John Adams’s Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives by Timothy A. Johnson (review)

In his autobiography, John Adams reports that ‘the two-year period I spent composing Nixon in China [1985–7] was a steep learning curve, but I reveled in it’. He then makes one of his most revealing technical comments: ‘I found I loved creating character through my choices of harmony and rhythm’ (Hallelujah Junction (London, 2008), 140–1). No mention of motive or theme and, as the many extracts from the vocal score of Nixon in China included in Timothy A. Johnson’s book demonstrate, it is not just that the orchestral accompaniments are largely devoid of motivic content, confining themselves to purely harmonic support that appears to deprive the orchestra of the kind of participatory awareness of very specific dramatic elements common in opera at least since Wagner. The vocal lines also seem to have more to do with pitch successions that conform to the governing chordal routines than with individualized motivic elements. So it is not simply that ‘character’ is created through harmony and rhythm. Musical meaning becomes embodied in rhythmicized harmonic progression, in keeping with the minimalist principle that moods can be conveyed without the kind of motivic content that imposes those connections between melodic shapes and people, objects, and other things to be found in so many other operas. It is as if Adams wants to show that musical mood is underpinned by a text rather than generated by that text; it is by no means obvious that music that somehow contradicted a text would have to be very different from music that seemed to support the text.

Johnson describes this effect without exactly pinpointing its special musical qualities. For example, with reference to the opera’s banquet scene (Act 1 Scene 3), he notes that ‘Chou’s speech differs remarkably from Nixon’s, especially musically’, then quotes Michael Steinberg’s statement that ‘here is an instance of how music characterizes as precisely as words. The distinct musics of the two speeches—Chou’s fluent, flexible, confident, free, Nixon’s staccato, nervous (at least at first), somehow stiff in its irregularities—speaks volumes’ (p. 246). It takes a critic of Paul Griffiths’s acuity to draw the general conclusion that—whether intentionally or not—one of the defining features of Nixon in China is the ‘touching quality’ gained from ‘the imbalance between the great international events recalled on stage and the small homely music—an imbalance that might express the diminishment of heroism in the television age’ (Modern Music and After (3rd edn., Oxford, 2010), 358). Adams’s own motives in writing the opera certainly seem to have had more to do with irony than with affection or nostalgia: ‘when Peter Sellars proposed an opera about the Nixon visit, my own antipathy toward that president who’d tried to draft me and send me to fight in Vietnam had not even begun to reach equanimity. In the meantime Nixon had been thoroughly disgraced by Watergate, and the American love for a good rehabilitation story had yet to be extended to him. ...The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea of putting Richard Nixon to music’ (Hallelujah Junction, 135).

Is Nixon in China that ‘good rehabilitation story’? Does it really, as Richard Taruskin has claimed, differ ‘from most twentieth-century operas by reinvoking music’s power of enchantment, surrounding historical characters with a “transcendent” aura that turned them into “timeless,” godlike figures’ (Oxford History of Western Music, v (New York and Oxford, 2005), 519)? The apparent scepticism embodied in Taruskin’s scare-quotes seems to fit well with Griffiths’s unambiguous conviction that, while ‘Nixon, arriving at Beijing in the first scene, exults in having “made history” ... his music is ruthlessly commonplace. “Trivial things are not for me,” sings his wife Pat; but they are in what she sings.’ Griffiths then attempts to make sense of this dichotomy...