JOHN ADAMS – ELLIE CAULKINS OPERA HOUSE – DENVER, COLORADO –
MARIN ALSOP – COLORADO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA – COLORADO OPERA CHORUS – 2008 –
NIXON IN CHINA – 1987
Before discussing the characters
and the music, it is important to ask the question of the direct representation
of modern historical facts in operas. History is common in plays and
Shakespeare and his histories are the very model we can think of. He covered
practically all the important kings of England. Marlowe added Edward II
who was not exactly a great king. It is true Richard III was not a great king
either but he was the last of the Plantagenet kings and his short reign was
crucial for the evolution of the English crown.
As for historical events we can
think of “Egmont” by Goethe then brought to the operatic stage by Beethoven. It
deals with the independence war of the Netherlands
against the Spanish King and Germanic Emperor that was successful for the Netherlands and failed for Flanders.
In the same line we can think of the Spanish Civil War depicted by Brecht in “Señora Carrar's Rifles.” We can also think of Jean Genet’s "Four Hours in Shatila" about
the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
But it is quite common that operas may deal with wider social
or political questions like the end of feudalism in France, before what was to happen
some years later with the French revolution, in Mozart’s “The Marriage of
Figaro.”
It is true it was and still is common in communist regimes
like in the USSR or China to use
historical events or ideological questions as central arguments in plays,
operas, films. It is true the theatrical stage and the movies deal with
historical situation a lot, and television with documentaries can deal with
very recent political or historical situations. In the West we seem to think
that opera is supposed to remain detached from direct political events. We can
note it has become a fad in the West today to present all composition by
Shostakovich, or other Russian composers, with a more or less long litany on
Stalin’s dictatorship, which is frankly out of place because it has no value
whatsoever on the quality of the music.
So you can imagine the reactions in the West when this opera
came out and it could even have been considered as typically American with
their exacerbated nationalism and patriotism. And yet, as we are going to see,
this opera is a lot more complex and rich than just that praising the wisdom of
American leaders in the present world. Some say it is a masterpiece of American
music and opera. We might get to a more complex vision and assessment at the
end of this review.
THE MUSIC
The music is first of all striking by what some call its
minimalism. It is based on short sequences of notes that are repeated over and
over again and are the very basis of the composition. The opera, for instance,
starts with an eight beat tempo over seven notes and one silent beat and this
musical phrase is just hammered into us hundreds of times, with variations up
and down the scale and from one instrument to another. This is only one
example. There are hundreds of such tempos in the opera and yet to reduce the
music to that would be faulty because these rhythmic sequences of notes that
vary from two or three up to seven or eight beats are used in two different ways.
First of all the opening eight beat seven note sequence
little by little goes into the background of a more melodious music that
develops in the foreground to the point, for this rhythmic sequence, of being
merged into this melodious façade. The second treatment of such rhythmic
repetitive phrases is that several different phrases can occur in the same
scene and they overlap, superimpose themselves over one another, create some at
times chaotic polyrhythmic construction that expresses or supports a chaotic
political situation in the concerned scene. It is true though these very
overpowering sequences are constantly present, in a way or another, and they
have a mesmerizing effect that becomes subliminal after a while. We do not
listen to them anymore but we hear them and our understanding of the plot is
literally mastered – and formatted – by these sequences.
MINIMALISM AND HUMAN
EXPERIENCE
But I would like to insist on another aspect of this
minimalist technique and music. It corresponds to an experience of modern life
in modern society. We are constantly swallowed up by various rhythms in us and
around us, in every single of our activities or actions, and these rhythms are
multiple, constantly crisscrossing one another, totally overpowering and unconscious
and yet formatting us entirely into what we are: polyrhythmic beings that could
not survive one minute if these tempos and rhythmic patterns disappeared. The
matrix of them have to do with our being Homo Sapiens, the bipedal fast running
long distance species we are and that implies we have to constantly coordinate
several physiological rhythms of ours: the heart, the breathing, the legs, the
arms, and the whole body. It is when these different rhythms are brought
together and coordinated that we experience the highest level of satisfaction,
fulfillment and pleasure. The basic activity that is constructed around such a
rare moment of absolute coordination is human sex, which by the way is
basically animal in nature though human in mental power.
Minimalist music had antecedents in the first thirty years of
the 20th century with Stravinsky, Prokofiev and many others, and not
all Russian. It correspond to the emergence of industrial suburban life in big
cities. Ballet dancing is in itself such an elaboration with dancers
coordinating their own movements, each dancer their various limb movements for
example, and the various dancers with pas-de-deux for one example. Ballet
dancing could also work on the opposition of such rhythmic construction and the
lack of coordination between two or more dancers could become significant and
signifying. And that comes from very far in human history since dancing is a
very old human activity, even if it mostly worked on coordination (like in the
old minuet) but did not ban confrontation.
