Nixon in China

STORY

The action takes place in Peking (Beijing), China, February 1972.

Act I

The airfield outside Peking: it is a cold, clear, dry morning: Monday 21 February 1972. Premier Zhou Enlai, accompanied by a small group of officials, strolls onto the runway just as the Spirit of ’76 taxis into view. President Richard Nixon, his wife Pat, and their entourage disembark. Nixon and Zhou Enlai shake hands, and the President sings of his excitement and his fears.

An hour later he is meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao’s conversational armoury contains philosophical apothegms, unexpected political observations, and gnomic jokes, and everything he sings is amplified by his secretaries and the Premier. It is not easy for a Westerner to hold his own in such a dialogue.

After the audience with Mao, everyone at the first evening’s banquet is euphoric. The President and Mrs Nixon manage to exchange a few words before Premier Zhou rises to make the first of the evening’s toasts, a tribute to patriotic fraternity. The President replies, toasting the Chinese people and the hope of peace. The toasts continue, with less formality, as the night goes on.

Act II

In the morning, Mrs Nixon is ushered onstage by her party of guides and journalists. She explains a little of what it feels like for a woman like her to be First Lady, and accepts a glass elephant from the workers at the Peking Glass Factory. She visits the Evergreen People’s Commune and the Summer Palace, where she pauses in the Gate of Longevity and Goodwill to sing, ‘This is prophetic!’ Then, on to the Ming Tombs before sunset.

In the evening, the Nixons attend a performance of The Red Detachment of Women, a revolutionary ballet devised by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. The ballet entwines ideological rectitude with Hollywood-style emotion. The Nixons respond to the latter; they are drawn to the downtrodden peasant girl - in fact, they are drawn into the action on the side of simple virtue. This was not precisely what Jiang Qing had in mind. She sings ‘I am the wife of Mao Zedong’, ending with full choral backing.

Act III

The last evening in Peking. The pomp and public displays of the presidential visit are over, and the main players all return to the solitude of their bedrooms. The talk turns to memories of the past. Mao and his wife dance, and the Nixons recall the early days of their marriage during the Second World War, when he was stationed as a naval commander in the Pacific. Zhou concludes the opera with the question of whether anything they did was good.

Adapted from a synopsis by Alice Goodman, courtesy of The Metropolitan Opera

INSIGHTS

Politics, history, myth and dreams

by András Almási-Tóth, director

Politics, in time, becomes history, history becomes myth, which is only a step away from the world of dreams. How far we can get from simple facts! Nixon’s visit to China became history even in its own time, it was dubbed as ‘The week that changed the world’. It comes as no surprise that the creative trio of Sellars, Goodman and Adams therein saw an opportunity.

The dull facts turn to dreams in front of our eyes; the boundary between objective and subjective storytelling dissolves. The opera tells the tale in a mirrored structure, or rather, in the refraction of a double mirror. It begins with reality, quoting well-documented events verbatim. However, this reality seems to become an inner reality all the time, and the innermost thoughts of the characters are revealed. Act II is dominated by subjectivity, first through Pat’s visit to China, then in the stage performance, where the story takes place completely in the world of dreams and visions. It is all foretold in the drama and by the three secretaries in the scene of the ‘verbatim theatre’. Act III then returns to reality, albeit to a subjective one behind the political hinterland. The caesura in our performance is in the middle of Act II. Here the mirror image is clearly visible: objective reality – inner reality / dream – subjective reality. Here the trio of Sellars, Goodman and Adams create something akin to Shakespearean dramaturgy, in a brilliantly modern setting.

As with every masterpiece, Nixon in China has much more to tell than the original story and finds contemporary resonance today. Although the relationship between China and the rest of the world is a current and global matter, the opera attempts to explore more than that, namely, a most crucial problem in Europe and all around the world: simply, how to get along with each other? How can all the different political, racial, religious and ethical views, the different cultures, different points of view co-exist? How can we accept anything unfamiliar (you do not need to love them, acceptance is enough) as there is always a greater and more important truth that should be our common goal. Seeing the unknown, the incomprehensible as alien has caused so many problems in world history. Nixon’s visit to China is a perfect example: two nations – unknown, incomprehensible and opposite – reach out to each other; coexistence is possible even if your worldview is completely different.

Our Hungarian premiere of Nixon in China at the Eiffel Art Studios in Budapest is staged in unusual spaces to have the audience see this ‘opera show’ from different points of view. Adams’ grand opera makes use of all the genre’s available tools to provide an ‘unusual’ opera experience in a unique re-interpretation.