps sell the opera to western audience to add an exotic in silk qipao, but it's pretty hard to make connections. Kim is so good that perhaps the Met will cast her in serious mainstream roles.(the photo shows Chiang Ching shouting back at the prosecutors when she was on trial for her life in 1981. She got away with a life sentence but damaged all the dolls she was forced to make as a prisoner so that they couldn't be sold)

The dancers were very good - dancing en pointe to machine gun fire isn't easy. Mark Morris was the choreographer but the ballerina in red doesn't seem to get credit. Adams Nixon in China wasn't as bad as I thought, but could use judicious editing and much more thoughtful direction, especially in the last fantasy act. Even if the opera deals with media manipulation, it falls apart if it gives up half way. Maybe Nixon should have dumped Pat for Chiang Ching (he might still be in power) but this self-indulgent production runs out of steam just as it's getting somewhere. (Please see my posts on Dr Atomic, A Flowering Tree and many others on China) Photo credit : Ken Howard, Metropolitan Opera

Nixon in China at the Met

For my detailed analysis of John Adams Nixon in China at the Met please see HERE)
"Nixon in China is a meditation on the events of its era through the medium of opera, which is a new sort of focus to put on the form." writes Jon Yohalem about John Adams Nixon in China in Opera Today (Full review HERE, very detailed). "The curious thing is that the audience for three or four hours of classical entertainment has come to delight in this sort of tableau, this elevation of the humans we have actually known to an archetypal status, and that opera is today considered the proper accolade to the achievement of a certain sort of celebrity, political or otherwise. This makes one wonder what opera, what singing rather than living, now implies to us........"

"But (works like Nixon in China) did not deal in archetypes; they are the musical equivalent of reportage, their substance gone once half the audience no longer knows what Nixon actually did. Modern celebrity opera is a sort of oral history if you like........"
 
The relevance to Turnage's Anna Nicole is obvious, though from past form, Turnage is more interested in jumpy tunes than in philosophic ideas.  But the idea that there's a new kind of opera afoot is interesting. We're far enough away from Nixon and "ping pong diplomacy" to experience this opera as pure theatre, without knowing the background.  I have been avoiding it for years as I didn't feel I could cope with something that must, necessarily, deal with surface experiences as seen through the US media at the time. But I lived through those times and see it from a Chinese perspective. So what I'll be writing will be different to what most people will feel. Please come back to this site soon for a unique point of view.

My gut instinct is that the opera (as opposed to the history) will deal with the way events are manipulated by the media. Hence the fascination with the agitprop ballet. One of the best known ballets at 5the time was Pak Mo Liuy (White haired Girl). The ballet reached saturation exposure in China at the time, one of the few "western forms" permitted during the Cultural Revolution. Everyone could sing along. The ballet was based on a novel which became a movie in 1949, the year when the Communist Party came to power. Please see the  movie HERE streamed in FULL DOWNLOAD. It's really quite good, better than mere propaganda. Watch this movie, and a lot about modern China falls into perspective.

Although there are no subtitles, the story is pretty straightforward. A girl is sold as debt to a rich landowner who rapes her. She  runs away to live in the wild, where her hair turns white with grief. The villagers think she's a ghost that haunts the temple (from which she steals edible offerings) . Eventually her former boyfriend returns as a CCP hero, liberating the village and overthrowing the landlord. Happily ever after, cultivating the fields, restored to health and sanity. The story is simple but direct which is why it packed such a punch sixty years ago when China was torn apart by decades of war and the collapse of feudal society. Everyone could recognize the situation, Communist or not. That's why Mao was necessary, no matter what a tyrant he really was.