Editorial: Myth-Making in ‘Nixon in China’ and Why Modern Directors Don’t Get It
While Refining Their Signature Style, Young Directors in Berlin Failed to Deliver Any Relevant Message
This essay originally appeared on Operawire.com on July 23, 2024
On July 11, a renowned composer John Adams posted on X (ex-Twitter):
This @deutsche_oper production: painful to even think about. “Nixon in China” is so often mistreated or misunderstood. In 35 years I’ve only seen 2 productions that got it right. This one? Clearly a disgrace. But we composers can only babysit our creations for so long.
What do we need myths for? To find and learn the great truth in the great adventures of the bravest heroes. To be deeply impressed, so we would never forget or betray the values our idols stood for. To make the world better, after all.
And what makes a story a myth? A plot that never happened before, a danger that is hard to compare, unreal circumstances, and certainly a hero, that hopefully solves everything in the most unpredictable way or sacrifices themself for a great purpose.
Do we have many such stories in our modern history? There are only a few, probably because it takes decades if not centuries to turn into one.
The 1972 visit by the American President to China had been turning into a myth while it was happening.
Historic Mission
The Cold War, Vietnam, weak or failed attempts at nuclear disarmament. Spies and suspicions everywhere. All this built a perfect staging for a new myth to be born.
Mutual threats with the Red countries and anti-communist politics in the US were not giving any results. Living in constant fear weakened the nation. The need for an unconventional approach was clear. Establishing peaceful relations with communist powers in Asia seemed to be a double win. And this is how a new purpose was found and Nixon in his own words made it a reality.
Before leaving for China, the US President stated that although the US and China have had great differences for decades, what was extremely important at the moment was to manage these differences to prevent war. This farewell statement almost from the board of his plane, self-proclaimed Richard Nixon a new hero.
Everything that was happening and being seen in China by the Western world was just a fairytale itself. It was a land of another culture and from another time, but like an ancient dragon from Chinese legends it inspired fear with its might and wisdom of the centuries behind it.
So, all the ingredients of the myth were ready and mixed into the story with the widest media coverage in the world.
What would happen if the visit failed and was there a real possibility for that? Historians must have asked such questions for sure, but there’s not much written on that. The legendary status along with a round-the-clock media coverage of the event everywhere in the world, made it evident and enigmatic simultaneously. The only thing that was made clear to people was that the world became safer.
“The Week That Changed the World,” Nixon concluded his trip.
Turning Into an Opera
The recent President’s visit was a defiance of fate for the art form that mostly dealt with the affairs of the past. A complete modern myth with everything said and done, carefully documented was waiting for artistic reflection.
Could other art forms have done that? Sure, there were many creative attempts on this matter. Theatre tended to use too much irony if not satire, especially taking the main characters Mao or Nixon into account… Books turned into documentaries or became too romantic, losing the main line. The visual arts proposed both ironic and documentary reflections of the event, concentrating on particular parts.
None of it gave the complexity that opera could propose and became the flagship to bring the story decades later.
The story was exhaustive. And the plot was not a question. The creators’ team now needed to make their piece special and embellish the story with their own shades of colors, words, and certainly sounds. With how they saw it, because, and it was the most exciting part, all creators have actually witnessed it in real time!
“I was attracted to this idea because it was a part of my life. I was a college student when Richard Nixon was president and he tried to send me to Vietnam. So I had very strong feelings about him,” John Adams said in the interview.
And he composed it this way, modern and minimalist and way beyond. Rhythmic patterns are repetitive but complex, they develop as a plot evolves, and keep us grounded in the plot no matter how unpredictable the visit to China turns. The dissonances are built as a strong response to the evocative lines of Alice Goodman and shake the emotional setting, it liberates us from following the plot directly, insisting that the emotional level was another, no less important, part of this trip.
Alice Goodman laid the ground for never taking this story for fun. She obviously felt a responsibility to faithfully communicate the values and ideals that the event stood for. And she made it through her characters that eventually got emotional arcs such as you can see in a full-fledged novel.
