But when the poet Alice Goodman agreed to write a verse libretto in couplets, the project suddenly took on a wonderfully complex guise, part epic, part satire, part a parody of political posturing, and part serious examination of historical, philosophical, and even gender issues.” By 1983 Nixon had become the stuff of bad, predictable comedy routines, and it was difficult to untangle my own personal animosity – he’d tried to send me to Vietnam – from the larger historical picture. I was slow to realize the brilliance of his idea, however. The idea was that of the stage director Peter Sellars, whom I’d met – in New Hampshire, fittingly enough – in the summer of 1983.
John Adams describes the initial impetus for the work: “As a child growing up in New Hampshire and having for a mother an old-school liberal Democrat, an active selfless party volunteer, I developed early on a fascination for American political life… So it was somewhat of a natural fit when the topic of Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung, capitalism, and communism should be proposed to me as the subject for an opera. Nixon in China has since had numerous revivals including at the Los Angeles Opera in 1990 and, most recently, at The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, in London in June of 2000. Andrew Porter pointed out in his New Yorker review of the opera that the Nixons, Henry Kissinger, and Madame Mao, had she not been in prison for her role in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, all could have attended the premiere. The actual premiere took place at the Houston Grand Opera in October of 1987 followed closely by performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Netherlands Opera. “I felt like I was pregnant with the royal heir,” Adams has said of the time of its composition, “so great was the attention focused on it by the media and the musical community at large… As it turned out, an unstaged sing-through with piano accompaniment done in San Francisco five months before the actual premiere attracted critics from twelve national newspapers and was even mentioned (and sardonically dismissed) by Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News.” No modern opera has ever been followed with as much interest, or its premiere so anticipated, as Nixon in China.
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