Comments on Daniel Stephen Johnson: Adams' Behemoth

American Splendo(u)r, then, please. Though it woul...

2011-02-22T12:34:39.788-05:00

American Splendo(u)r, then, please. Though it would be hard to match one of my favourite films of all time. Who could match Giamatti? Oh...James Maddalena...oh, alas, too old now.

Excellent points both, Judd! Actually I was just ...

2011-02-22T10:57:24.644-05:00

Excellent points both, Judd!

Actually I was just thinking, you know what medium lends itself very well to long, overlapping monologues and rarified language??

Comic books. Alan Moore should write a libretto! (Or maybe Hugo von Hofmannsthal should've written Swamp Thing? Either way.)

Well done. Small point: Hobbes also wrote about Be...

2011-02-21T11:22:35.401-05:00

Well done. Small point: Hobbes also wrote about Behemoth, which makes the reference more direct than you're implying.

This is a very good review of Nixon in China. There is something nagging me about the Larger Point that seems to hang over it, though; there's a sort of Operatic Exceptionalism that I read as being suggested, though perhaps you didn't mean it that way. Other forms can perform the psychological/empathetic moves that you describe, and Opera, like many other great art forms, is divisive and perhaps not for everyone. Taking the salient points you make about Opera into a broader artistic realm might therefore be worthwhile. That's not really a criticism, more of a thought-addendum. Great writing, in any case.

What a well thought out essay on this piece - and ...

2011-02-19T14:07:29.506-05:00

What a well thought out essay on this piece - and of this production. Bravo, Daniel, bravo!

I've been impressed overall with the reception "Nixon" has gotten at the Met, though still shake my head at the complaints of anachronism leveled by many who STILL essentially see this work as "CNN Opera" - when there is so, so much more to it than "news."

Thanks for sharing this!

Dan - I have worshipped Adams since the mid-1980s...

2011-02-19T13:42:44.824-05:00

Dan -

I have worshipped Adams since the mid-1980s, when an indie rock music radio host used to play him overnight alongside oh, Lou Reed and Barry Adamson and Steven Sondheim.

Your essay really hit home for me, and was an enjoyable analysis of one of my favorite composers and favorite operas.

Yes, NiC is a desert-island disc for me.
I bought that CD set the day it came out, and it is still here, dog-earned, loved, and listened to.

Bravo!

-K-

Dan, Thank you so much for writing this fantastic ...

2011-02-19T10:59:19.239-05:00

Dan, Thank you so much for writing this fantastic piece. I enjoyed reading your analysis. I attended a live performance of Nixon in China at the Met two weeks ago and found myself so taken by the work, I didn't know what to do with myself. You articulate exactly what is so extraordinary and powerful about this opera. - An appreciative reader.

this is one of the best articles i've EVER rea...

2011-02-19T10:32:11.678-05:00

this is one of the best articles i've EVER read..

One small comment on the issue of "updating.&...

2011-02-19T09:46:44.115-05:00

One small comment on the issue of "updating." For the vast majority of the long history of the performing arts, audiences saw characters on stage dressed in styles contemporary to the audience.

The concept of historically researched costuming is a little over 150 years old and wasn't adopted universally for some while after it began. For a glimpse of what Shakespeare looked like on the English stage of the 18th century, Go to Google images and type in Quin as Coriolanus. On the top row, left, you'll see everyone in standard English court costume of the period.

When people say that opera should be staged as the composer intended, in my experience they generally mean "the way it was done when I first saw it at age seventeen" which for any opera written before, say, 1950 is NOTHING like what the composer knew. And if we could and DID exactly replicate the productions that Verdi or Mozart knew, audiences would most likely find them grotesque and laughable.

Art always pushes forward, it will not be stopped, and it is always relating to or reacting against issues and realities in the culture if its own day.

I don't actually have anything to add to the w...

2011-02-19T08:34:20.311-05:00

I don't actually have anything to add to the waves of praise, but wanted to anyway.

Smashing, smashing stuff.

Thank you, Dan, the most comprehensive text I'...

2011-02-19T06:30:27.169-05:00

Thank you, Dan, the most comprehensive text I've yet read to stand for all those of us who helplessly love this work.

Alice, by the way, is a Church of England rector in Cambridge. A complicated person. But I think she's written the greatest libretto since Hofmannsthal's for Rosenkav and Auden/Kallman's for Rake (which people are similarly divided over - some just can't take the poetry).

Dan, thanks for a well-written piece: an explicati...

2011-02-19T00:08:17.906-05:00

Dan, thanks for a well-written piece: an explication, celebration, love letter, and journal entry all in one. You've certainly given me a lot to think about as I acquaint myself better with Nixon. The pointer to John Adams Reader is appreciated, too.

Wow. One of the best things I've seen written ...

