Four Scenes from Nixon in China (July 17, 2026)
John Adams conceived the opera Nixon in China following a suggestion from the director Peter Sellars and composed it in collaboration with the librettist Alice Goodman between 1985 and 1987. It was premiered October 22, 1987, by Houston Grand Opera. John Adams extracted a three-movement selection from the opera for Boston Symphony concert performances with chorus and two soloists in spring 2026 and the present four-movement suite for this Tanglewood performance, featuring four soloists but no chorus.
Since John Adams’s Nixon in China was premiered by Houston Grand Opera in October 1987, it has become one of the most celebrated works of modern music. The composer’s first opera, the piece was the foundation for a revitalization of American opera and music drama over the past four decades. Adams himself contributed many of the most enduring works in that renaissance, including The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic, Girls of the Golden West, and most recently Antony and Cleopatra. Beyond the theater, Adams has excelled in orchestral music, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his On the Transmigration of Souls and the Grawemeyer Award for his Violin Concerto. He has written piano concertos for Emanuel Ax, Yuja Wang, and Víkingur Ólafsson and has been particularly associated with the San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. An advocate for younger composers, he is also active as a conductor.
Composed between 1985 and 1987, Nixon in China grew out of a suggestion from the director Peter Sellars, who, along with librettist Alice Goodman, collaborated with Adams on most of his stage works. Adams has also worked frequently with Nixon in China choreographer Mark Morris. The plot of Nixon in China is based on historic events that took place just fifteen years before the opera’s premiere. Along with The Death of Klinghoffer—a 1991 dramatization of the 1985 hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro and the killing of one of its passengers—the opera helped create the subgenre of the “headline opera,” works that refract the mythology of recent real-life events and personalities through the lens of operatic music, words, and staging.
By the 1980s when Nixon in China was conceived, both former U.S. President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) and the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) were nearly universally maligned. Even apart from Western antipathy for Maoist communism, it was widely recognized that Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) had been a reactionary and massively destructive enterprise. Nixon had resigned in disgrace from his presidency on August 9, 1974, due to the Watergate scandal involving illegal attempts to investigate and discredit the Democratic party. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 started the process of ending decades of Chinese political and commercial isolation from the West, with an important parallel goal of further isolating the Soviet bloc. Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist, took a huge political risk with his overtures to Mao.
Adams and his creative partners, realizing the significance of Nixon’s visit, took an approach that largely avoids direct satire and latter-day political critique in spite of their inherent antipathy to Nixon and his politics. With only Henry Kissinger’s role as a possible exception, the opera depicts its six principle characters as fully human and multidimensional to the degree possible within the medium. The libretto takes us from the showy but tentative and awkward public scenes of Richard and Pat Nixon’s arrival in Beijing through attempts at personal understanding between the opposing parties. Parallels are created between the husband-and-wife pairs Mao/Chiang Ch’ing and Nixon/Pat Nixon and between the two central diplomats, Chou En-lai and Henry Kissinger. Several of the opera’s scenes imagine the characters in personal and private moments, contrasting starkly with the well-documented pomp and theatrical inanity of the public scenes. These private moments, and moments originating in the characters’ own minds and memories, are opportunities for poetic introspection.
The Four Scenes from Nixon in China feature arias for the two principal women characters, Pat Nixon and Chiang Ch’ing, Nixon’s major Act I aria with interjections from Premier Chou En-Lai, and the “Night” duet from the start of Act I, Scene 3, which foreshadows the opera’s end. Act I, Scene I is a frenetic, nearly unbroken stream, establishing the breathless pace of modernity. A contingent of Chinese officials awaits the Nixons’ plane, the Spirit of ’76. As Chou En-Lai introduces the Nixons to other dignitaries, Nixon (“News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News! News!”), both present in the scene and observant of it, contemplates the historic gravity of the occasion, the score noting “as he sings the joy of anticipated triumph becomes the terrible expectation of failure.”
During Nixon’s diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials toured Pat Nixon to Beijing’s historic and culturally important sites. In Act II, Scene I, pausing under the Gate of Benevolence and Longevity at Beijing’s Summer Palace, she sings in the aria “This is prophetic” of her vision of a utopian future strikingly similar to an illusory past. Witnessing with Richard the sham class violence of a propaganda theatrical production, Pat attempts to intervene, the misunderstanding helping to destroy her sense of cultural superiority. Chiang Ch’ing’s aria “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung” drives that point home, highlighting the Nixons’ “foreignness.” The final movement of the suite takes us back to Act I. The Nixons are together following Richard’s long first meeting with Mao. Near the end of a long day but preceding the lavish welcoming banquet, the Nixons are able to regroup briefly as a private couple, albeit a couple still in the constant presence of Premier Chou. Their optimistic closing sentiment, “The west wind heralds spring…. Spring’s as good as here,” will prove illusory.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.