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‘Nixon’ in China, and Dubuque, Too
For The Atlantic online, I went behind the scenes at the Met Opera as they prepared to transmit John Adams’ Nixon in China to thousands of cinemas around the world:
On February 21, 1972, when Richard Nixon visited China, the technology used to beam the welcoming party around the planet and back to the United States was state-of-the-art. Nixon made sure of it. As the presidential plane, the Spirit of ‘76, descended the gray Peking skies, a satellite hook-up installed in China by White House staffers waited to capture and disseminate “the key picture of the whole trip,” as the president called it.
The picture became an icon of Realpolitik, in spite of the fuss. On the ground, the scene was composed of brilliant blues (the Chinese premier Chou En-lai’s long ceremonial coat and the president’s business suit), subversive reds (the plane’s airstairs and the far away banners), and, less conspicuously, the drab green worn by the 500 Chinese honor guards in attendance. There were stars on the soldier’s caps and on the American and Chinese flags that hung over the proceedings. But most crucially for Nixon, there were two pair of hands clasped, his and Chou’s — West glad-handing East.
The scene came together without a hitch, like something from a double proscenium, even if the details didn’t register as clearly as the president might have liked for many of the folks back in the U.S. One viewer in Nixon’s home state of California, a 25-year-old music student named John Adams, watched the event on a little black and white set, the figures of Nixon and Chou floating as a single shape on Adams’ screen.
It was undoubtedly these ghosts, tormented by an uneven cathodic flow, which revisited Adams’ imagination when, eleven years later, a 23-year old theater director named Peter Sellers approached the composer with an idea for an opera called “Nixon in China.”
Read the entire article here.
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