MESMERIZING RHYTHM
We know this aspect of our modern life was marvelously
depicted by Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times” showing how industrial gestures
and rhythms could become obsessive compulsive and thus overpowering, though yet
and always significant and signifying in any situation, including the sexual
innuendo of the scene when Charlie Chaplin performs his screwing gesture with a
woman in the street.
Just as this rhythmic opportunistic and circumstantial
composition is constantly present in our daily life, including with music
nowadays and the constant sonorous presence of musical rhythms and compositions
in our environment, both personal and social, it is also mesmerizing, hypnotic,
unconscious and subliminal. We all know we have some musical rhythms and
phrases that come back in our consciousness without knowing where they come
from. This type of subliminal formatting is constantly used by advertising, both
on the radio and on television. This opera is absolutely typical of our age and
the rhythmic minimalism is fundamental, but we do not capture it after a while,
though our unconscious mind captures without counting the binary, ternary,
quaternary and so on patterns. The traditional symbolism of these rhythmic
patterns is lost in our modern world though in the Christian tradition every
single one had a meaning and our Romanesque or Gothic cathedrals or churches were
built on such numerical symbolism.
We are thus manipulated in real life by such rhythmic
patterns that have some deep unconscious meaning that we do not control any
more, if ever. In this opera we let ourselves be transported by this subliminal
rhythmic background but it informs our understanding of the opera itself.
THE LANGUAGE
That’s where the language can be brought in because the use
of the language in this opera is often going that rhythmic way and creates
patterns that are no longer symbolic but that have a deep resonance in us:
these patterns reverberates in us without us knowing it. Let’s take some
examples. In Act I Scene three Chou sings:
“From vision to inheritance
From vision to inheritance
From vision
From vision
From vision to inheritance”
We can see the patterns that can be rendered with “from
vision” = A and “to inheritance”= B as being AB – AB – A – A – AB. It is
essential because Chou speaks of the vision of the past revolution and then the
present inheritance that kills the revolution. In his vision there is little
future except the managing and processing of this inheritance. That’s a
particularly pessimistic vision emphasized by the singing pattern.
Nixon actually answers Chou with another pattern:
“We must seize the hour
We must seize the hour
We must seize the hour
We must seize the hour
And
seize the day”
In the same way we have a pattern that can be rendered if “we
must” = A, “seize” = B, “the hour” = C and “the day” = D as follows: ABC – ABC
– ABC – and BD. The value is purely opportunistic and circumstantial on Nixon’s
side. No vision, no inheritance, just an opportunity that must not be missed
because it “makes history” as he says. He has some sense of the future but
without any vision at all, without any project, just the future for the
future’s sake.
This use of language is extremely present in the whole opera.
THE BALLET IN THE OPERA
We could take another example which is a lot vaster since it
concerns the whole Scene two of Act II, the “Red Detachment of Women” ballet
which is provided with a text to be sung on an original music by John Adams,
not the original Chinese music of the ballet by Huang Zhun. The text is mostly long sequences of iambic dimeters
with variationS on the iambic pattern that turns trochaic here and there, at
times slightly more complex. The singing and the music emphasize this
linguistic pattern, or linguistic patterns. Let’s give one example: the first
Chorus:
“How thin you are!
If every
scar
On this
poor back
Could only speak
These walls would crack
This thick-walled heart
Cast in the dirt
Would raise the cry
“Hate
tyranny!”
We can note how the opening trochee of the seventh line
emphasizes the meaning: the downtrodden Ching-hua. In the same way the final
line with the unorthodox rhythm of two stressed syllables and two unstressed
syllables stands out as a slogan, a motto, like in a demonstration.
Those are only examples of how the language is formerly made
significant beyond the words themselves.
We can now turn to the characters and the “political” meaning
of the opera.
CHIANG CH’ING
The first act starts with the chorus singing some simple
mottos taken directly from the Little Red Book of the Quotations of Chairman
Mao Tse Tung (today’s Mao Zedong) you can check it at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/.
Nixon on arrival sounds confused in his political vision when he says: “We live
in an unsettled time. Who are our enemies?” and then he turns paranoid when he
adds: “The rats begin to chew the sheets. . . Nobody is a friend of ours.” Then
he meets Mao. Mao then stands as a philosopher when he says: “My business is
philosophy” and when he greets Kissinger as “the philosopher.” But at the same
time he says “I back the man who’s on the right” meaning on the right and not
in the right as Kissinger suggests. And he clearly explains: “The line we take
now is a paradox. Among the followers of Marx the extreme left, the
doctrinaire, tend to be fascist.” This sounds more like John Adams’ opinion,
but it is amplified by a heavily repeated sentence that expresses Mao’s total
disillusionment at the end of his life, placid and (maybe) cynical
contemplation of events: “Founders come first, then profiteers.” We are just
after the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing, present later on
is over-powerful if not all-powerful.
