Nixon Meets Wagner

I'm appalled that it's been nearly 6 months since my last post! That's the perils of volunteer labor, I guess. It's been busy, busy for us. First it was getting ready for the holidays, then it was recovering from the holidays, and now it's trying to buy a new home in the Bay Area. Lots of driving all over and viewing properties, offers, due diligence & fact-finding, an inspection - which led to cancellation of the contract. Now we start all over. I do think about the blog, but I'm too distracted by current events. House issues, Egypt, Libya, Wisconsin - you name it. All seem so much more present, so much more important than a silly vanity blog.

Last week we went to the Met HD performance of Nixon in China and I was blown away by how much Wagner is contained in the work. I've seen the work live twice before, but not since 1990 in LA. I'm sure I noticed the Wagner at the time, but the piece is now more familiar and I'm more comfortable with minimalism.

I came home, got out our Nixon CDs and ripped them into iTunes and put them on my iPod. And I've listened over and over. The music is so complex and lush - it's just a revelation. In the scene "Tropical Storm" towards the end of the 2nd act, there is a section that is pure Salome dissolving into the gods entering Valhalla and shades of the end of Götterdämmerung.

Here and there throughout the opera you hear the opening Rhine music, bits of Forest Murmurs, which when you think about it is really a precursor to John Adams and Philip Glass (funny thing, but I couldn't remember if it was spelled Philip or Phillip, but on my way to Wiki to check, I thought, "Well, heck, he's a minimalist; I'm sure he'd only use one 'l'." And, indeed, he does.)

If you haven't seen the production, most Bay area theaters are running the encore performance this Wednesday, March 2. And I would encourage those who may not think they're interested to give it a shot. Contained within the minimalism is some gorgeous, lush orchestration that you will probably recognize.

I also wanted to attach a review Martin Bernheimer wrote after he saw the world premiere. (And no, it wasn't in Houston, it was right here in San Francisco at the Herbst Theater a few months before it premiered in Houston. It was a concert version with 2 pianos and Adams conducting, as I recall. It was sort of the off-Broadway equivalent of a preview run before a show hits the Great White Way.) The review doesn't exactly say that it's a dud, but one can infer that Bernheimer wasn't sure the work was here to stay!

Minimalist Mush : Nixon Goes To China Via Opera In S.F.

May 25, 1987|MARTIN BERNHEIMER | Times Music Critic

SAN FRANCISCO — Richard Nixon eyes Mao Zedong nervously, sweats profusely, thinks of his place in history and sings an aria. It is a high baritone aria full of shallow, well-meant platitudes.

The Chinese Chairman receives his guest with quizzical civility compromised by sly bemusement and sings an aria of his own. It is a high Heldentenor aria full of mystical philosophical references.

And so it goes. This is the Imperial City in 1972, or a deliriously unreasonable facsimile thereof.

Pat Nixon spouts giddy petit-bourgeois homilies as well as lyric-soprano cliche-fragments, weeps for the downtrodden and waltzes with her sentimentality-prone husband.

Mme. Mao does some vamping, musing and waltzing of her own, amid daring coloratura flights and gusts of Wagnerian resolve.

Henry Kissinger, a basso-not-so-profondo, provides comic relief. Premier Zhou Enlai sings a symbol-laden soliloquy with something akin to a probing if inscrutable voice of baritonal reason. Choruses of various sizes add Orffian punctuation to the multifarious verbal encounters.

This bizarre but potentially beguiling concoction is "Nixon in China," a pseudo-historic quasi-satirical opera-in-progress by everybody's favorite romantic minimalist, John Adams. (Remember "Harmonielehre"?)

With two intermissions and glib explanatory remarks by the composer himself, "Nixon" ran--sometimes crept--for three and a half trying hours Friday night at the Herbst Theater.

At this so-called "concert preview," the audience in the 1,100-seat hall shrank dramatically as the evening rambled on. That need not suggest a lost cause, however. Things could be very different by the time "Nixon" receives its much-ballyhooed full-scale premiere at the new Wortham Theatre in Houston in October (with reprises to follow in Brooklyn, Washington and Amsterdam).

When finally staged, the opera will no doubt benefit from the theatrical imagination of Peter Sellars, the fashionable enfant terrible who happened to conceive the project in the first place. Mark Morris, another avant-gardish Wunderkind, will no doubt provide off-the-Great-Wall choreography, including a heart-rending ballet divertissement inspired by "The Red Detachment of Women."

By October, the opera should be adorned with bona-fide orchestral accompaniment. The singers, for better or worse, will be outfitted with body mikes.

It all will be terribly daring, terribly mod, terribly chic, terribly up-to-date. It also may be provocative. It may even be fun.

Minimalist Mush : Nixon Goes To China Via Opera In S.F. - Los Angeles Times

Also, here is a fascinating piece with a different perspective by a journalist who was on that historic trip:

Far From Valhalla: A Witness Sees History Restaged and Rewritten

By MAX FRANKEL
A look at the opera "Nixon in China" by Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Nixon's trip to China.