The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra

John Adams wrote The Chairman Dances in 1985 as part of the process of composing his opera Nixon in China. He submitted the piece in fulfillment of a commission for the Milwaukee Symphony, which gave the premiere under Lukas Foss’s direction on January 31, 1986. Composed between 1985 and 1987, the opera Nixon in China was premiered by one of its commissioning organizations, Houston Grand Opera, in October 1987.

Since John Adams’s Nixon in China premiered nearly 40 years ago in Houston, it has become one of the most celebrated works of modern music. Adams’s first opera, the piece was arguably the foundation for a revitalization of American opera and music drama in 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. Nixon in China grew out of a suggestion from the director Peter Sellars, who along with librettist Alice Goodman collaborated on most of Adams’s stage works. Adams has also worked frequently with Nixon in China choreographer Mark Morris.

The plot of Nixon in China is based on actual 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.” These include Chinese American composer Bright Sheng’s Madame Mao (2003), Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O (1997), Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole (2011), and Anthony Davis’s The Central Park Five (2019), works that refract the mythology of recent real-life events and personalities through the lens of operatic music and staging.

By the 1980s, both former U.S. President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) and the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) were nearly universally maligned figures. 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. As Chinese-U.S. relations evolved in the following years, in what is considered a watershed of cultural diplomacy the Boston Symphony Orchestra was the first Western orchestra to visit China, performing concerts in Beijing and Shanghai under Seiji Ozawa’s direction in 1979.

Adams and his creative partners realized the significance of Nixon’s visit and have been praised for their approach to the subject, which avoids satire and latter-day political critique. The opera depicts its six major characters as fully human and multidimensional to the degree possible within the medium of opera. The trajectory of the scenario takes us from the tentative, awkward, and public scenes of the opening toward an awareness of growing understanding between the opposing parties, creating parallels between the husband-and-wife pairs Mao/Chiang Ch’ing and Richard/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; in Act III, contrasting starkly with the well-documented public scenes of Act I, the couples in their beds muse upon their individual pasts. This includes a scene in which Pat Nixon dances a foxtrot, recalling her youth in the 1930s. That foxtrot is in a sense a vestige of The Chairman Dances, which was originally conceived for one of Mao’s recollections, as the composer relates below, but which was ultimately realized as a standalone orchestral work. The Chairman Dances is characteristically eclectic, featuring the driving rhythms, Stravinsky-like syncopations, and overarching harmonic framework found in much of Adams’s music, along with detours through 1930s ballroom orchestra episodes relating to the original dramatic conception.

The composer’s comments on The Chairman Dances follow.

ROBERT KIRZINGER

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.

John Adams on his The Chairman Dances 

The Chairman Dances was an “out-take” of Act III of Nixon in China. Neither an “excerpt” nor a “fantasy on themes from,” it was in fact a kind of warmup for embarking on the creation of the full opera. At the time, 1985, I was obliged to fulfill a long-delayed commission for the Milwaukee Symphony, but having already seen the scenario to Act III of Nixon in China, I couldn’t wait to begin work on that piece. So The Chairman Dances began as a “foxtrot” for Chairman Mao and his bride, Chiang Ch’ing, the fabled “Madame Mao,” firebrand, revolutionary executioner, architect of China’s calamitous Cultural Revolution, and (a fact not universally realized) a former Shanghai movie actress. In the surreal final scene of the opera, she interrupts the tired formalities of a state banquet, disrupts the slow moving protocol and invites the Chairman, who is present only as a gigantic forty-foot portrait on the wall, to “come down, old man, and dance.” The music takes full cognizance of her past as a movie actress. Themes, sometimes slinky and sentimental, at other times bravura and bounding, ride above in bustling fabric of energized motives. Some of these themes make a dreamy reappearance in Act III of the actual opera, en revenant, as both the Nixons and Maos reminisce over their distant pasts. A scenario by Peter Sellars and Alice Goodman, somewhat altered from the final one in Nixon in China, is as follows:

“Chiang Ch’ing, a.k.a. Madame Mao, has gatecrashed the Presidential Banquet. She is first seen standing where she is most in the way of the waiters. After a few minutes, she brings out a box of paper lanterns and hangs them around the hall, then strips down to a cheongsam, skin-tight from neck to ankle and slit up the hip. She signals the orchestra to play and begins dancing by herself. Mao is becoming excited. He steps down from his portrait on the wall, and they begin to foxtrot together. They are back in Yenan, dancing to the gramophone….”

John Adams