{"id":164249,"date":"2023-05-11T12:24:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-11T16:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=164249"},"modified":"2023-05-11T12:24:21","modified_gmt":"2023-05-11T16:24:21","slug":"americans-abroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/05\/11\/americans-abroad\/","title":{"rendered":"Americans Abroad"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Richard and Pat Nixon in China, 1972. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

By the time I saw Nixon in China<\/em> during its 2011 run at the Metropolitan Opera, it had become a classic, if not an entirely undisputed one. It had made it to the Met, at least, with its composer, John Adams, conducting, and James Maddalena, who originated the role of Nixon in the 1987 premiere at the Houston Grand Opera, back at it, now nearly the age Nixon was when he made the trip. A friend of mine, with theatrical \u00e9lan, bought out a box for a group of us and encouraged formal dress, as if we were in a nineteenth-century novel. He showed up in a tux. I don\u2019t remember my outfit, but I\u2019d be surprised, knowing myself, if I managed anything more presentable than a mildly rumpled off-the-rack suit. At the time, I was working as an assistant to a magazine editor who regularly attended the opera, in full formal dress, with a pair of its major donors, fitting in an elaborate meal on the Grand Tier during intermission. My handling of his invitations gave me a surprising proprietary sense about the place. I didn\u2019t feel that I belonged<\/em>, of course, but at least I had a narrow help\u2019s-eye-view of its workings. In the upper deck, and even in our box, my friends and I had the sense of superiority that comes from being broke and artistic among the rich and, presumably, untalented.<\/p>\n

Not that I had any major insight into the opera at the time, this one specifically or the art form more generally. I\u2019d sat in the cheap seats on a few occasions, trying to rouse myself awake for the end of Tristan und Isolde<\/em>, once, with a Wagner-loving girlfriend. I\u2019d even stood in the back row of the orchestra for Leo\u0161 Jan\u00e1\u010dek\u2019s From the<\/em> House of the Dead<\/em>, feeling obligated as a Dostoyevsky loyalist to bear witness. (All I remember is a general brownness and a grim, monochromatic score. It was, after all, a Czech opera about a Russian prison camp.) I did, however, have an abiding interest, bordering on mania, in the pathos of conservative politics, and only a person who has lost interest in the world could fail to be interested in Richard Nixon. The friend who had arranged this outing was, among other things, a news junkie and former Republican, and his relationship to the former president was characterized, like the opera\u2019s relationship to its subject, by a complicated mix of irony and enthusiasm. Dramatic renderings of Nixon tend toward the sweaty and profane (as in Robert Altman\u2019s Secret Honor<\/em>) or the broadly comic (Philip Roth\u2019s novel Our Gang<\/em>, or the 1999 film Dick<\/em>, starring a young Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, an overlooked gem surely due for reappraisal). But Adams\u2019s monumental, hypnotically Glassian score and Alice Goodman\u2019s dense postmodern libretto invest Nixon with a weird if inarticulate dignity that he rarely displayed in life. The striving and paranoia are tamped down, replaced with yearning na\u00efvet\u00e9 and statesmanship.<\/p>\n

