Nixon in China, the orange juice

[Sean]

The dance sequence in this opera is the most amazing thing I've ever seen on a stage. So it's not Tristan but it is the major operatic statement of the late 20th century.

Here's my in-progress notes on essentially one-work composer John Adams's Nixon in China, plus a link to my Powerpoint presentation given to multiple student groups here at a southern Chinese university.

The video always makes a strong impression on a proportion of the students- those already hypnotized by their neurotic little messages on 3x3cm screens by this time naturally don't count...

The ballet sequence in question I expect is still on Youtube, presently inaccessible from China, posted by someone called JeeRant if I remember- part 13.

It's also available in a better longer stretch via the Chinese equivalent called Baidu video or Tudou, starting about three minutes in to skip Walter Kronkite's opening stupidies and commercial drivel.

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/S93kzE2RQts/

My powerpoint file

https://www.box.com/s/3bzpnjw49jd42pgxi1d1

Adams's 1985-7 Nixon in China is the last significant masterpiece in music's evanescence, an example of postmodernism's Dionysian play, non-intellectual critique and incredulity towards overarching schemes and authority. Nixon's 1972 visit to China is recent history to relate to closely and within personal memory, and as often with Glass and other minimalists the music is drenched in marvellous nostalgia from the great tonal repertory's recession, augmented by eclectic influence from Wagner, Stravinsky, Holst, Shostakovich and others. Moreover the on-off character of minimalism's rapid, short motivic writing and frequent sense of wistfulness and loss is reflected in the rise of postmodern simulative binary digital technology and the loss of modern direct unitary analogue.

The conception of Nixon is surrealistic using a play within the play, a poetic couplet libretto after Wagner, iconoclastic repetition of music and words, and indeed famous people not normally singing to each other. Singing though captures the Dionysiac and the sense of being carried by deeper forces in life, as indeed in Greek tragedy. It also examples the Wagnerian total artwork in its integral blend of music, poetry, drama, imagery and dance.

The opening two acts have more clearly delineated statements and melodic sequences but in the third these are spliced and juxtaposed, alongside the music's referencing of past major composers, such that they are taken less seriously, being treated nihilistically or hypercritically- both the closed sections and what emerges as the portentious tone of Nixon's and Mao's ideological stances are mocked. Indeed with such irreconcilable differences the only option is to transcend them to the protagonists' own simple humanity and a state of play without attempting dialectical critique: the protagonists slide into personal reminiscences aligned with postmodern concern for subjective response.

While the communicative power of the simple harmonic idiom critiques intellectually contrived structures imposed from without, the drama's corresponding reversion to simple ethical human behaviour and spirit critiques the high politics and belief in overarching ideology. Humanity trumps Cold War ideals of how to organize society particularly as played out in its Chinese atheist cultural setting.

The meeting with Mao indicates the antagonism and irreconcilability of capitalist and communist positions despite their common material values, positions that were to dissolve in postmodern pragmatism. By the final scene and its uniquely calculated anti-climax the attempt at dialectical critique and finding syntheses of opposites for a new ideology is completely abandoned on dramatic and musical levels, even becoming more chromatic and less melodic, art and alienated life having had their day.

Intellectually constructed subjective viewpoints are no route to underlying truth but with subject and object blended in the reciprocal relationship between Self and artwork, the absolute and its self-reference underlying both, an intersubjective, universalizable intuition is. Furthermore most of the best music is in the first half followed by a gradual anti-climax, disrupting linear development and reflective of reactionary postmodern equality: the three acts have the asymmetry of three, two and one scenes each.

The play within the play as with the examples in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet unexpectedly reveals deeper truths about the main play, with simple humanity negating ideology and high politics all as the music follows its own emerging musical, dramatic and human logic over pre-designed narrative schemes; seemingly trivial details in the drama and music have the core interest and significance.

Several play characters get drawn into and participate in the danced play after being shocked by it and the opera's absolutely phenomenal aesthetic centre is where in reviving a brutalized girl a gun is offered but replaced by a glass of orange juice: spirituality issues from atheistic and materialistic Chinese society via art, the absolute in the relative. As in all great art the surreal logic just follows whatever multi-reference frame dynamics that emerge and evolve, the aesthetic line and power from the gunas' pre-everything field independent of any other consideration.

