History as opera

Rico says that many classical operas were written as histories of the time, and the trend is recurring, according to articles by Max Frankel and Michael White in The New York Times:

Max Frankel: What's it like to watch your own experience turn up as grand opera: in my case, finding my reporting about Nixon in China suddenly evoked by the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adams’s Nixon in China? Very weird. I kept imagining myself onstage in the prepositioned press crowd as Air Force One dropped from the sky in Beijing. And there I was again among the toasters clinking glasses that night at Chou En-lai’s banquet for the president.
Weirder still was my realization that one of the main characters in the opera was still living (and surely sulking) just a mile across town. That’s because the Henry A. Kissinger I know from years of professional contact is just a wee bit more fascinating and complicated than the lecherous lackey of landlords who drags his namesake through the muck in the Met’s drama. He sings:

She was so hot
I was hard-put
To be polite.
When the first cut
— Come on you slut! —
Scored her brown skin
I started in,
Man upon hen!

Then, too, the devious Richard M. Nixon who haunts my generation and who still speaks to us on tape embodies a lot more intrigue, pretension and paranoia than the smooth Nixon baritone up onstage. (This air agrees with me./Wish we could send some to D.C.) The forbearing Pat Nixon at his side does resemble the first lady in my head, but her poetic soprano longings for the simple life sure vex that memory. I also insist that to a billion contemporary Chinese, Mao Tse-tung has a lot more to answer for than the merry chaos and inscrutable epigrams this opera uses to recall his reckless ardors. (Founders come first/Then profiteers.) As for Chiang Ch’ing (Mrs. Mao), well, her artful shrieks clear up to high-D actually do some justice to her vicious real-life domination of the Cultural Revolution.
All that I’m seeing sung, danced, and acted out at the Met is indeed live and raw stuff from 1972, which continues to shape American policy: the crass calculations of international politics, the yearnings of two then-exhausted societies seeking renewal in each other’s embrace and the hunger of hugely misguided leaders pining for the solace of justification.
There’s no denying the art in Nixon in China: the brisk rhythms of Mr. Adams’s music; the wit and elliptical fantasies of the librettist, Alice Goodman; and the inventions of the director, Peter Sellars. They first seized on this subject in 1983, a mere decade after the president’s journey, and finished the work in 1987, more than six years before the deaths of Nixon and his wife. (Like China, the creators of Nixon had to wait a generation for the ultimate American recognition, in their case from the new moguls of the Met.)
So what does the resonance of reality do for art? And what does art owe to reality?
If Picasso can deconstruct a guitar, why shouldn’t opera distort diplomacy and pervert personality? Verdi, the grand master of dramas that combined personal passions with social and political conflict, said that “to imitate truth may be a good thing but to invent truth is better.” Yet he let 2,500 years pass before borrowing real personages for Nabucco and 300 years before recreating the struggle of dogmatism versus liberalism in the Spain of Philip II in Don Carlos. In stark contrast the conspiracy theorists of Hollywood, led by Oliver Stone (JFK, Nixon), reject such respectful patience as they design ever more numerous docudramas (pace Mark Zuckerberg). Well, Nixon in China persuades me to take my stand with Shakespeare, who chose a century as the minimal safe distance between actual events and his iambic-speaking kings.
Opera, of course, is improbable by definition. It is musically and emotionally histrionic. No one will ever mistake operatic recitative for actual conversation, no matter what names and costumes the singers bear. So why bother, as in Nixon, to lure us to a fictional enterprise with contemporary characters and scenes from an active memory bank? Why use actualities, or the manufactured actualities of our television screens and newspapers, to fuel the drama?
The answer is obvious but also treacherous. Newsreel drama can help to overcome the musty odor that inhabits many opera houses. The siren song of a familiar tale can draw a new generation to the box office; to this day we implore our politicians to make surprising policy, to pull off a Nixon in China. Above all, a seemingly relevant story can harness the power of contemporary experience, tap into the knowledge and emotions that audiences possess before the overture, and so build on reality to stake a claim to deeper truths.
The danger is that despite the verisimilitudes of text, setting, and costume, a viewer’s grasp of events may not match the fabric being woven onstage. What the creators intend to be profundity may strike the knowing as parody. By appropriating and embellishing a recognizable history, the art may end up straining our credulity.
