In 1972, Richard Nixon went to China to meet Mao Zedong and thus reshuffle the cards of world politics, while tensions with the USSR were still high and the Vietnam War was far from over. In 1987, this historic episode was the subject of an opera created in Houston, Nixon in Chinawhich is worth to the composer John Adams, born in 1947, to take date in the lyrical universe by a very personal treatment of contemporary “myths”.
As for Einstein on the Beach (1976), flagship of the new opera made in the USA, whose success was as much due to the staging by Robert Wilson as to the score by Philip Glass, the original impact of Nixon in China is partly to the credit of Peter Sellars, the director who suggested the theme for the opera to John Adams. This means that we were waiting with interest, Saturday March 25, at the Opéra Bastille, for the reading of the work by Valentina Carrasco, born in Argentina in… 1972.
« Diplomacy du ping-pong »
His point of view is perceptible from the performance of the overture, which takes on the character of a theatrical prologue in which the music serves as an accompaniment to a game of table tennis, played in slow motion. Two symbolically masked players compete there. One, dressed in blue, has the hooked nose of a trick-or-treat eagle; the other, all in red, has the head of a carnival dragon. Valentina Carrasco thus places her approach to opera under the aegis of the first rapprochement between Chinese and Americans, in 1971, through sport, which was described as « diplomacy du ping-pong ».
The curtain then rises on several dozen singers-pongists who are quick to sing the first “hit” of the opera: « The People Are the Heroes Now » (“The people, here are the heroes, now”). A smiling declination of mass expression that sets the tone for a seemingly entertaining show.
In appearance, only, because, after the arrival of the presidential couple, flanked by the inevitable Henry Kissinger (Joshua Bloom, very credible), aboard a gray metal eagle, and the usual salutes intended for the photographers, we quickly understand that the work of Valentina Carrasco is based on the concept of illusion. Mao (inoxidable John Matthew Myers), who prides himself on philosophy, receives Richard Nixon (Thomas Hampson, with a slightly dulled treble) in a living room that looks like a library. The books lined up on the shelves are only trompe-l’œil; the real books are stacked on the floor below, behind the railings of a dark jail, before being burned in an oven which ensures the heating of the residence of the Grand Helmsman.
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