Nixon in China in Paris

Finally, these People Think You’re Stupid

I wish I could say that the current production of John Adams’s Nixon in China at the Opera Bastille, mounted of a Sunday afternoon while a ragtag of anti-Macron union flags bounced around to desultory trumpet and drum beat on the Place outside, was the zenith of the current decadently lazy moment now settled cozily upon the globe. At least then we’d know it was ending. But I am certain it is not. The melange of culturally indolent and politically conspicuous — they are, finally, virtually the same thing — that your metropolitan Parisian audience sucked up like so much Aubrac bone marrow is surely no more than a sign of the times.

Nixon in China has all the heft of a Mandalorian episode and half the pleasure and quadruple the length. The composer John Adams spent an entire career seemingly devoted to being an enemy of music. He was invited to write the opera at the request of Peter Sellars, a famous director from the “I Mistook Weird for Interesting” School that has only increasingly tyrannized American arts over the last half century. It was an ambitious and exciting idea: commemorate, in American idiom, a historic trip with a meditation on personality, destiny, and myth-making. There is no reason to leave opera — or any art form, or perhaps anything, for that matter — to the Europeans alone. This patriot and devotee of American arts loves the idea. Theoretically. Perhaps the original 1987 production in Houston was at least beautifully staged. We can dream.

The opera is an unmitigated and irrecoverable disaster. Where to begin? Dick Nixon sings to his wife Pat lines like "Just you wait until the toasting starts. Between the booze and praise you’ll warm up then.” There is no melody, euphony, accord. There is no artfulness. Nothing. The performers are forced to belt out dull verses in the tones of deaf World Wrestling Entertainment titans. If the college frat — the one you thought was too dumb even to host a worthwhile boozer — put on an opera in togas, this is what it would sound like. If Donald Trump and Michael Cohen got into a police holding cell and started battling in song, this is what it would sound like. If Family Guy did an opera spoof episode, this is what it would sound like. But at least it would be funny, and at least the audience would laugh.

Not so in Paris. Maybe not ever, but certainly not in Paris. This heavy-handed production begins with a pantomimed ping pong match, in which the red track suit-wearing player (get it, he’s China) is topped with a dragon mask, and the blue track suit-wearing player (guess what he’s supposed to represent) is wearing an eagle mask. Moments later, a giant and angry-looking aluminum eagle floats menacingly over the stage. Get it? Do you not get it? Do you not see the subtlety? This is not an aluminum eagle but the Spirit of ’76, the airplane carrying the President of the United States. Hon hon hon, those Americans, hey hey! We understand zem better zan zey understand zemselves! I bet zey would never appreciate the humeur and symbolisme! But wait! There’s more! The Opera Bastille producer and director have ensured that the audience will barely hear most of the principal singers, because they will encourage the ingénu conductor to dial the orchestra’s atonality up to 11 and so muffle out the illuminating lines like “Founders come first, then profiteers” and "We have at times been enemies.” And more! When the big private meeting occurs between Nixon and Mao, accompanied by Kissinger and Chou En-Lai, the entire stage is uplifted to show Chinese uniformed solders, in a dungeon-latticed and water-pipe-topped basement, reviewing books and brutally gathering up classical musical instruments and tossing them into an incinerator. Wait, wait, are you sure you get it? Can you see past the subtlety? This is happening right below the very room where the leaders are sing-speaking to each other like wooden horses in a Mozart buffa.

My friends, you should have seen the reaction from the Parisian opera-goers. Remember back in high school, when there were always some families who couldn’t stop cooing about how amazing the lead was in Mr. Henderson’s production of Big River? Yeah, you remember. “I don’t know how he does that!” says one. “What a voice!” says the other. “And the costumes!” says a third. It was the same at the Opera Bastille. But it was in French. 

It would make more sense to me if Peter Sellars had cooked it all up as some kind of Dada experiment in the spirit of his exquisitely more talented homonymic Peter Sellers of Inspector Clouseau fame. “Hey, John Adams, you and me, we’re going to pull one over on these decadent ignoramuses. We’re going to write exclusively execrable music and make sure there’s an execrable libretto, we’re going to ensure the French add execrable Frenchness, and we’re going to make them all say they love it. And it’s going to be our joke.” Wouldn’t have that at least been funny, once they revealed the gag. I wish it had been true. 

But no. This bogus dupery, this musicless pantomime, this unredeemable dross keeps getting put on, in earnest, by major opera houses. They say it is entering the American operatic pantheon, whatever that may be. Heaven should help us. All I could think when I was watching the conductor flumce around with his baton was “these people think we are stupid.” No other explanation suffices.

As I took in both the spectacle and the audience’s reaction, it dawned on me that Nixon in China is actually very well suited to our intellectual and aesthetic moment, defined as it is so heavily by woke-ism. The woke, like the cadres of Mao, insist that we not hear with our ears or see what we see. They insist not only that we suspend disbelief but that we sustain other-belief, belief in manifest falsehood. It is not enough to take detached interest in the wondrous, odd, or inexplicable tastes of our fellow men and women. Instead, we must overtly and loudly celebrate ugliness and cacophony and call them gorgeous. We must lie. Like Nixon. Like Mao. Like the American media who take photos of three trash can fires during the Macron retirement protests and write Paris is Burning. Like the guy who sent Adams and Sellars their paychecks and told himself he felt good about it. Like anyone who said they ever liked Nixon in China.

I yearn for a robust American art, as jagged as it is lovely, as radical as it is classical, as inventive as it is informed, as brave as it is honest. Let us make such art, produce it, tour it, celebrate it, and, finally, export it, so these French — and the rest of the world — can drop the pretense and once again sit back in wonder at what we and only we can do.