This Chiang Ch’ing (today’s Jiang Qing) is called “that tasty
little starlet” my Mao. She came in 1938 in his life and survived him. She was
sentenced to death, a sentence that was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983
and she committed suicide in 1991. She was Mao’s fourth wife and a typical
manipulator till the end. The opera more or less presents her as an orthodox
sectarian fundamentalist of Mao’s thinking with her presentation herself at the
end of Act II as follows:
“I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung
Who raised the weak above the strong
When I appear the people hang
Upon my words, and for his sake
Whose wreaths are heavy round my neck
I speak according to the book”
John Adams includes his own meaning here with the line cut after
“hang” and the double meaning it has then which is emphasized by the “wreaths”
three lines later. The last line is repeated ad nauseam. The whole set of six
lines is repeated a few lines later and the Chorus will close the act with a
final repetition of this last sentence. The “book” is the Little Red Book of
course and at the same time you can hear all fundamentalists in any religion or
philosophy in this stance, the book being either the Bible, or the Quran, or the
Book of Mormon, or Das Kapital,
or Scientology:
The Fundamentals of Thought. And she will go even further in the present when in the last scene
she repeats “The revolution must not end.”
Mao is just the puppet at the end of the strings of
this woman. In Act III he explains his recollection of the revolution under the influence, if not
the guidance, of his wife when he says twice “Revolution is a boys’ game.” Is
it really? Or is it child’s play?
CHOU AND
LAI
Chou (today’s Zhou Enlai) is the realist in the
situation: he knows Mao’s wife’s adventures (the Cultural Revolution for
example) leads to a lot of victims and let us know about it when he says:
“We saw our parents’
nakedness;
Rivers of blood will be
required
To cover them. Rivers of
blood.”
And near the end he summarizes his own life as
follows:
“I have no offspring. In my dreams
The peasants with their hundred names,
Unnamed children and nameless wives
Deaden my footsteps like dead leaves.”
He appears as a complete ghost in this situation, a ghost
that more or less represents the peasants who have so many names that they have
none, their children who have received no names and their wives who have no
names. Note the progression from too many names to no received names and to no
names at all. And this Danse Macabre of ghosts brings death in the picture with
the pair “deaden. . . dead. . .“ And Chou will close the opera with the
following question and his answer:
“How much of what we did was good?
Everything seems to move beyond
Our remedy. Come heal this wound.”
You cannot have a more pessimistic balance sheet from someone
who led, in second position for sure, the Chinese revolution from the beginning
till his own death in 1976. And yet the opera closes with a phenomenal
contradictory and frightening poetical metaphor that contains all the hope we
can grasp in our everyday experience:
“Just before dawn the birds begin,
The warblers who prefer the dark,
The cage-birds answering. To work!
Outside this room the chill of grace
Lies heavy on the morning grass.”
We can see the alliance of the free birds who sing in the
night and the caged birds, the slaves who answer the free ones. Metaphor of the
revolutionary underground forces who call the slaves and advise them to rebel,
to stand up and break the cage. You can feel and sense the “chill of grace,”
that chilling tragic moment when history changes, moves forward, transforms
itself in the most graceful event that requires “rivers of blood” to be
fulfilled.
THE THREE AMERICANS
Then in front of these three characters whi are the three
American representatives. Kissinger is also playing the landlord’s factotum in
the ballet, Lao Szu. He is just a cynical diplomat who tries to get his will
through by all means. In the ballet he is the one who will give the order:
“Whip her to death!” He is the one who is negotiating the end of the Vietnam
War in Paris, as he is reminded of by Mao, while the war itself is becoming
more or more brutal in its last years (three more years to go).
Pat Nixon appears as the total fool who only sees the surface
of things. Practically inexistent in Act I, she is central in Act II since she
occupies the first half with her three “cultural” visits. She only sees details
like a glass elephant that she likes. And she has a long soliloquy which is
inconsistent.
“This is prophetic! I foresee
A time will come when luxury
Dissolves into the atmosphere
Like a perfume. . .
. . . Why regret
Life which is so much like a dream,
Let the eternal plan resume. . .”