Moreover the juice as well as Nixon and Pat's involvement in the play as part of the framing audience draws the relative into unity with the absolute aesthetic content. And in parallel with minimalism's Indian music origins the disruptive technique of including in a story the figures framing it is in the Indian tradition, for example in the Mahabharata. There's also similar holistic form and lateral thought as providing interesting substories and architectonic-defeating aesthetics, as further in Wagner.

The music is influenced by the end of Wagner's Die Walkure and its human values and reflects minimalism's summary of the ascendance of tonality's depth humanity over contrived harmonies' barbarity and mindlessness. The girl is persuaded into the militia then later denounced while her spirit never changes; moreover girls as soldiers dance using and trekking with guns, making bathetic ridicule of warfare via their beauty, delicacy and superb choreography.

The plays' relations undermine the art-life dichotomy and art as counterbalance to life's tensions, accompanied by the music's repetition and juxtaposition of inwardly related non-linear ecstatic ideas; the play within the play is also an instance of repetition, static self-referentiality and its infinite fascination. The understandable tonality and expressive idiom as grounded in folk music is a movement towards life itself and away from high modernist reflectivity of life while the attempts to rationalize politically and architectonically hold up until the juice but disintegrate from there into the third act when there are only people and their vulnerability.

This less memorable but carefully constructed act parallels the musical and social decline in modernism, post-tonality and postmodernism. The reminiscences only meaningful on subjective levels are blended across the protagonists in intersubjective Dionysian unity, singing in counterpoint even though in separate rooms, defeating compartmentalized Apollonian thought; the nothingness of words and interconnection of music is also that of normal human experience and reality.

In Nixon as with many great artworks all the initial participants were outstanding with extraordinary commitment, the work bringing out their best because they sensed its value and self-creation under independent aesthetic imperatives: composition, libretto, singing, conducting, playing, acting, choreography, dancing, direction are in the 1987 Houston production and subsequent recording superb and inexhaustibly watchable.

Also as with other films of enormous aesthetic interest in terms of social critique such as The Wicker Man and The Devils it has mysteriously never been officially released in full. The 2011 Metropolitan recording not to mention the 2008 Alsop recording, is on the finest levels a statement of infinite loss, horrific brainlessness, unspeakable evil and terminal disease, with the participants at one with the inhumanity and frenetic empty eyed psychosis of computer simulation; humanity is truly at an end point.


Nixon in China, Houston performance 1987- some internet links

Show scenes in this order; could intersperse the ppt above with them
 
Act 1 scene 1- news (at start see few moments of Nixon film, then from 12.30)
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/5mqVY7jcVow/

Act 1 scene 2- meeting with Mao (from 2.30)
http://v.ku6.com/show/9XKm7tQHGLrtMf5RDoZ4Pg...html

End of meeting scene (inc from 4.20)
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDE1MTQ2NTY4.html

Act 1 scene 3- speaches (from 6.40)
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/TTf2dqOd8Gk/
 
Act Scene 2
Dance sequence including juice (03.10 - 22.00)
I am the wife (26.30 as nec to end at 32.50)
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/S93kzE2RQts/

Check all volume controls inc on console and amplifier...

[kishnevi]

Adams has written a goodly amount of worthwhile music;  maybe not for the ages, but he's hardly a one work composer.  As to whether NiC is the major operatic statement of the late 20th century---I suggest checking back near the end of the 21st century before  saying something quite so definite as that.

This is in fact one of many productions shown on PBS's Great Performances and related series (Dance in America, etc.) which deserves a DVD release.

[Sean]

I read somewhere that there are mysterious problems with the release of the original Houston production- there's no real mystery though, just repressive nonsense culture that stops critical art...

So, any thoughts on a better opera of the period? I didn't think so... Or a better Adams work?

Sean

[kishnevi]

I read somewhere that there are mysterious problems with the release of the original Houston production- there's no real mystery though, just repressive nonsense culture that stops critical art...

So, any thoughts on a better opera of the period? I didn't think so... Or a better Adams work?

Sean

We're too close in time to be really able to judge what the best opera of the last n decades is--that was my point.  Especially since, depending on how define "late 20th century",  you're potentially saying this opera is greater than The Crucible, Vanessa,  or any of Britten's last operas.

And Adams has written a number of works at least as good as Nixon in China, in my opinion.  Perhaps being marooned in [sarcasm]the cultural backwater known as China [/sarcasm] has prevented you from hearing any of them.