Though the opera remains true to the publicly known contours of the actual trip, Nixon in China<\/em>\u2019s Dick and Pat are as much stand-ins for Americans Abroad\u2014hopeful, a bit bumbling, but fundamentally decent, albeit with the power of the world\u2019s wealthiest country at their back\u2014as they are representations of real people. (Nixon, it\u2019s worth noting, was still alive when the opera premiered, and was invited to the opening. A few years later his representative said that he didn\u2019t attend because he \u201chas never liked to see himself on television or other media, and has no interest in opera.\u201d Okay!) In his arias, Nixon delivers a garbled mix of clich\u00e9s, non sequiturs, impressionistic memories, and Ashberyian koans, the most famous of which, \u201cNews has a kind of mystery,\u201d is repeated in dizzying variations soon after Nixon descends from his Boeing 707 and shakes hands with Chou En-lai (as the Chinese premiere\u2019s name is unorthodoxly rendered in the libretto). The song lodges in one\u2019s brain immediately\u2014I\u2019ve been continually exclaiming \u201cNews! News! News!\u201d at my four-month-old son\u2014and serves as a kind of motto or benediction for the entire work, simultaneously insistent and ambiguous. It\u2019s the exclamation of a man who is marveling at the mythmaking apparatus that he has been an active beneficiary of and that will ultimately destroy him. It\u2019s the vagueness that makes it transcendent, a half-formed thought one might jot down in a notebook and turn over in one\u2019s head for days. A kind of<\/em> mystery?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an emptiness at the core of Nixon in China<\/em> that is appropriate, given that it\u2019s about political pageantry, the kind of nonevents that Joan Didion identified as the stock-in-trade of modern politics in her 1988 essay \u201cInsider Baseball.\u201d One of opera\u2019s chief methods is to turn private emotions into grand spectacle, to give voice to feelings that could never be as beautifully expressed as they are in a duet between two doomed lovers. Nixon in China<\/em> turns superficial spectacle into another spectacle, a copy of a copy. There is action\u2014Nixon meets with Mao; Nixon and Chou deliver toasts at a banquet; Pat goes on an official sightseeing tour\u2014but there is little dramatic movement. Even when we do get insight into the \u201cprivate\u201d Nixon, Pat, Mao, et al., in quieter scenes that take place behind closed doors, what is revealed is not fundamentally different from what is presented publicly. Adams\u2019s score ebbs and flows, churning on and on, threatening, but never tipping over into, catharsis. The work steadily resists resolution\u2014it ends with an extended coda, taking up the entire third act, in which the characters prepare for bed.<\/p>\n

At the time, in 2011, I remember enjoying the spectacle, and puzzling over what it all meant. News \u2026 news \u2026 news \u2026 I had been to the opera so infrequently that I assumed any gulf between my understanding and the work\u2019s intention lay with me. But the passage of time hasn\u2019t brought a grand interpretive theory, and anyway, that isn\u2019t really what this art form requires. Over the subsequent decade and change, I\u2019ve found in opera a refuge of old-fashioned virtuosity, a place where, give or take the occasional malfunctioning Ring Cycle set, one can reliably admire vocal athleticism and swaggeringly baroque production values, regardless of one\u2019s level of prior knowledge. Of course, understanding the source material, the nuances of the score\u2019s texture and performance choices, the historical context of the work\u2019s composition, and much else, adds to the experience on an intellectual level\u2014that is, in retrospect. But so much of the joy lies in the immediacy of the moment, which one can feel even as a know-nothing in the cheap seats, and supplement as desired in the aftermath.<\/p>\n

On reflection, the very tentativeness that Goodman\u2019s libretto invokes\u2014a kind of<\/em> mystery\u2014suggests her and Adams\u2019s philosophy. It\u2019s not anti\u2013great man theory, exactly, as it\u2019s still very much an opera about history\u2019s main characters. But the tenuousness of their position is made clear. They are tourists at the grand events they have set in motion, and their role is as much to comment and reflect on them as it is to shape them. They inhabit a world in which gesture has more power than reality. It was, in retrospect, the perfect opera to dress up for, and for pretending to be more than we were.<\/p>\n

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Early Work\u00a0<\/span>and the story collection<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Cool for America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019ve found in opera a refuge of old-fashioned virtuosity, a place where one can reliably admire vocal athleticism and swaggeringly baroque production values.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[67827,12425,2200,68662,2204,6850],"class_list":["post-164249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-featured","tag-john-adams","tag-metropolitan-opera","tag-nixon-in-china","tag-opera","tag-richard-nixon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAmericans Abroad by Andrew Martin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 11, 2023 \u2013 \u201cI\u2019ve found in opera a refuge of old-fashioned virtuosity, a place where one can reliably admire vocal athleticism and swaggeringly baroque production values.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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