When Henry Kissinger became an opera character
Henry Kissinger, the polarizing diplomat who died Wednesday at the age of 100, received extensive honors during his long career. But one of the most unusual – an honor that was also devastating – came in 1987, when he joined Mozart’s Figaro and Puccini’s Tosca as characters in an opera.
Composed by John Adams and directed by Peter Sellars, with a libretto by Alice Goodman, “Nixon in China” was inspired by President Richard M. Nixon’s groundbreaking 1972 trip to China. Kissinger’s secret shuttle had paved the way for the visit, which helped normalize relations between the two countries after a long period without diplomatic ties.
When the opera premiered, it was still a fresh idea that this art form, so associated with the mythic, could address recent history – and treat it not as satire, but as a strangely moving combination of grandeur, humor and tenderness. “Nixon in China” is not a realistic account of the trip, but a stylized fantasy about it.
As operatic characters, both Nixon and Mao Zedong are somewhat ridiculous and somewhat noble, singing their hopes and dreams in Goodman’s enigmatic, evocative lines. And Kissinger – Nixon’s national security adviser in 1972 and his secretary of state a year later – is at their side, just as he has been throughout history.
“When Peter Sellars proposed the idea of the opera,” Adams said in an interview, “he had just finished reading Kissinger’s ‘White House Years,’ which I seem to remember was quite pompously self-indulgent. I think there was interest in customizing the secretary.”
“Nixon” sought to tap into the wispy depths beneath the headlines and established positions surrounding a much-discussed story. (Adams and Sellars would later do the same in “The Death of Klinghoffer” – another Goodman collaboration, about a cruise ship hijacked by Palestine Liberation Front militants in 1985 – and “Doctor Atomic,” about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb.)
The play is not particularly sympathetic to Nixon, but it leaves the audience with a poignant human sense of him. The opera’s Kissinger, however, is never truly human; he doesn’t get the exposure of thoughts and ambivalence accorded to the other protagonists. “He’s not a character that we go deep psychologically with,” Adams said.
It’s not deep, but it’s smooth. In the first scene, as the Americans arrive and awkward pleasantries are exchanged in the form of interjections, fragments and repetitions, Kissinger is the only one sounds comfortable. The bass register of the role gives it a sonorous diplomatic softness; it’s soothing, while everyone else sounds tense and anxious.
“He is and always was theatrical,” Sellars said in an interview.
But this veneer disappears in the second act, during an imaginative reinterpretation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda ballet ‘The Red Detachment of Women’. As in ‘The Mousetrap’ from ‘Hamlet’, reality and fiction blur: the singer playing Kissinger is, without explanation, in the ballet as Lao Tzu – here, in case you didn’t get the message, the sinister chief assistant of a tyrant. (“Doesn’t he look like you-know-who!” exclaims Pat Nixon.)
Like Lao Tzu, the grounded friendliness of the first act has disappeared in favor of lustful, violent extremes; the singer soars in falsetto and, confronted by a defiant belch, stutters a cry to “beat her to death.” “I’m here to liaise with the backroom boys,” sings Kissinger-as-Lao-Tzu, “who know how to live.”
“People are a little shocked when he shows up as the sadistic overlord,” Sellars said. “But he is clearly the man responsible for Chile and for the secret bombing of Cambodia – the list of atrocities and acts of unspeakable violence is long. And that grisly stuff is behind the cheerful and eloquent diplomat. The surprise, as always, is that no one is just one thing. That is one of the reasons why you create opera characters.”
After the ballet reveals Kissinger’s offensiveness as pure brutality, his final moments in the final act are prosaic: “Please, where’s the toilet?” he asks.
And, the libretto tells us, only after he goes looking for the bathroom can the Nixons, Mao and his wife, and Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Prime Minister, “all fall into a state of reverie”: the surreal poetic lock ensemble, in which the five characters muse about their lives, their country and the fate of both.
“How much of what we did was good?” Zhou sings towards the end. That kind of self-examination is completely absent in the opera’s Kissinger – who, with his charming but ruthless realpolitik, his fist wrapped in a velvet glove, is the opposite of interiority, the opposite of poetry.
Like Nixon, Kissinger knew about the opera. But when it finally arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2011, he showed it. Adams heard Kissinger tell people, “I think I have a sense of humor. But it has its limits.”