President and Opera, on Unexpected Stages

All the panelists onstage — the composer John Adams, the director Peter Sellars, the choreographer Mark Morris, the designer Adrianne Lobel and the baritone James Maddalena, who created the title role — laughed. No one disagreed.

But on Wednesday night that same team, joined by the librettist Alice Goodman, seemed elated to have arrived at the Met with their path-breaking opera. When Mr. Adams, who conducted the performance, first appeared in the pit, he received a cheering ovation from a full house. And practically the first person on her feet during the standing ovation at the end, nearly four hours later, was Tricia Nixon Cox (who during the first intermission had posed for a photo backstage with her operatic “parents”).

This is the second John Adams opera to reach the Met. But the company that presented his “Doctor Atomic” in 2008 is a different place from the Met of 24 years ago. Under Mr. Gelb the house now actively courts contemporary works and modern productions. In 1987 “Nixon in China” went directly from Houston, where critical reactions were all over the place, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with no thoughts of breaking into Lincoln Center.

The standard thing to say would be that the Met’s embrace of “Nixon in China” is way overdue. The opera and the production may have come to the Met at just the right time to comprehend the continuing resonances of this audacious and moving opera. Far from being trendy, the idea of an opera about President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, which came from Mr. Sellars, was inspired. In essential ways nothing really happened during that diplomatic journey. Yet in the larger scheme the trip was momentous. For America, as Mr. Sellars said during the panel, it represented the collapse of a “mental wall,” and the recognition of “one-fifth of the planet.”

Here was Nixon, an “old cold warrior/Piloting towards an unknown shore,” as he refers to himself in Ms. Goodman’s poetic libretto. The meeting of Mao and Nixon was fabulous diplomatic theater. And no art form is better suited to momentous spectacle than opera. With the exception of Henry Kissinger, all the historic players in the drama are treated seriously and given a dignity that allows for plenty of humor and absurdity.

Since its premiere Mr. Sellars and his team have essentially been adapting the original production to subsequent stages. This specific production, which played at the English National Opera in 2006, was rebuilt for the larger dimensions of the Met’s stage. But Mr. Sellars’s concept, which presents the story with vivid realism and fanciful style, is unaltered. When you get something right at the start, why change it?

The opera opens outside an airfield in Beijing, where a contingent of Chinese Army, Navy and Air Force personnel — dressed in Dunya Ramicova’s costumes, which have a touching workaday look — solemnly sing a chorus. Immediately, both the rich inventiveness of Mr. Adams’s score and, for me, its one shortcoming come through.

In the subdued orchestra, overlapping patterns of ascending minor scales create a hypnotic, quietly intense backdrop, pierced by fractured, brassy chords like some cosmic chorale. The chorus sings Ms. Goodman’s elegant couplets (“Soldiers of heaven hold the sky/The morning breaks and shadows fly”) in intoned phrases. Mr. Adams has acknowledged his debt here to Philip Glass, especially the opera “Satyagraha.”

But it is one thing when Mr. Glass sets Sanskrit in staccato bursts to lend “Satyagraha” a ritualistic allure. Ms. Goodman’s words want more flexibility and lyricism, and too many stretches of Mr. Adams’s vocal writing are rendered in clipped, intoned lines. When he gives us lyrical flights, he does it beautifully, as in the thoughts of Chou En-lai — as the opera renders the name, which is now usually transliterated as Zhou Enlai — during the opera’s deeply affecting final moments. The role is sung by the fine, sonorous, dignified baritone Russell Braun.

The scene in which the presidential plane descends for the arrival of Nixon and his entourage remains musically exhilarating and theatrically dazzling. The orchestra erupts with big band bursts, rockish riffs and shards of fanfares: a heavy din of momentous pomp.

Soon after Nixon is greeted by Chou, the president breaks into the “News” aria. Swept up, almost in a seizure, with the significance of greeting Communist China on its own turf, Nixon sputters the words “News has a kind of mystery.” And here the staccato vocal writing perfectly conveys Nixon’s awkward stiffness and self-consuming power.