2011-02-18T22:59:13.681-05:00

Wow. One of the best things I've seen written about Nixon in China. I too, first discovered John Adams when I heard the local NPR station play The Chairman Dances. I was immediately fascinated. And have continued to follow John Adams and his music since.

"The Spirit of '76" isn't a Boei...

2011-02-18T21:59:01.241-05:00

"The Spirit of '76" isn't a Boeing 747. It's a modified Boeing 707.

Y'know what, fuck it, Josh is right. I just d...

2011-02-18T15:16:37.456-05:00

Y'know what, fuck it, Josh is right. I just deleted that paragraph with Lacan in it.

Greg III, you're absolutely right. I totally ...

2011-02-18T14:34:02.494-05:00

Greg III, you're absolutely right. I totally failed to express my own bafflement at the people who think that it's necessary to be "faithful" to the original setting of the opera—as if every production weren't, necessarily, an interpretation of the piece, as if the composer and/or librettist would really have had the best notion of how their own works should be staged 200 yrs after their deaths, and as if taking offense at onstage anachronism weren't itself an anachronistic response. (If Don Juan is supposed to take place in 17th-century Spain, how come the band at his banquet knows "Non più andrai"? etc., etc.) They are "wrong" for many more reasons than the few I listed.

Dan, you are very gallant to offer defenses on the...

2011-02-18T13:55:41.906-05:00

Dan, you are very gallant to offer defenses on their behalf (small space! tight publication schedule!), but this wasn't a new opera. If this was the first impression of Nixon they were receiving, then they were unprofessionally unprepared.

It's a small thing, but I think you may have o...

2011-02-18T13:49:16.396-05:00

It's a small thing, but I think you may have over-reduced the purposes of modern dress reworkings when you talk of making things relevant. For me, modern dress does other things, perhaps opposite things in fact.

The first is ye olde остранение/defamiliarization, especially for operas part of whose accreted dust is a narrow range of visuals in productions over the years. (Grrg will recall a well-recieved jab at audiences showing up for Tosca who won't feel satisfied if they don't see their Empress Josephine knockoff.)

The second is a kind of, what, removal of one layer of suspended disbelief. The person in front of me is singing, yes, and people don't ordinarily sing, but at least s/he's dressed in a way s/he might concievably be dressed. I am not meant to pretend quite as fully as usual that I am magically peering into the past.

I suspect it may also coax more natural performances out of some singers. Anyway, it's not just a matter of "oh, those people up in that stage are wearing jeans, just like me! Maybe opera isn't so weird after all!" which is kind of what I think when I hear "make opera more relevant." [Phonetically not so far from make opera more elephants. Just joshin'.]

Um, I haven't had a lot of sleep lately. Hope this makes sense.

Grrg, THANK YOU, that's so awesome. Josh, thi...

2011-02-17T09:29:08.927-05:00

Grrg, THANK YOU, that's so awesome.

Josh, this was the aria Prof Howard played us in class to illustrate his point: (clicky clicky). You should come over and watch the old telecast with us.

Greg, thank you, too! Of course as soon as I click SEND I think of all the things I should have added. The folks writing about it for the New York press, meanwhile, didn't have the luxury of unlimited time and space and zero editors—it can be incredibly difficult to write a story, overnight, with a clear journalistic shape and then shoehorn it into the teeny wordcount allotted for opera reviews. I haven't read Zack's Nixon review yet (I stuck my fingers in my ears and said LA LA LA until I'd got my own opinions down on "paper"), but in general I find him one of the city's sharpest music writers.

Nice job, Danny. This piece was a welcome antidot...

2011-02-17T01:38:15.370-05:00

Nice job, Danny. This piece was a welcome antidote to a lot of the rather stupid blather one saw throughout the New York press (Zachary Woolfe, I'm looking at you).

By the way: admirable job of concision. I'm pretty sure you could have written four times as much as you did and still not exhausted your thoughts about the opera and the performance.

Other than your unnecessary and wounding reference...

2011-02-17T00:26:11.305-05:00

Other than your unnecessary and wounding reference to Richard Howard's pompous and horrible reference to Lacan....

I liked reading this piece a lot and it makes me feel even more sadder that I did not see the broadcast and will not see the replay of the broadcast at my local theater this coming weekend. Hopefully some day I can borrow the DVD from a friend...?

Josh P

There is one more resonance regarding the elephant...

2011-02-16T20:22:31.326-05:00

There is one more resonance regarding the elephants, big, small, and poetical, that litter the stage of Nixon -- AIDA. As I recall reading (in Matthew Daines' article maybe?), there had been a very popular staging of Aida in Houston that featured live elephants from the Houston zoo during the triumphal march, and they joked that they would prove that their opera was also a grand opera by including their own elephants. I also recall that some audience members in Houston at the time immediately got this inside joke. (Again I wish I could remember where I read this.)