Great singer – Newspaper Kommersant No. 58 (7503) dated 04/05/2023

For the first time in its history, the Paris National Opera staged Nixon in China (1987) by the American classic John Adams. The plot of one of the most famous modern operas is built around the historical events of 1972: US President Richard Nixon makes a sensational visit to China and meets with Mao Zedong. Director Valentina Carrasco and conductor Gustavo Dudamel tell how the turning point of the era of détente is now shown on the stage of the Opera Bastille Sergey Hodnev.

Henry Kissinger sings in bass, Nixon and Zhou Enlai have baritones, and Chairman Mao is a tenor. The fact that well-known modern political figures were brought to the opera stage in 1987 must have been terribly acutely outlandish, especially since the very title of the work seems to be a mocking game with the operatic nomenclature of deeply out-of-date times (all kinds of Aurelians in Palmyra, Alexandra in India”, “Hadrians in Syria” and other “Julius Caesars in Egypt”). In fact, Peter Sellars, the ideological inspirer of the opera and its first director, librettist Alison Goodman and the composer himself were not exactly mocking. Nixon in China is an attempt to show that opera fatal passions are not at all foreign to the fateful events that can be seen on TV.

The reflective President of the United States, accompanied by his ingenuous wife Pat and the cunning secretary of state, arrives in China, and there they are met by the rather idealized Mao Zedong, leading philosophical conversations with the guests, and his fanatical wife Jiang Qing, showing them the ballet “Red Women’s Squad”. We see, in essence, a series of tedious protocol events, we hear, in addition to official toasts, exclusively private human comments, and from all this, an event that changes the world somehow inadvertently grows (for the better – in this regard, the wise Zhou Enlai in the finale allows himself doubt). Of course, there is a fair amount of political pamphlet in all of this, and in the time since 1987 realpolitik conflicts have made Nixon in China sometimes more topical, sometimes less. But still, it seems that the music itself is more relevant here than any media context.

It is precisely in terms of music that the current Paris Nixon is an obvious and deliberately solemn success. American superstars were written out for the main roles: Nixon – Thomas Hampson, his wife – Renee Fleming, Jiang Qing – Kathleen Kim. She already sang her last decisive coloratura part, while veterans Hampson and Fleming sang in Adams’s opera for the first time and on the whole successfully (although in terms of vocal form, Fleming’s still soft and charming soprano still won – Hampson had to compensate for the erased defocused timbre and problematic highs musicality and artistry). The heavily sung Pilot Pilot by Josh Matthew Myers and the lengthy ominous Kissinger by Joshua Bloom are more notable successes, as is the opening as a marvelous, Mozart-cut baritone by the young Chinese Xiaomeng Zhang (Zhou Enlai). But perhaps the main trump card of the premiere is the musical director of the Paris Opera, Gustavo Dudamel: it is rare when the brew of Adams’ score, the most complex rhythmically and stylistically, sounds with such naturalness, tension and great dramatic breathing.

It is all the more offensive that the premiere was categorically unlucky with the director’s concept. Argentine Valentina Carrasco, not appreciating the leftist sympathies of the authors of the opera for Mao and China, here and there stuffed the production with the horrors of the “cultural revolution”.

Subtle negotiations between Mao and Nixon take place in an office where counterfeit books are on the shelves, while downstairs, in the basement, the military clique burns real books in a firebox and tortures intellectuals. That would be fine, but as an intermission before the third act, the audience is shown a long fragment of a documentary film from the 1980s, where a Chinese music teacher tells how he was mocked by the zaofani and the Red Guards: piercing, no doubt, but sewn to the opera with poster-white threads. As well as the caricature of the pampered Mao (reminiscent more of Kim Jong-un), and the visual awkwardness with which memories of the Vietnam War are introduced into the performance, and the showing in the finale – such a depth of comparison – of the events in Tiananmen Square and the recent BLM protests. And the director naively tries to show the confrontation of the superpowers either in the form of a game of ping-pong (but this is a real rhyme of “roses”), or in the form of rivalry between the carnival Chinese dragon and the unkind eagle with light bulbs in its eyes, hovering on cables. Baby metaphors are so far a weak alternative to the old versions of Peter Sellars, who once staged Adams’ CNN opera with the polish and literalness of a TV news picture.