Piecing the Broken Golden Bowl: Dislocation and Diplomacy in Nixon in China by John Adams and Alice Goodman

Abstract

While the initial idea for Nixon in China, John Adams's first stage work, was suggested by director Peter Sellars (Adams, 2008 127), its final shape owes much to a series of creative decisions whose nature may well surprise those who insist on viewing it as a paradigmatic example of "CNN opera," a deprecatory phrase still in use among its detractors (Tarling 250). According to Adams, the work's complex genesis began when Sellars came up with its "wry and mischievous" title (2008 127)-one that brilliantly encapsulates the tenor of the whole project, despite the misunderstandings to which it has been subjected ever since the 1987 premiere. Misled by Sellars's formulation, many still assume that the opera's primary purpose is mimetic and that it aims at recreating a (relatively) recent event, namely President Richard Nixon's epochal visit to Communist China in February 1972; but a closer look at the subject chosen by Sellars suggests that this is not the case. By the mid-1980s, Mao and Zhou Enlai 1 were both dead; Jiang Qing was serving a life sentence; Deng Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" policy was rapidly transforming China into a consumer society; in the absence of political changes capable of solving the regime's legitimacy crisis, the resulting wealth inequality gave rise to tensions which eventually found expression during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Equally momentous transformations had taken place on the American side. In the aftermath of Watergate, Nixon had been forced to resign from office; the last American troops had finally withdrawn from Vietnam in 1975; and Ronald Reagan, a Republican president of a rather different stripe, had taken office in 1981, ushering in an era of deepening East-West polarization. Michael Steinberg pointed out in 1988 that, far from trying to compete with the modern news media, the opera portrayed a vanishing, increasingly alien world whose unique challenges were already hard to recapture: "Now that the People's Republic has become a tourist spot with Holiday Inns and Piecing the Broken Golden Bowl: Dislocation and Diplomacy in Nixon in China b...