COVER -> DAY ONE
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Although its epigrammatic fatuity is maddeningly incongruous with its intersticic prolixity, opera at its best uncannily focuses on the profound and the absurd. It is, conversely, pretty poor at dealing with all the rest of human life which is, after all, what most of our lives amount to. We might hold out mild hopes for the occasional absurdity but profundity is beyond the powers and even the recognition of most of us.
It is entirely for these reasons that the story of President Richard M. Nixon's visit to China in 1972 is the stuff of great opera, brought to Britain 13 years after its premier in Houston. For the sake of completeness I ought to say that John Adams' music, from the tremendous opening build-up of tension prior to Nixon's arrival to the last, fragile note of regret, marks him out as America's greatest living composer but it was matched by Alice Goodman's libretto of rhyming couplets.
It is difficult to say whether my lasting impression of the profound flawed by the absurd is a matter of the creators' intention or whether they intended us to see the profound in spite of the absurd but, either way, what we all have to face is the reality that the most profound decisions, from the liberty of the individual to the future of our planet, depend upon people flawed like ourselves but suffering from the twin pressures of populist opinion and power brokering.
My recollection of Nixon is highly coloured and, accordingly, unreliable. He had said of my Alma Mater that he wished to turn Harvard yard into a dumping ground for nuclear waste; in my first month I was one of the welcoming party for the return of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (Nixon is a Coxsacker, said the bumper stickers).
I was, after all, in Massachusetts, the only State that did not vote for Nixon in 1972. I dined regularly with Ben Bradley of the Washington Post and the Niemen Fellows. I was the Editor of the nightly half hour news bulletin on WHRB-FM which chronicled events from Senator Sam Irvine to the final Presidential humiliation.
Yet here he, Nixon, was, trying to put right what John Foster Dulles had got so terribly wrong by shaking hands with the leader of the most populous nation in the world; and Mao, chronically and seriously ill, had prepared his body for the ordeal for day after punishing day so that he could temporarily consign his life support equipment to a hidden corridor while the great interview lasted.
According to all the published accounts they said nothing of any real global importance and, interestingly, while all the memoirs recall Mao's wit and wisdom they say nothing of Nixon's conversational style. Style. The event might have been staged to help Nixon's Presidential re-election and to shore up Mao's prestige after the disastrously disruptive Cultural Revolution - there might have been even more sinister motives about which we have no inkling - but, still, it was certainly a new beginning and finally ensured a nuclear free end to the Twentieth Century.
At a more personal level the strength of the opera lies in its graphic portrayal of mutual, cultural incomprehension. The superficial familiarity of banqueting tables, microphones, factories, farms and hotel rooms were all washed over with a haze as pervasive as Chinese cigarette smoke.
Watching a ballet within the opera the Nixons could neither understand symbolism nor violence and Madam Mao could not understand their flat-footed squeamishness. Pat Nixon had earlier sung that she was not interested in trivial things but one got the impression she had never come across anything else and for all his political traumas Nixon never saw anything as epic as the Long March. Only Henry Kissinger, one felt, had the depth of experience and the openness of mind to bridge the gap.
If the world's greatest and most populous powers have problems of mutual comprehension, how will they react to the prospect of 'life' on other planets?
Admittedly, NASA is somewhat prone to exaggerate its triumphs and its hardships in an effort to command the public attention which is a necessary precondition for public funding but there is something slightly extraordinary in the latest announcement about the existence of water on Mars.
If two planets in our solar system possess the means for organic life it is a statistical certainty that other solar systems either have had, have or will have the pleasure of creatures like us; and it is statistically probable that some of them will have reached a level of sophistication and/or brutality greater than ours.
Are we likely to attempt to parley with these problematic beings or will we simply opt to try to blast them out of the stratosphere before they can get any closer?
It is a question that might fascinate Dr. Kissinger but I doubt it is within the powers of Messrs. Gore and Bush who cannot even grapple with the relatively simple matter of how to deal with convicted murderers. If their incomprehension of their own deprived and oppressed is so great, no wonder China was a bit of a stunner; as for 'little green men', you have to conclude that murder is much more likely than mutuality.
In the meantime, while some scientists probe our space, others are focusing on our own planet. It is now possible to contemplate the global eradication of malaria through the introduction of genetically modified, non-transmitting, sterile mosquitoes which will drive out the nasty sort.
What this is likely to do to the ecology and the birth rate in tropical countries are fascinating issues but, again, I wonder whether the outcome will be left to the market or, in other words, to chance rather than being decided by politicians. Given the scant respect for black American citizens who find themselves, often unjustly, on death row, who is to care for the black and brown millions dying of malaria?
The opera sings our capacity for striving, for stumbling and rising again and it dances our capacity for precision and synchronicityŻbut as technology increasingly outstrips ethics we will have to sing and dance simultaneously.
