John Adams' timely revival of 'Nixon in China'

The L.A. Philharmonic has been celebrating composer John Adams’ 70th birthday all season, and on March 3 and 5 the orchestra finishes the party with his most famous opera. “Nixon in China” is about the 37th president's monumental meeting with Chairman Mao in 1972, breaking two decades of hostile silence between the U.S. and communist China.

The opera premiered in 1987, and is now considered one of the great contemporary American operas. And Adams maintains it’s as timely as ever.

Nixon is often portrayed as a cartoon villain. But even his critics were impressed by his surprise summit in Red China in 1972, 45 years ago this week.

John Adams was 25-years-old when Nixon made his famous trip.

“I was intensely aware of Nixon,” Adams says. “First of all, because I was a student during the Vietnam War. And when he was elected president, I was almost drafted. And at the time he seemed to be a boogie man for us.

“The idea of composing an opera about Richard Nixon meeting Chairman Mao was first proposed to me by Peter Sellars, the stage director,” Adams explains. “And I was very, very skeptical because this was 1983 and Nixon was still really an object of late night television jokes. And people had still remembered Watergate and his bad behavior.

"But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was a perfect choice for an opera — because the characters were so colorful, and the story is essentially about the collision of capitalism versus Communism, which was the great agonistic struggle of the 20th Century.”

This production of “Nixon in China” is directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer, artistic curator for the San Francisco Opera Lab. And yes, she’s related to Joseph Pulitzer, the father of the Pulitzer Prize. The family connection is of note because “Nixon in China” has so much to do with news and journalism. Pulitzer began prepping six months ago — right in the thick of the 2016 election.

“There was this sort of general consensus among the design team,” she says, “you know, Look at this crook — and everything he had done, in terms of lying under oath and all of that. And then, I would say the lens shifted in light of the election, and just the sort of explosion around what’s ‘real news.’ I mean, I come from a journalism family, and the idea of actually calling it ‘real’ as opposed to ‘false’ is an entirely new rhetoric that didn’t exist.”

“‘How much of what we did was good?,' is the question that Chou En-lai ends the piece with, and a reflection on the actions that were taken,” Pulitzer adds. “And that level of self-reflection and self-doubt and questioning, and leaving it with us to question, I feel is a gift that is very important at this time in history.”

Adams says that in almost every interview he does, he is asked, "Would I write an opera about Donald Trump?" And his answer is always, "No. And the simple reason is that he’s ultimately not an interesting character to me. There’s just no shading to his personality. There’s no self-doubt, there’s no empathy. I don’t think the man cares about anyone. So, from a dramatic point of view, it’s just not interesting."

“I’ve always, with one or two exceptions, chosen to write about things that have happened within my lifetime. I’m currently writing an opera that takes place in 1850, about the California Gold Rush, but the fact that all these people came out here based on reading what basically was fake news, and the racism and the violence that took place at that time, is eerily similar to what we’re witnessing in this country right now. So I always try to take things from my American experience and use them as a means of — I guess you could say — poeticizing my experience.”

The L.A. Philharmonic performs "Nixon in China" on March 3 and 5.