And seventeen more “let” will follow and all the humdrum
clichés of the American society seen as a naturally growing organism with
references to “bedroom communities,” “the band,” “the stand-up comedian,”
“Gipsy Rose,” “businessmen,” “routine,” “days,” “the sun,” “lovely drivers,”
“the farmer,” “passersby,” “them,” “the Statue of Liberty,” “her,” “the Unknown
Soldier,” “him,” “The Prodigal,” “the eagle,” “bride and groom,” and the
concluding line “let it
remain inviolate.” In other words LET
IT this perfect American cliché or accumulation of clichés be eternal,
never change. Who is she to give that instruction? Of course, no one. She is
simply asking some kind of anonymous god to do it. Note the “perfume” that has
to be an allusion to the “beauty parlor” she was supposed to visit quite often
and where she revealed the secret of the Oval Office she had gathered on the
pillow from her husband, the President.
In the ballet she is such a fool that she believes the
actress who is “whipped to death” is really “whipped to death” and she drags
her husband onto the stage to come to the rescue of the actress. She is like a
child who wants to grasp the character or the candy he/she sees on the TV
screen.
She is thus a believer who works by the book, the book of the
American Dream, of what Chou alluded to in his toast in Act I:
“The virtuous American
And the Chinese make manifest
Their destinies
in time. We toast
That endless province whose frontier
We occupy from hour to hour,
Holding in perpetuity
The ground our people won today
From vision to inheritance.
All patriots were brothers once. . . “
RICHARD NIXON
The frontier of the Far West, and China
is that Far West beyond the sea. The manifest
destiny of Monroe’s
doctrine. The American Dream of a world dominated by the USA. And Chou is
trying to share it with Nixon who does not pick the metaphor and answers with
another dream:
“Telecommunication
has
Broadcast your message into space.
Yet soon our words won’t be recalled
While what we do can change the world. . .
But let us, in these next five days
Start a long march
on new highways,
In different lanes,
but parallel
And heading for a
single goal.
. . . We
Must seize the hour and seize the day.”
Apart from an allusion if Mao’s Long March, the metaphor is
that of the Information Highway that drowns the allusion to Mao’s Long March in
some opportunistic stance in front of a media-oriented circumstantial challenge,
which has little to do with Saul Bellow’s fourth novel published in 1956. But
the original meaning in Horace (Odes 1:11) has to be kept in mind: “While we
speak, envious time will have {already} fled: seize the day, put
very little trust in the future.” That belittles Nixon’s opportunistic Carpe
Diem reference.
So, in the last act and in the last scene of this last act we
are not surprised that Pat leads Nixon into speaking of WW2 and his involvement
in the Pacific campaign. But it is all reduced to nothing at all, no fighting,
no real danger, just let them live and enjoy the adventure. In the very closing
scene Nixon and Pat reminisce how Nixon had organized some typical American
food stand in the war. While Chiang Ch’ing is repeating “the revolution must
not end” and before Chou’s pessimistic and realistic conclusion on the
impotence of human beings in front of history, Nixon is serving “a free burger
and a beer” to his military mates? Between the two “the revolution must not
end” we have this profound remark from Nixon:
“They called it “Nick’s Snack Shack.” I
found
The smell of burgers on the grill
Made strong men cry.”
I thought that real men did not cry, but I must have been mistaken,
though to cry for the smell of a hamburger is as trite as trite can be. And his
last words will come just before Chou’s pessimistic and realistic conclusion on
the impotence of human beings in front of history. Nixon concludes this
historical event with:
“Done to a turn;
Rare, medium, well-done, anything
You say. The Customer is King.
Sorry, we’re low on relish. Drinks?
This is my way of saying thanks.”
Welcome consumer’s society! Then what can we conclude?
CONCLUSION
A historical event indeed but history is not in the hands of
the men who took part in this event. History has its own logic. Mao is a
dreamer manipulated by a fundamentalist wife who speaks by the book, acts by
the book, and will end very badly after having caused rivers of blood to be
shed while Chou is mopping around this blood to keep it within the river beds.
On the other side Kissinger is a cynical diplomatic tyrant while Pat Nixon is a
fool attached to superficial illusions and Richard Nixon is an opportunistic
self-centered paranoid person reminiscing the past with or for pleasure and
“seizing the day” without even knowing what it will bring, manipulated as he is
by a modernistic metaphor of the media information highway.
All that developed on this mesmerizing hypnotic minimal
rhythmic music engulfing and supporting all melodious moments and linguistic
meaning. We are subluminally intimated the overwhelming signification that life
is life, time is time, history is history, but we are nothing in that stream of
historical unconsciousness. Luckily biologists and physiologists start telling
us the human species has reached its maximum natural life span. We just have to
become mechanized robots to finally go beyond history in the metal scrap yard
of tomorrow’s singularity.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 5:19 AM