Three Scenes from Nixon in China
John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947, and lives in Berkeley, California. The scenario for Nixon in China was proposed to the composer by director Peter Sellars in 1983. Adams deflected the idea before returning to it the following year. Having signed on Alice Goodman for the libretto, creation of the opera began in earnest in 1985. Nixon in China was ultimately commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Netherlands Opera, and Washington Opera (now Washington National Opera). It was first produced at Houston Grand Opera, the first performance taking place October 22, 1987. The concert suite Three Scenes from Nixon in China was devised by the composer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. First performances: Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons conducting, with soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Thomas Hampson, soloists, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Lisa Wong, guest choral conductor, March 26-28, 2026.
In addition to the soprano and baritone soloists, the score of the suite calls for 2 flutes (both doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1st doubling E-flat clarinet; 2nd and 3rd doubling bass clarinet), 4 saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor (doubling alto), baritone), 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, percussion (1 player: glockenspiel, triangle, sleigh bells, sizzle cymbal, hi-hat, suspended cymbal, slapstick, claves, sand blocks, wood block, high and medium temple blocks, tambourine, snare drum, tenor drum, pedal bass drum, bass drum), 2 pianos, keyboard sampler, strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses), and mixed chorus (sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses).
For some fifty years, John Adams has been associated with California’s Bay Area, but he was born in Central Massachusetts and grew up in New England (Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire), a geographical and cultural circumstance that has informed many of his works. The dynamic interplay of his traditional training, cultural inquisitiveness, and highly developed aesthetic instincts has resulted in one of the most important bodies of work in American music history, especially in the realm of opera. He is arguably the most accomplished and frequently performed living composer of both opera and symphonic music, and his works exhibit that rare combination of immediate expressive impact with erudite and rigorous craft.
Adams studied clarinet with his father and also worked with Boston Symphony Orchestra clarinetist Felix Viscuglia, eventually performing as a substitute player with the BSO and with Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston. He attended Harvard University, where his composition teachers included Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, David Del Tredici, and Harold Shapero. He was also an accomplished enough conductor with Harvard’s student ensembles and other groups to be offered a fellowship to Tanglewood by Leonard Bernstein, but he turned it down to concentrate on composing.
By the time he was awarded his master’s degree from Harvard in 1972, he’d already moved to San Francisco, traveling across the continent in a VW Beetle, as recounted in his memoir Hallelujah Junction. The geographic move underscored his decision to enter a new phase artistically. On his own, he had felt the pull of the new American “maverick” avant garde already for years, having become deeply interested in the philosophy and approach of John Cage and other experimentalists whose work directly challenged the pedantry and prejudice many attributed to establishment composers. California in the early 1970s was a greenhouse of musical experimentation, inclusion, and freethinking, with such musicians as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Lou Harrison serving as guiding spirits. Adams, though still searching for his own compositional voice, quickly immersed himself in the progressive musical culture there and became an influencer in his own right. He taught at the San Francisco Conservatory and led the school’s New Music Ensemble, and at age 31 was named the San Francisco Symphony’s advisor for new music. He later served as the ensemble’s composer-in-residence (1982–85).
Adams’s early important works, including Phrygian Gates and Shaker Loops, show the strong influence of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, a sensibility that has remained part of his ever-expanding stylistic capacity. His thorough grounding in traditional Western classical music emerges often in his music, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. Harmonielehre and the Chamber Symphony both reference Arnold Schoenberg (with the Chamber Symphony also, crucially, drawing on the cartoon music of the Looney Tunes/Carl Stalling era); Son of Chamber Symphony and Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra incorporate quotes from Beethoven.
Primarily in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman, Adams’s work in opera has won him the greatest renown, undeniably helping reshape the genre itself by using realistic scenarios based on recent historical events. He followed his breakthrough opera, Nixon in China, with Death of Klinghoffer, about the Palestinian Liberation Front’s hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro. His Doctor Atomic creates an operatic mythology centered on Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. His latest stage work is an operatic treatment of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra based on the composer’s own libretto. That opera, his opera Girls of the Golden West, and many others of his works aim to make direct statements about the world’s big social questions, especially the status of women in history and society.