Nixon in China illustrates the problem. As the Met’s program notes observe, it is, after all, a “media event about a media event”. The opera is plotless, a mere depiction of scenes from a diplomatic marriage. Confined by circumstance, it is mostly without passion, lacking the swollen strife of the grandest operas; there are no turbulent love affairs, no corrosive jealousies, no religious ecstasies, no unfathomable calamities.
There is no room in this scenario for the back stories all of us original actors brought to the journey. The great convulsions of Mao’s China, which had claimed millions of lives, are only lamely evoked in scattered phrases about revolutionaries who swim as “fish swim through the sea”, endure a “long march”, are made to “leap forward”, and implored to “seize the day”. Similarly, the opera offers only vague allusions to the memory, then raw, of Americans and Chinese battling in Korea and to the winds that drove Nixon across the Pacific, his retreat from cold-war demagoguery and bitter defeat in Vietnam.
Besides, the main images produced by this historic journey turn out to inhabit only the first of the opera’s three acts. A perfect rendering of the presidential jet, the Spirit of ’76, appears from the sky and disgorges the hatless statesman, followed by his first lady in iconic red. True to a memorable photograph, Nixon shakes the hand of Chou En-lai, which Americans had rudely scorned for a generation.
The welcoming chorus strikes a slightly false note when it sings Mao’s 1929 strictures to be kind to peasants and captive foes; it might more aptly have intoned his dictum for party discipline, to hold “the individual subordinate to the organization”. Yet the airport chitchat between Nixon and Chou is accurate enough, and Nixon’s mind is aptly described as preoccupied with his image in American living rooms, with domestic “enemies” gnawing at him like rats and with his constant self-tutoring to stand “steady like a rock”.
Onstage, as then, the men are next rushed off to Mao’s reception room. His tenor sings a convincing version of that frail chairman’s frail banter, bad jokes, and opaque metaphors, all duly emulated by his American guests. Summit meetings really are like that. But what the opera fails to capture are the truly operatic convulsions implicit in this scene. The despotic god of Red China was blessing the visit of an American whose whole career had been built on Red-baiting. You had to escape the cocoon of the presidential party to catch sight of the perplexed crowds that gathered around photos of the meeting when they appeared without real explanation on wall newspapers around Beijing.
Nor does the opera encompass the elegant diplomacies and strategic minuets by which Chou and Kissinger, seated at the fringe, brought their bosses to this encounter. In Beijing that day, you could almost hear the anguished cries of betrayal from their Vietnamese and Taiwanese allies; unseen, their choreographed infidelities had been an essential prelude to the entire journey. And I clearly felt the tremors in far-away Moscow, as the United States and China now made common cause against the Soviet Union; the tectonic balance of power was shifting beneath our feet.
On, then, to the first of the week’s banquets, which was little more than another photo op, a joyous exchange of toasts over fiery mao-tais and trite words. Mr. Adams’s music captures the frothy excitement we all felt, but it can only hint at the quaint renderings of American tunes (like Home on the Range) with which the People’s Liberation Army Band entertained us. The incongruity of its performance still pierces my memory more sharply than any modern atonality. Even more discordant is the declaration by the opera’s Nixon: I opposed China./I was wrong. He offered his hosts no such confession.
Having exhausted the most familiar images of the Nixon trip, the stage action now travels a very different road from mine. Instead of following Mrs. Nixon on her dutiful sightseeing, as the opera does, I spent hours exploring the terrain that only a few renegade Americans had trod for a quarter-century. The opera shows the first lady greeting cheerful, well-coached children. I encountered dozens of youngsters who burst into tears and buried their heads in mothers’ skirts at the sight of the scary, hairy, long-nosed monsters from abroad. They gave by far the most poignant demonstration of the gulf produced by decades of isolation.
For just an instant, a few bent figures then cross the stage sweeping a path for the visitors. And that vignette violates my most vibrant memory of the entire week. For what I really saw was hundreds of thousands of women trudging through the streets at dawn, raking away perhaps an inch of snow with pathetic brooms of cord-bound twigs. As I wrote at the time and wonder still: what power can turn out such multitudes at the drop of a snowflake? What force can evoke such pride of work and thoroughness? What poverty commands such labor? And what wealth of satisfaction results from such collective and monumental effort?
