John Adams
The Nixon Tapes - version 3 (1998)
Scenes from Nixon in China for solo voices and orchestra

Suite includes:
Aria        “Landing of the Spirit of '76”
Aria        “News has a kind of mystery”
Aria        “This is prophetic”
Act 3         Complete

Scoring
Two flutes doubling piccolos, 2 oboes/English horn, 3 clarinets/Eb and bass,
4 saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone),3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion, 2 pianos, 1 synthesizer or sampler, strings, 2 baritones, 1 lyric soprano,
1 coloratura soprano, 1 bass. Approximately 51 minutes.


John Adams’s opera Nixon in China remains his most famous and celebrated work, with its bracing collision of minimalism, realpolitik and acute psychological insight. The London Symphony Orchestra’s performance in January, conducted by Kent Nagano, elicited an ecstatic audience response and had the critics reaching for superlatives: "a masterpiece" (The Daily Telegraph), "one of the greatest operas of the late 20th century" (The Independent), "exhilarating" (The Times), "thrilling" (The Guardian).

The composer has created three suites, The Nixon Tapes, which contain excerpts from the opera, Nixon in China, in order to make the music from the opera more available to concert audiences. Version III, without chorus, combines three highpoints from Acts I and II – the landing of the presidential plane, Nixon’s News aria, and Pat Nixon’s aria This is Prophetic – together with Act III in its entirety.

Composer's Notes on Nixon in China

As a child growing up in New Hampshire and having for a mother an old-school liberal Democrat, an active selfless party volunteer, I developed early on a fascination for American political life. The city of Concord, where I attended high school, was the nerve central of the presidential primary campaigns which rolled into town every four years, bringing with them the obligatory discharges of hot air, free canapés, and air-brushed, glad-handing candidates. I shook JFK’s hand the night before he won the New Hampshire primary in 1960, and the first vote I ever cast was for the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose 1968 campaign ultimately signaled the resignation of Lyndon Johnson and the slow winding down of the Vietnam War. So it was somewhat of a natural fit when the topic of Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung, capitalism, and communism should be proposed to me as the subject for an opera. The idea was that of the stage director Peter Sellars, whom I’d met–in New Hampshire, fittingly enough–in the summer of 1983. I was slow to realize the brilliance of his idea, however. By 1983 Nixon had become the stuff of bad, predictable comedy routines, and it was difficult to untangle my own personal animosity–he’d tried to send me to Vietnam–from the larger historical picture. But when the poet Alice Goodman agreed to write a verse libretto in couplets, the project suddenly took on an wonderfully complex guise, part epic, part satire, part a parody of political posturing, and part serious examination of historical, philosophical, and even gender issues. All of this centered on six extraordinary personalities: the Nixons, Chairman Mao and Chiang Ch’ing (a.k.a. Madame Mao), Chou En-lai, and Henry Kissinger. Was this not something, both in the sense of story and characterization, that only grand opera could treat?

To my mind Alice Goodman’s poem is to me one of the great as-yet-unrecognized works of America theater. Her words are a summary, an incantation of the American experience, and her Richard Nixon is our presidential Everyman: banal, bathetic, sentimental, paranoid. Yet she does not deny him an attempt, albeit couched in homely metaphors of space travel and good business practice, to articulate a vision of American life.

Of particular meaning to me were the roles of the two principal women, Pat and Chiang Ch’ing. Both wives of politicians, they represented the ying and the yang of the two alternatives to living with someone immersed in power and political manipulation. Pat was the ideal, the quintessence of "family values", a woman who stood by her man (preferably a foot or two in the background), embraced his causes and wore a gracious if stoic smile through a long career that could only have seen countless bouts of depression and crushing humiliation. Chang Ch’ing began her career as a movie actress and only later enlisted in the Party, accompanying Mao on the gruelling Long March and ultimately became the power behind his throne, the mind and force behind that hideous experiment in social engineering, the Cultural Revolution. In the music I composed for these two women I tried to go beyond the caricature of their public personae and look at the fragility of each’s relationship to her spouse. But in the final act, the focus of both text and music is their vulnerability, their desperate desire to roll back time to when life was simpler and feelings less compromised. Indeed, all five of the principals are virtually paralyzed by their innermost thoughts during this act. In the loneliness and solitude of his or her own bed, no one can avoid the feeling of regret, of time irretrievably lost and opportunities missed. It falls to Chou En-lai, the only one with a modicum of self-knowledge, to ask the final question: "How much of what we did was good?"

Reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com