Adams is also an accomplished conductor and a generous advocate for the music of his fellow composers. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed many of his pieces, beginning with the string-orchestra version of Shaker Loops under Seiji Ozawa in 1984; others include Harmonium, Naive and Sentimental Music, the oratorio El Niño, the Doctor Atomic Symphony, Scheherazade.2, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and most recently, his Violin Concerto, with soloist Augustin Hadelich; the orchestra will perform his Harmonium under Dima Slobodeniouk later this season on a concert with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Since John Adams’s Nixon in China was premiered by Houston Grand Opera in October 1987, it has become one of the most celebrated works of modern music. The composer’s first opera, the piece was the foundation for a revitalization of American opera and music drama over the past four decades. Adams himself contributed many of the most enduring works in that renaissance, including The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic, Girls of the Golden West, and most recently Antony and Cleopatra. Beyond the theater, Adams has excelled in orchestral music, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his On the Transmigration of Souls and the Grawemeyer Award for his Violin Concerto. He has written piano concertos for Emanuel Ax, Yuja Wang and Vikingur Ólafsson and has been particularly associated with the San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Composed between 1985 and 1987, Nixon in China grew out of a suggestion from the director Peter Sellars, who, along with librettist Alice Goodman, collaborated with Adams on most of his stage works. Adams has also worked frequently with Nixon in China choreographer Mark Morris. The plot of Nixon in China is based on historic events that took place just fifteen years before the opera’s premiere. Along with The Death of Klinghoffer—a 1991 dramatization of the 1985 hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro and the killing of one of its passengers—the opera helped create the subgenre of the “headline opera,” works that refract the mythology of recent real-life events and personalities through the lens of operatic music, words, and staging.
By the 1980s when Nixon in China was conceived, both former U.S. President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) and Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) were nearly universally maligned figures. Even apart from Western antipathy for Maoist communism, it was widely recognized that Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) had been a reactionary and massively destructive enterprise. Nixon had resigned in disgrace from his presidency on August 9, 1974, due to the Watergate scandal involving illegal attempts to investigate and discredit the Democratic party. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 started the process of ending decades of Chinese political and commercial isolation from the West, with an important parallel goal of further isolating the Soviet bloc. Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist, took a huge political risk with his overtures to Mao.
Adams and his creative partners, realizing the significance of Nixon’s visit, took an approach that avoids satire and latter-day political critique in spite of their inherent antipathy to Nixon and his politics. With only Henry Kissinger’s role as a possible exception, the opera depicts its six principal characters as fully human and multidimensional to the degree possible within the medium. The libretto takes us from the showy but tentative and awkward public scenes of Richard and Pat Nixon’s arrival in Beijing through attempts at personal understanding between the opposing parties. Parallels are created between the husband-and-wife pairs Mao/Chiang Ch’ing (Jiang Qing) and Nixon/Pat Nixon and between the two central diplomats, People’s Republic of China Premier Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai) and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Several of the opera’s scenes imagine the characters in personal and private moments, contrasting starkly with the well-documented pomp and theatrical inanity of the public scenes. These private moments, and moments originating in the characters’ own minds and memories, are opportunities for poetic introspection.
The first of the Three Scenes from Nixon in China is the entirety of Act I, Scene 1, an unbroken, frenetic, and intensely energetic 20-minute span opening with representatives of China’s armed forces singing Mao’s Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention. A fanfare-laced orchestral episode announces the arrival of the Nixons on The Spirit of 76. They are met ceremoniously by Premier Chou En-Lai. As Chou introduces the Nixons to other dignitaries, Nixon (“News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News!”) contemplates the historic gravity of the occasion, moving from optimism to despair.