“We couldn’t make it as a satire, we had to have each of our people however monstrous, speaking as eloquent as they possibly could,” Goodman commented.
The lyrics in “Nixon in China” are supernatural. Be it the political ambitions, tiny personal secrets or memories, social imbalance, or enthusiastic observations, it gives a very certain feeling of personality and their role in the story. You can never mix up the characters even if you see just plain text.
And though the text, and certainly the music, are not sympathetic to the disgraced American leader, it leaves us with some kind of human and even heroic sense of Nixon.
“A story of normal people changing the face of history,” Thomas Hampson, who played Nixon in the approved by Adams production at Opera de Paris, commented on the characters.
And they were ordinary people, after all, put in the surreal theatrical space, watched by millions of people around the world. Protecting peace for this world or maybe just playing this legend to teach us the importance of peace for all of us.
Modern [Mis]Understanding
“Nixon in China” explores the key moment in history, that laid the ground for the profound changes in international relations between many countries and regimes out of the initial US-China case.
It contains many things to reflect on today when the relations between the US and China are quite tough and suspicious again, not to mention the obvious problems with Russia.
The original director and ideator of the opera Peter Sellars called his creation an “opera that has the shape of a dream space, of big-time diplomacy.” This is how it was made. And how it would be greatly appreciated today by many people concerned with the situation in the world.
Probably, it’s another reason why there’s no place for satire in it. In the world we live in today, laughing loudly in the face of our fears looks less like a morale-lifting exercise and more like doomed hysteria.
And this is what happened recently in Berlin. Young directors Franziska Kronfoth and Julia Lwowski paid neither attention nor respect for the (now) old myth, its heroes, and its very substance. Another thing that’s gone missing is a strong connection between the story and music. While the work of Goodman/Adams certainly can be percept without a visual part at all, the performance after losing the connection turned rather painful.
The directors duo promoted their style, bright and aggressive, and needed to turn it against the enemy. But “Nixon in China” is a modern and wise myth where the enemy cannot be pointed on that simple. We are left to watch and learn, to value every word coming from each side, to evaluate their ambiguity, and to comprehend how to turn it all for the better.
Unable to find the obvious victim of their rage, directors looked into the real world and found propaganda, our modern eternal enemy. They made it the evil power of their performance and made much fun of that. But they couldn’t get that propaganda did not correlate with the significance of this event, and the diverse media coverage and learning about the possibility of peace in the bipolar world made much more for the myth-making in the story. Yes, it boosted the popularity of the President, as it was supposed to do. But, when talking about our times, wouldn’t it be great, if politics would try to prevent the war for their popularity instead of starting it as they are getting used to now?
Kronfoth and Lwowski, who made John Adams angry, left me very sad, hoping that they will not again show their lack of understanding of the topic with other important operas. They missed a great opportunity to make a fantastic production and to tell a great American myth in Germany, and also, to learn themselves what must be learned by us, those who were born after the premiere of “Nixon…”
There have been many arguments about modern and unconventional productions in the last decades. I believe that it doesn’t matter if it’s classic or not if it respects the source and through the artistic lens provides good moral values. But I’m afraid now, we are experiencing a new wave of this crisis.
In a world of overconsumption, where everything seems to be already seen, the directors pay too much attention to refining and promoting their recognizable style. But only a few can at the same time achieve depth in understanding the piece of which Bob Wilson is a good example. Others fall into their own trap and bring nothing worthwhile into the world, using great music like a random soundtrack for their Instagram stories.
And, just as I teach my daughter about such poor content, I can conclude this article about the disgraceful staging, “Nobody actually cares much about it since there’s no real value.” And that was exactly what the massive exodus of the audience from Deutsche Oper revealed about the performance of “Nixon in China” in Berlin. I hope it was noticed by Kronfoth and Lwowski, as well as the theatre administration, and at least this lesson will be learned.
