Music and Politics

The recently screened images of George Bush Junior coming down the walkway thingy from his plane to broker peace in the Middle East (that's meant to read ironically) for some unaccountable reason put me in mind of John Adams's wonderful opera Nixon In China, and since I had been intending to use the weekend to listen to at least one full opera from my collection, amongst other things, it was Adams's epic that made it to the turntable. And how glad I am that it did. I don't play this enough, I suppose because I feel I need to listen to the whole thing at a stretch to do it justice and that doesn't fall so naturally into my routines.

The brilliance of the piece lies in something fundamental to its conception. Of course, the music is superb - complex yet accessible, dramatic yet tuneful - and the libretto is of the highest quality, being, amongst other things, a compendium of wonderful half rhymes, and less than half - sort of echoes, whispers of rhymes. But it's the extraordinary idea of treating the protagonists in at least one respect as genuinely heroic characters that takes the opera to another level. It's easy to see why this would work with Chou Enlai & Mao, but to apply it to Nixon himself and Pat Nixon took genius.

Just one example: Nixon's early rhapsodic News is a kind of mystery comes off as funny, yes, a kind of satirical comment on a politician's infatuation with capturing the networks at primetime, but it also connects to a haunting sense of the magic of having the world focused upon you in the middle of events larger than you can ever be, as if part of Nixon is just another viewer watching the president walk into history. Adams's use of repetition here, a legacy of minimalism, as in so many parts of the opera, casts a new light upon the libretto, a device which, I imagine, would work wonderfully in the opera house, allowing the audience time to linger over the power of the words as they are hammered home in our consciousness. (Interestingly, a certain tension between the written libretto and Adams's setting is apparent if you read Alice Goodman's actual words as you listen. At times the repetitions seem to go against the supple rhythms of the lines on paper, but this tension seems to add yet another layer of meaning to what is taking place on stage, at least as far as I'm concerned.)

The mingling of the public and private worlds of the protagonists reaches a climax in the brilliant final act - one of the most satisfyingly 'right' endings to any kind of drama I have experienced. Making Nixon's memories of his wartime experiences deeply moving is art of the highest order. Good grief, I almost find myself liking the man. Almost.

Back in KL in December I read David Hare's Fanshen (a play about the revolution in China) along with a few other plays from the mid-seventies, and I was struck then by how powerfully political themes can be dealt with in the theatre, and, perhaps, how important it is to a culture that such themes are embraced. That's a bit odd for me as I've always tended to favour the private over the public, the apolitical over the committed. More of this, and Fanshen, anon - I hope.

I just wish I could get hold of some kind of video of Peter Sellars's original staging of Nixon in China. That's one dimension of the work, and its full meaning, I'm painfully aware of lacking.