2023-04-16 03:24:51
In the history books it is described as “the week that changed the world”. Richard Nixon traveled to China between February 21 and 28, 1972; it was the first visit by a US president to the People’s Republic of China. The two declared enemies since in 1949 Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party assumed power in the country. That visit helped temper the cold war; Just three months after his stay in China, Nixon traveled to Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet leader, Leonidas Brezhnev. A new international era was beginning.
Usually, historical events of this caliber lead to documentaries, books, studies, long reports, even fictional films. But Nixon’s trip to China is also remembered thanks to an opera by the American composer John Adams (1947), with a libretto by Alice Goodmanwhich premiered at the Houston Grand Opera on October 22, 1987, in a production directed by Peter Sellars and choreographed by Mark Morris. “Since ‘Porgy and Bess,’ no American opera has been so unanimously acclaimed as ‘Nixon in China,'” The New Yorker magazine wrote of her. And indeed, Adams’ opera is one of the most represented contemporary titles -the Paris Opera currently has it on the bill-. But never in Spain. Until now.
The Royal Theater premieres ‘Nixon in China’ on Monday, in a co-production with Den Kongelige Opera of Copenhagen and the Scottish Opera. The stage direction is from the British John Fulljames and the musical direction is shared by the Korean Olivia Lee-Gundermann -who has just conducted the score at the Dortmund Opera- and the Greek Kornilios Michailidis. The cast is made up of Leigh Melrose (Nixon), Jacques Imbrailo (Chou En-Lai) and Borja Quiza (Henry Kissinger); sopranos Sarah Tynan (Pat Nixon) and Audrey Luna (Madame Mao, Chiang Ching); the tenor Alfred Kim (Mao Tse-Tung) and the mezzo-sopranos Sandra Ferrández, Gemma Coma-Alabert and Ekaterina Antípova (Mao’s Secretaries). The performances are sponsored by the BBVA Foundation, which in 2019 awarded John Adams the Frontiers of Knowledge award in the Music and Opera category.
The composer himself has acknowledged having had an early fascination with American political life and has admitted some personal animosity for Richard Nixon – “he had tried to send me to Vietnam” -. But the idea of turning that historical event into an opera was not his, but Peter Sellars’s. “Nixon’s trip in 1972 was, in fact,” Adams has written, “an epoch-making event the magnitude of which is hard to imagine from our present perspective. It was certainly the first opera that used a ‘media event’ as the basis of its dramatic structure». «Opera -the composer has assured- is an unusual art, it can cover issues in the broadest way, and if we want it to have a future in its creative aspect we must address issues that affect our society and our timesuch as terrorism, the atomic bomb, international politics…»
Joan Matabosch, artistic director of the Teatro Real, analyzes the work and points out that its true key «is found in the third act, when the x-ray of the media event and the persistent irony about the cult of the person and the manipulation of public opinion in the arena Politics gives way to the sphere of the intimate, now without distances, institutional protocols, masks or filters». In this sense, he continues, «the success of John Fulljames’s staging is daring to explain the entire work from the perspective of this third act which, in some theatrical proposals more focused on the anecdotal and media elements of the previous acts, It almost seems like it’s too much.”
powerful and vulnerable
«The opera, from this angle -continues Matabosch-, is a reflection on the vulnerabilities of the most powerful men on the planet, on the emotional lives of those politicians and their environments, and on the loneliness of these men who have totally distanced themselves from the reality of their respective peoples. Fulljames, for his part, says that “this is an opera about the impotence of the powerful before history.” To do this, the British director has created a staging in which he takes on a special role in the historical documentation: “papers, photographs, film images, records and annals that are displayed and broadcast in multiple ways, sometimes on screens, sometimes through overhead projectors used in real time,” says Matabosch.
John Adams is framed within minimalism, a musical current that he does not deny. “He minimalism it describes a series of musical qualities: it’s systematic, tonal, with a repeating structure… -he said- And these elements are in some of my works, so I can’t oppose being described as a minimalist musician. But I’m not just a minimalist, that’s limiting myself; I like his energy, but I’m more expressive. Life and experience have enriched me.”
«Adams treats the minimalist style -says Joan Matabosch- with a great sense of humor, with a very subtle irony», and adds that to better understand the composer, one must take into account what he said on one occasion: «In my house you could not distinguish Benny Goodman from Mozart». Olivia Lee-Gundermann talks about the continuous changes of color that the score has, which is subservient to the text: “The repetitive rhythms support the sense of suspense of the story.” Kornilios Michailidis, for his part, assures that this was an innovative opera, which also presents «influences of jazz, neoclassical music, romanticism, Stravinsky, Wagner, Richard Strauss… You look at the past, but it is very current ».
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