Nixon in China seems to pop up with some frequency in this column. Back when my obsession with the opera began, I used to wonder what Richard Nixon made of it. In the 1990s, I found the very idea of an opera depicting a real person alive at the time of its premiere viscerally exciting – not to mention the seductively modern and quintessentially American sound of its music.

The answer to the Richard Nixon question was probably that he had no opinion on the opera whatsoever. I can’t find any reference to him ever seeing it. Either way, what aroused my curiosity was whether Nixon would have been possessed of sufficient wisdom to receive the work as a piece of reflective art eddied by the pitch and roll of fantasy, poetry and theatre. He may have been a crook, but Nixon could be a philosophical soul – one characteristic the opera depicts beautifully and without favour. Nixon spent years embroiled in the very literal legality of politics. Would that have rendered him unable to experience the operatic reflection on his visit to China without concluding, numbly, ‘It wasn’t anything like that’?

As the opera reaches middle age – or perhaps lurches into a mid-life crisis – it’s now John Adams who’s worried about how things look. Apparently, Nixon is frequently not being seen as Adams would like it to be seen. When a new production by the theatre collective Hauen und Stechen opened at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in July, Adams made his displeasure known on X. ‘Painful to think about,’ he wrote, above a video of the curtain call posted by the journalist Heiko Schon. ‘Nixon in China is so often mistreated or misunderstood. In 35 years I have only seen two productions that got it right. This one? Clearly a disgrace.’

It was odd to read such a reflective artist and broad-minded human being as Adams writing about ‘getting it right,’ when centuries of art – and indeed, the final scene of Nixon in China – suggests things are rarely so cut-and-dried. I’ve seen four productions of Nixon. One was the original Peter Sellars staging with which the opera was born. Of the three others, two were transfixing, resonant, sensitive and illuminating treatments of the work that did something different: managing to remain present while acknowledging that the events inspiring the opera are rapidly receding into history.

Presuming Adams also saw both those productions – and presuming one of his ‘two that got it right’ was the original Sellars staging in which he was complicit – we apparently disagree. Which raises the question: what is my opinion as a critic, audience member and fan of the opera worth, against that of its creator?

As Adams will know, history suggests artists aren’t always great at appraising their own work and are frequently even worse at seeing it in all manner of broader contexts. That said, I would be intrigued to know whether librettist Alice Goodman shares Adams’ own views on which productions of their work ‘get it right’. Her libretto, one of the most profound and quick-witted in all opera, is as much at the heart of the piece as Adams’s music. More than most libretti, it invites a bold expansion of the imagination from all involved.

Among opera’s strengths as an art form is its combination of texts that remain effectively fixed with productions that change beyond recognition according to the times in which they are created. Given the cultural climate and the economics of the industry, few living composers these days get to see multiple productions of an opera they’ve written. Adams wouldn’t be frustrated about duff productions of Nixon in China had he not written an enduring masterpiece that people around the world still want to see, though it’s telling that the composer believes its successor, The Death of Klinghoffer, a better piece (it doesn’t get half as many outings).

You can forgive Adams for wanting to protect a technically meticulous work. ‘We composers can only babysit our creations for so long,’ he added on his X post, acknowledging the way of things. It’s unclear whether Adams saw the Deutsche Oper production in its entirety. I haven’t, but I did watch a trailer on YouTube. No fool would draw critical conclusions on a three-hour show based on a three-minute trailer, but having seen it, you can certainly appreciate where Adams might have been coming from. A few days later, on another social media platform, I saw a post from a friend who happens to work on the music staff at the Deutsche Oper. It was an image from the canine cartoon Bluey, showing Bandit Heeler and his daughter Bingo, who have just witnessed something they created being torn apart by others. ‘When you put something beautiful into the world,’ says Bandit Heeler to Bingo, ‘it’s no longer yours, really.’

@operalastnight

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Opera Now. Never miss an issue – subscribe today