[Sean]

We're too close in time to be really able to judge what the best opera of the last n decades is--that was my point.  Especially since, depending on how define "late 20th century",  you're potentially saying this opera is greater than The Crucible, Vanessa,  or any of Britten's last operas.

And Adams has written a number of works at least as good as Nixon in China, in my opinion.  Perhaps being marooned in [sarcasm]the cultural backwater known as China [/sarcasm] has prevented you from hearing any of them.

Hi Jeffrey

Adams isn't in a historical position to write anything better than his great 1985-7 opera Nixon in China- the cultural terms of existence aren't there.

Barber's Vanessa is boring and Britten's late operas including the best of them Death in Venice with its ridiculous undeveloped wistfulness are on my side of the argument I'm afraid... Best wishes, S

By the way you'll have to remind me which second rate pen The Crucible comes from.

[Octave]

Ug.

[Sean]

Jeffrey, I think I was being a bit antagonistic there and I could marshal a few better arguments for what I was trying to say. Britten's opera cycle peaked early, other British opera excepting Nyman et al is following its problematic post-tonal path, and though the Adams isn't great music in the traditional sense I think it has a key and still undervalued position in stage works of the last quarter century.

[Sean]

I've also now found out about Robert Ward- I hadn't heard of him but I can access some of his orchestral works here so I'll give him a go, starting today.

[Karl Henning]

There wouldn't be an actual point to mentioning any other Jn Adams work, would there, Sean, because your mind is already made up, isn't it?

If once you admit that your dogmatic points are open to reappraisal, the whole house of cards is apt to tumble down.

[Sean]

Everything should be open to reappraisal, sure thing...

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

essentially one-work composer John Adams

It's funny how when Sean finds a piece of contemporary music that he likes, he still has to damn its composer with faint praise.

[Karl Henning]

Well, he's not a good listener, is he? He's too interested in what he thinks about things, to mind the music.

He also reminds me of a classmate who reviewed a new Springsteen album when it came out. He wrote the entire review and when I got to the end of the article, I realized that he was interested only in the lyrics -- he didn't say a word about the music.

[jochanaan]

I saw Nixon in China here in Denver several years ago, and liked it.  Most memorable, aside from the nice minimalist orchestration, was Mrs. Mao's line "We'll teach these f***ers how to dance!"

[Karl Henning]

I should learn these little lessons . . . titter them with a little scatology, and they'll take you more seriously . . . .

[Octave]

Does anyone who's heard more than one of the available recordings have a strong preference?  I'm only aware of the original De Waart; the newer Alsop (Naxos); and a Blu-Ray from last year, which is the Met production conducted by Adams himself.

[Sean]

Velimir, sure, Adams found something really extraordinary in Nixon and he was never going to do it again. He's not a great composer but was suddenly at the centrepiece of the late Western cultural high point that supported every aspect of the project. I'm still not sure how he gets so much amazing 1970s spirit and nostalgia into it- all the more poignant in the present decadent morass.

Karl, one doesn't have to worry too much when one knows one's right. And though scatology sometimes has those unexpected comic effects that propriety suggests it shouldn't, that's not the case here.

jochanaan , that stupid line isn't in the DeMain Houston production or the De Waart recording. There's a libretto with the De Waart- I haven't checked it; Trudy Allen Craney just says 'Hit it, boys'. It is in the garbage Alsop recording though.

Octave, the DeWaart is the only recording to consider. There is the occasional fresh feminine perspective from Alsop but the purpose of her set it is to reduce this masterpiece to the brainless shouting match of an American musical.

Actually the DeMain premier theatre production is even sharper and incisive and I do marginally prefer it; the cast is the same as the recording, made right after- don't know why the conductor changed.

[Sean]

Also I really did not like the Met production from the couple of available Youtube clips and certainly Maddelena if I've spelt his name right no longer has the voice for it; not sure about Adam's own interpretation.

[Sean]

Jeffrey, etc

Ward's Third is somewhere between Copland's fresh air, Martinu's open air particularly with the piano obbl, and Khachaturian's nostalgic air- a bit derivative but well worth getting into actually.

[Sean]

No one with any thoughts on the orange juice I guess?

[kishnevi]

Only if it's made from Florida oranges