John Adams calls Berlin’s Nixon in China ‘a disgrace’
OperaThe composer has come out bitterly against the belated first Berlin staging of his 1987 opera.
This @deutsche_oper production: painful to even think about. "Nixon in China" is so often mistreated or misunderstood. In 35 years I've only seen 2 productions that got it right. This one? Clearly a disgrace. But we composers can only babysit our creations for so long. https://t.co/xjSJ8H4PnC
— John Adams (@HellTweet) July 11, 2024
Watch trailer here.
I was in the premiere and hoped that Mr. Adams would never have to see the garbage that was made out of his masterpiece. Another case of an infantile production team unable to trust the strength of the score. A messy aesthetic (remember Schingensief?) is also a concept, but this was just a mess. The excellent singers deserved better. Thanks to Adams for speaking out! And a slap to the DOB for hiring these amateurs.
Fully warranted. This directorial ‘collective’ had no idea how to stage the piece. An absolute scandal they were even hired for the job.
The producers are ‘Hauen*Und*Stechen’, ‘slashing and stabbing’, a ladies collective of two:
“Das Musiktheaterkollektiv Hauen•Und•Stechen wurde von den Musiktheaterregisseurinnen Franziska Kronfoth und Julia Lwowski gegründet. Sie arbeiten seit 2012 künstlerisch und strategisch zusammen. Beide studierten Opernregie an der Hochschule für Musik „Hanns Eisler“ in Berlin. In ihrer Arbeit mit dem Kollektiv streben sie ein bewegendes, zeitgemäßes, grenzüberschreitendes und genreübergreifendes Musiktheater an.”
The terms ‘moving’, ‘contemporary’, ‘bounderies-transcending’ and ‘genre-transcending’ have been abused so many times since WW II, that they became petty-bourgeois klischees already half a century ago. These two girls have not noticed, because the products of such intentions are immediately forgotten, so they always seem new to the ignorati.
“Sie arbeiten seit 2012 künstlerisch und strategisch zusammen.”
‘Since 2012 they work together both artistically and strategically’. One imagines the girls with knives and sticks roving through theatre land to get their productions done, god knows what they do to the programmers. But probably they will be hailed as liberators from patriarchal suppression.
The trailer shows an accumulation of cheap and vulgar effects in an effort to keep interest going of an audience which is expected to fall asleep if there’s not enough to see on the stage.
But Adams’ silly music (repetitive effects without a cause) married to a silly subject and silly plot appears to puffickly match the high school efforts of the ‘modern girls’. So he has nothing to complain about.
‘Modern opera’ that tries desperately to cling to timely subjects and cheap glitter have the best change to be forgotton as soon as a sobering maturity dawns upon the theatre landscape. Opera only survives because of a universal human subject carried by music that can express interiority, entirely independent of time and place.
Perfect, including about the “music.” Thanks very much.
Do let us know when your next opera premieres and where!
Sure. It will be in Germany as well.
Any gigs this year ,Sally?
Yes! And I’m so happy! As I play the alto mandoline in a women’s mandoline ensemble, next week we do a concert at Plauderhausen, we have been invited by the annual German Professional Musicians Conference to keep them awake during their ordeal of listening to professional lectures all day long. We play Vivaldi, an arrangement of something that’s called Ride of the Vagaries, and a video game thing and it pays generously.
Sally
I have not seen the production. But irrespective of its quality, to refer to the producers as ‘girls’ says more about you than a failed opera.
I do agree entirely. Two women artists who call themselves ‘Slashing and Stabbing’ should be respected for their courage to stand-up against male privileges and monopolies, what their male counterparts do, they can do better.
Sally
That is the wurst production imaginable!
and right he is!
All the other opera composers would say similar things about 95% of contemporary productions of their works, were they alive to see them.
When Ligeti was alive he DID object, equally in vain, to the travesty Peter Sellars made of Le Grand Macabre.
only because his wife told him to do so.
The basic concept was to portray the Nixon/Mao meeting as slapstick. Someone who saw the production said, “Der Klamauk passt zu diese Nationen!” (The slapstick fits these nations.) I suppose there could be some fertile ground there, but the trailers I’ve seen don’t seem to show it.
I was especially struck by the Hilary Clinton look-alike, though she wasn’t on the scene back then. And as often in German Regietheater, Americans are portrayed in kitschy cowboy outfits and the like. Regietheater, of course, has become an acceptable forum for anti-Americanism portrayed with the usual stereotypes. Not that I mind so much, as readers here may have noticed, I’m an American who is decidedly anti-American in a number of ways, but I wish these stage directors could do a better job of it. A bit more depth, something that cuts a bit deeper.
Even more interesting are the complex motivations for anti-Americanism in Germany. With our dyfunctional political system, hegemony, cultural superficiality, unmitigated capitalism, arrogance, and militarism, much could be explored in Regietheater.
The problem is, the central motivation for German anti-Americanism often seems not so much political, cultural, or social, as based on envy and jealousy, as if the one-time Herrenvolk are still mad they aren’t the ones ruling the world and having big tête-à-têtes on the world stage. Turning Nixon In China into a slapstick makes them feel better. Sour grapes opera, even if the opening of China brought Germany a huge amount of very profitable trade.
@william osborne This is an extremely insightful and revealing assessment, I fully agree.
One flopped German opera production of an American work should represent the envy and jealousy of a whole nation, regretting its nazi past? What happened to the author of this comment? One would almost suspect it must be an American living in Germany.
I saw Nixon in China in Glasgow about a week before lockdown. It was fantastic. The ballet is devastating and it was wonderfully danced. In context the music is perfect.
I’ll bet he’s keeping the rental fee though.
My fly on the wall tells me that Adams considers the rental fee as compensation for artistic damages.
Kinda of a silly a point. You don’t like things about your job, so you just give your paycheck back? I don’t think so.
I’d genuinely like to know which two productions met with Adams’s approval.
I played Nixon In China with the SF Opera.
A DVD was supposed to be released.
It wasn’t.
People sitting 50 feet or more from each other are supposed
to play together with Computer-like accuracy.
The Conductor didn’t help at all.
I heard even the Met had trouble with it.
Most difficult Ensemble piece I’ve ever played.
The piece has some great moments, tho!
Playing it was a Once-In-A-Lifetime event!
Or at least, I hope so…
Since Adams is a living composer, he should have been consulted. The disgrace is that he wasn’t!
But nothing is as annoying as a composer who has not had the decency to die before his work was performed. He mostly restricts the freedom that is needed to do things with the work that are very different from his intentions. Composers are authoritarian types who for some reason insist that their works are performed as they intended.
They coined a word for these European productions: eurotrash.
Kansas City Lyric Opera was one of the two that did it right.
Well, at least it didn’t look boring
Abominable spectacle ! Il est dommage que le ridicule ne tue pas…
Vu à Paris (Chatelet) il y a une dizaine d’années, j’avais decouvert Adams dans un étonnant opéra que je n’ai cessé d’apprécier depuis.
Habitue du Deutsche Oper où j’ai assisté à de nombreux spectacles remarquables (le dernier étant Ana Bolena), je considère que ce Nixon in China est une honte !
Le livret est totalement detourne et la mise en scène est tellement absurde et déplacée que l’on n’entend meme plus la partition…
A fuir !