How little we knew of these people. Yes, the Nixon trip was essentially just a piece of theater, but my out-of-sight interviews and ventures that week left me with a decidedly deeper drama than the Met’s reproduction.
In any case, Act Two catapults from the real to the surreal when we reach the Nixons’ night at Chiang Ch’ing’s high-voltage ballet. Instead of glumly enduring the humiliation of having to applaud the rout of the ballet’s “running dogs of capitalism”, as they really did, the Nixon and Kissinger characters are here physically flung into the middle of the ideological dance. Henry assumes the role of a servile agent of landowners and a defiler of peasant womanhood; Pat becomes the comforter of the downtrodden; and Dick, her confused helper, breaks into one of his chronic sweats. Since this is the only opportunity for the intrusion of actual ballet, the whipping of the workers and their liberation by the Red Detachment of Women goes on for quite a time, until Mrs. Mao defiantly ends up: At the breast/Of history I sucked and pissed and through her dogma, wished to be A grain of sand in heaven’s eye/And I shall taste eternal joy.
Finished now with the historical and the ideological, the opera takes a final turn, in Act Three, to the psychological. Arrayed before us on Freudian couches, the Nixons and Maos soliloquize about their youthful days of personality formation. The chairman and his bride (actually his fourth) recall dancing to the romance of revolution and battling their way to power. The president harks back to his Navy combat and how “five-card stud taught me a lot about mankind”, to “speak softly and don’t show your hand”. Kissinger uses his couch for a roll with his translator, avers that life is hard, asks to be shown to the toilet, and never reappears.
It is easy to mock the story lines of most operas, but that is not my main purpose here. I mean to suggest, in all sympathy, that when living reality is so blatantly harnessed to bait the audience with familiarity and to create a heightened sense of excitement, it risks being constrained by that same reality from reaching true depths of drama and character. At the sudden and surprisingly ambiguous end of Nixon in China we hear Chou’s plaintive aria asking How much of what we did was good?/Everything seems to move beyond/Our remedy.
I left wondering whether the opera’s creators might not share his anxiety.

On a lighter note, an opera about Anna Nicole Smith, of all people (though she's certainly an operatic figure):

Michael White: Drugs, sex, greed, and grotesque behavior: it could only be opera, right? For all its chandeliers-and-champagne style, opera has long enjoyed a voyeuristic interest in low life. Half its heroines are fallen women: Lulus, Violettas, Manons, briefly flourishing in sin and paying in the end. But opera’s love affair with sleaze takes on a new dimension when Anna Nicole Smith, the buxom Playboy centerfold, celebrity gerontophile, and tabloid-culture princess (who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2007) takes to the lyric stage.It happens at no less an establishment than the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in Anna Nicole, a new opera that bears an adult-content warning on the posters, by the English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. And it’s not passing without notice. British newspapers have been titillating their readers with the prospect of a night of sung debauchery and moral outrage since the project was announced. And those include publications whose views on opera wouldn’t normally extend beyond denouncing it as something swanky and elitist.
“It’s true,” Elaine Padmore, the director of opera at Covent Garden, said in a recent interview. “We’re getting coverage for Anna Nicole in places we wouldn’t expect to take an interest in our productions, though if they think it’s going to be a girlie show, they’ll be disappointed. It may be a tacky subject, but it won’t be tackily staged.”
On paper, Anna Nicole is a paragon of cultural credibility, involving A-list personnel like the stage director Richard Jones, the conductor Antonio Pappano, the Wagnerian soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek (soon to make her Metropolitan Opera debut as Sieglinde in Die Walküre), and the baritone Gerald Finley. A Royal Opera commission, it reflects the company’s commitment to feeding new work into the repertory. And as a work based on real, recent events much covered in the news media, it plays into the latter-day tradition of newsreel operas, like John Adams’s Nixon in China, now at the Met, a respectable precedent.
But it is a different precedent that has sent the British press into overdrive. For if the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith were not sensational enough as an idea for an opera, the libretto was written by Richard Thomas, the author of the infamously rude and risqué Jerry Springer: The Opera, which caused gleeful outrage on both sides of the Atlantic several years ago.
