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As opera characters, both Nixon and Mao Zedong are faintly ridiculous and faintly noble, singing of their hopes and dreams in Goodman\u2019s enigmatic, evocative lines. And Kissinger \u2014 Nixon\u2019s national security adviser in 1972 and, a year later, his secretary of state, too \u2014 is there by their side, just as he was in history.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Peter Sellars proposed the idea of the opera,\u201d Adams said in an interview, \u201che had just finished reading Kissinger\u2019s \u2018White House Years,\u2019 which I seem to recall being pretty pompously self-congratulatory. I think there was some interest in cutting the secretary down to size.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNixon\u201d sought to unlock the ruminative depths beneath the headlines and set-in-stone positions surrounding a much-reported story. (Adams and Sellars would later do the same in \u201cThe Death of Klinghoffer\u201d \u2014 another collaboration with Goodman, about a 1985 cruise ship hijacking by Palestine Liberation Front militants \u2014 and \u201cDoctor Atomic,\u201d about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb.)<\/p>\n
The piece is not exactly sympathetic to Nixon, but it leaves audiences with a more poignantly human sense of him. The opera\u2019s Kissinger, though, is never really human; he doesn\u2019t get the exposure of thoughts and ambivalence granted to the other main players. \u201cHe\u2019s not the character we go into great psychological depth with,\u201d Adams said.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s not deep, but he\u2019s smooth. In the first scene, as the Americans arrive, and awkward niceties are exchanged in the form of interjections, fragments and repetitions, Kissinger is the only one who sounds<\/em> comfortable. The role\u2019s bass register gives him sonorous diplomatic suavity; it\u2019s soothing, while everyone else sounds strained and anxious.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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\u201cHe is and always was theatrical,\u201d Sellars said in an interview.<\/p>\n
But this veneer comes off in the second act, during a fanciful reimagining of the Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda ballet \u201cThe Red Detachment of Women.\u201d As in \u201cThe Mousetrap\u201d from \u201cHamlet,\u201d reality and fiction blur: The singer playing Kissinger is, without explanation, in the ballet as Lao Tzu \u2014 here, in case you didn\u2019t get the message, a tyrant\u2019s sinister chief aide. (\u201cDoesn\u2019t he look like you-know-who!\u201d Pat Nixon exclaims.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As Lao Tzu, the grounded suavity of the first act is gone in favor of lascivious, violent extremes; the singer soars into falsetto and, faced with a rebellious peasant, stutters a cry to \u201cwhip her to death.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m here to liaise with the backroom boys,\u201d Kissinger-as-Lao-Tzu sings, \u201cwho know how to live.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are a little shocked when he appears as the sadistic overlord,\u201d Sellars said. \u201cBut obviously he\u2019s the man who\u2019s responsible for Chile and for the secret bombing of Cambodia \u2014 the list of atrocities and acts of unspeakable violence is long. And that lurid stuff is behind the jolly and well-spoken diplomat. The surprise is, as always, no one is just one thing. That is one reason you make operatic characters.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the ballet unveils Kissinger\u2019s officiousness as sheer brutality, his final moments in the last act are prosaic: \u201cPlease, where\u2019s the toilet?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n
And, the libretto tells us, it\u2019s only after he leaves in search of the bathroom that the Nixons, Mao and his wife, and Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, can \u201call enter a state of reverie\u201d: the surreally poetic final ensemble, in which the five characters muse on their lives, their countries and the fate of both.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n