During Nixon’s diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials toured Pat Nixon to Beijing’s historic and culturally important sites. In Act II, Scene I, pausing under the Gate of Benevolence and Longevity at Beijing’s Summer Palace, she sings in the aria “This is prophetic” of her vision of a utopian future strikingly similar to an illusory past. The final movement of the suite is taken from the closing scene of Act I, during the state banquet honoring the Nixons on their first evening in Beijing. Nixon’s speech follows Premier Chou’s toast to the visitors and to the prospect of understanding. Nixon toasts, noting that technology is taking their words into space and around the world and hoping that the two nations might move together toward a common goal over the ensuing days. The quartet of the Nixons, Chou, and Kissinger vie with the chorus’s cries of “Cheers!” (“Gam bei!”).
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
John Adams on Nixon in China
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. The city of Concord, where I attended high school, was the nerve center of the presidential primary campaigns which rolled into town every four years, bringing with them the obligatory discharges of hot air, free canapés, and air-brushed, glad-handing candidates. I shook JFK’s hand the night before he won the New Hampshire primary in 1960, and the first vote I ever cast was for the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose 1968 campaign ultimately signaled the resignation of Lyndon Johnson and the slow winding down of the Vietnam War. 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. The idea was that of the stage director Peter Sellars, whom I’d met—in New Hampshire, fittingly enough—in the summer of 1983. I was slow to realize the brilliance of his idea, however. 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. 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.
All of this centered on six extraordinary personalities: the Nixons, Chairman Mao and Chiang Ch’ing (a.k.a. Madame Mao), Chou En-lai, and Henry Kissinger. Was this not something, both in the sense of story and characterization, that only grand opera could treat?
Nixon in China took two full years to complete. Throughout the composing I felt like I was pregnant with the royal heir, so great was the attention focused on it by the media and the musical community at large. The closer I came to completing the score, the more apparent it became that there would be no sneaking this opera out discreetly in workshop. 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.
Nixon’s 1972 trip was in fact an epochal event, one whose magnitude is hard to imagine from our present perspective, and it was perfect for Peter Sellars’ dramatic imagination. Nixon in China was for sure the first opera ever to use a staged “media event” as the basis for its dramatic structure. Even at his young age in 1987, Peter showed a deep understanding for the way people in power managed to keep themselves there. He understood brilliantly how dictatorships on the right and on the left throughout the century had carefully managed public opinion through a form of public theater and the cultivation of “persona” in the political arena. Both Nixon and Mao were adept manipulators of public opinion, and the second scene of Act I, the famous meeting between Mao and Nixon, brings these two complex figures together face to face in a dialogue that oscillates between philosophical sparring and political one-upmanship.
Of particular meaning to me were the roles of the two principal women, Pat and Chiang Ch’ing. Both wives of politicians, they represented the yin and the yang of the two alternatives to living with someone immersed in power and political manipulation. Pat was the ideal, the quintessence of “family values,” a woman who stood by her man (preferably a foot or two in the background), embraced his causes and wore a gracious if stoic smile through a long career that could only have seen countless bouts of depression and crushing humiliation. Chang Ch’ing began her career as a movie actress and only later enlisted in the Party, accompanying Mao on the grueling Long March and ultimately becoming the power behind his throne, the mind and force behind that hideous experiment in social engineering, the Cultural Revolution. In the music I composed for these two women I tried to go beyond the caricature of their public personae and look at the fragility of each’s relationship to her spouse. In Act II we see each in her public role: Pat is the perfect diplomatic guest, being treated to a whirlwind tour of the city and “loving every minute of it.” The shrill, corrosive Chang Ch’ing interrupts the ballet to shout angry orders at the dancers and sing her credo of power and violence, “I am the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung.” But in the final act, the focus of both text and music is their vulnerability, their desperate desire to roll back time to when life was simpler and feelings less compromised. Indeed, all five of the principals are virtually paralyzed by their innermost thoughts during this act. In the loneliness and solitude of his or her own bed, no one can avoid the feeling of regret, of time irretrievably lost and opportunities missed. It falls to Chou En-Lai, the only one with a modicum of self-knowledge, to ask the final question: “How much of what we did was good?”
Excerpted from the composer’s essay on his website, earbox.com.