Mr. Thomas says that Anna Nicole won’t be so robustly scatological, although the Royal Opera warns on its website of “extreme language, drug abuse, and sexual content”. The site nonetheless described the show as “a celebratory story of our times”. What exactly is it celebrating? “That’s a mistake,” Ms. Padmore said. “It’s meant to say ‘a celebrity story of our times’, which is nearer the mark.” The wording on the site has since been changed accordingly. “Anna Nicole is a parable,” Ms. Padmore continued, “a bad fairy tale about a character so larger than life she becomes surreal. It’s also very funny, although I don’t think it laughs at her. It’s not cruel.”
Still, it does raise the question: why this subject? Did Ms. Padmore never have misgivings about taking on Anna Nicole? “Of course,” she replied. “And people never tire of asking, but it’s the wrong question. The process of creating this opera didn’t start with her. It started with wanting an opera from Mark-Anthony Turnage. We talked over a long period about what the subject could be. Eventually he came up with Anna, and it seemed like the right fit for his approach to composition, which is steeped in jazz and the whole idiom of contemporary American music.”
Not that Mr. Turnage is himself a jazzman, or in any way American. At fifty, he is one of Britain’s most successful classical composers. His work is championed by the conductor Simon Rattle, and his track record in opera has established him among the few composers today who truly know how to turn music into theater: a matter of gut instinct as well as technique. But he once told me: “I’m not really a big opera lover. I find a lot of it pretty dull, especially the bel canto stuff.”
And it is certainly true that bel canto stuff is not his natural world. Born in 1960 in Grays, Essex, one of the drabber satellites of the working-class East End of London, he made his name with music that projected upfront impact with a strident, streetwise edge: hard-hitting but seductive, in the way of desolate urban beauty, and politically aware.
His first opera, Greek, adapted a tough Steven Berkoff play about the English underclass and screamed with raucous energy that was in some ways autobiographical: a gauntlet thrown down by a boy made good from the sticks. These days, as a settled figure in the music world, he thinks too much has been made of his origins, and either way, he broke out of them. But like others who escape their background, he was never sure, and perhaps still isn’t, what he escaped into: an uncertainty that resounds in his work.
On one hand it’s conservatory-schooled contemporary music; on the other it’s profoundly influenced by American vernacular, bathed in a smoldering synthesis of rock, soul, jazz, and blues. His solo instrument of choice has long been the saxophone. He hero-worships Miles Davis, a devotion that culminated a decade ago in Blood on the Floor (he likes strong titles), a piece that combined the improvisational talents of American jazz players with the impeccable craftsmanship of the Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt.
Aside from spawning a thousand feature articles about crossing cultural barriers, it touched a raw nerve: it was written in memory of Mr. Turnage’s brother, who had died from a heroin overdose. And it’s not hard to trace a route across the years from Blood to Anna, which appears to be borne out by his remarks about his new piece. In a recent interview, he described Anna as music “with a nod to Broadway and a ballad Susan Boyle could sing, although there’s not much else in the score you could do with Broadway voices. It’s too complicated,” he added, “and there’s a full orchestra. It’s certainly more tonal than anything I’ve ever written. Act One ends in E-flat. I guess you could say it’s a Puccini-size opera with jazz; and we’ve got some amazing players doing the jazz.” He cited his longtime acquaintances Peter Erskine, a drummer, and John Paul Jones, a guitarist from Led Zeppelin. “Cool or what?” he said.
Cool is the word. But what is the word for Anna Nicole Smith? Outrageous? Tasteless? Where was the attraction? “Well, I wanted something contemporary,” Mr. Turnage said, “something real, not mythic. Then, after getting nowhere, I met Richard Thomas, and we both, independently, came up with this idea. I wasn’t sure at first, but then I looked into her life and decided its strangeness gave it so much color there were possibilities. It’s a fantastic story.”
The only question was how much of the story to put in. And there was plenty to choose. For those who may not remember, Ms. Smith was a poor girl from Texas who found fame by exposing her surgically-enhanced breasts serially and showing there were no depths to which a determined social climber couldn’t profitably sink. At 26, she married an 89-year-old billionaire who obligingly died a year later; she became embroiled in tangled legal actions over the inheritance, then died herself at 39.
In between, she was a stripper, pinup, small-time actress, and reality-TV star. And the highs or lows of her colorful existence included having a Caesarian delivery live on television; appearing in Pietà-style photos with her dead son (who died from a drug overdose in her maternity hospital room); having a whole posse of men claim paternity of her daughter (one of them a masseur married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt); and playing the part of an extraterrestrial kick-boxer in a film in which her mission was to save Earth.
You couldn’t make it up. Except that, in a modified way, making it up is what the authors of the opera had to do. “We found that, for all the media coverage, it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened and what she was like,” said Mr. Thomas, the librettist. “There are too many conflicting accounts. At some point we had to decide for ourselves what she was, so we decided she was a fabulous eccentric who made it pretty much on her own terms. That was our starting point. Thereafter we’ve stayed as anchored to the documented facts as we can. But of course there’s an element of fantasy, as there has to be in a piece like this. As soon as you put speech in rhyming couplets, there’s a ‘take.’”
Ms. Westbroek, who sings the title role, confirmed that her instructions were “not to impersonate Anna, which is as well, because I don’t look like her. She was actually very beautiful,” Ms. Westbroek added. “And, of course, there were those breasts.”
For the purposes of art, Ms. Westbroek will be wearing a cantilevered chest construction to portray the objects Smith called the source of everything she had, and it won’t make playing the part any easier. Ms. Westbroek, known for heavier roles by Puccini, Verdi, and Wagner, is new to contemporary opera, and she admits to finding it a challenge. “There’s coloratura in the vocal writing, which isn’t my thing,” she said. “I’m onstage almost the whole time, which is exhausting. But I’ve come to love Anna as a character. She had no limits. She was borderless. I don’t see her as monster. Richard Jones calls the opera an homage to her soul,” Ms. Westbroek added, referring to the director, “and I guess that’s right. But I can’t pretend it isn’t tense, raising her from the dead with so much publicity.”
The tension dogging Anna Nicole relates less to raising the dead than to reinventing the living, including some highly litigious figures. Representing actual people on the stage is a dangerous business. And despite Ms. Padmore’s insistence that “we’ve had people looking carefully into all that,” there seems a sense of barely suppressed panic at the Royal Opera, as if the administrators had only just awakened to the potential consequences of what they have taken on.
Music journalists, myself included, have been refused access to rehearsals, copies of the score, and even a look at the libretto. Neither Mr. Jones, the director, nor Mr. Pappano, the conductor, would talk. And, as I write, a photographer sent by The New York Times has been denied official access to anyone involved.
The stated reason for this battening-down of hatches is that the Royal Opera doesn’t want the piece prejudged by speculative, sensationalist gossip before it has appeared. But given an information void, the British press has filled it handsomely with speculation.
What, you have to wonder, did the opera’s press representatives expect? Or was it the lawyers? Mr. Thomas said that to show a critic the libretto would count as publication. And recent developments in the Anna Nicole story in American courts suggests that a publication before opening night might be premature. It’s widely thought that significant parts of the text are falling prey to a red pen. “I seem to be attracted to litigious subjects,” Mr. Thomas said, “but I’ve tried to make this one as litigation-proof as possible. The story’s public domain, the lawyers have been through everything, so it ought to be okay. But it’s true that we haven’t made any contact with the people we’ve put in this piece, and we deliberately didn’t. It would have colored it. So far they haven’t made any contact with us either, so we don’t know what’s going to happen. But hopefully the answer is nothing. So much of the fuss that’s being made about this piece is groundless. If you took the same story, same scenario, same psychodrama, but instead of calling it Anna Nicole, it was La Contesse de Nicole and took place in 19th-century Paris, there’d be no problems at all. It’s a perfect story for opera: farcically tragic and utterly excessive. And opera deals with excess well. I know the topicality brings something else. And I do actually take the business of putting these people’s lives onstage seriously. It gives me nightmares. But I console myself with the fact that, if it were me, I’d just love someone to put me on that stage. And if I could be sung by Gerald Finley, I’d be very happy.”