Since the mid-1980s when John Adams, Peter Sellars, and Alice Goodman set out to make opera relevant to contemporary human experience with Nixon in China (1987), their efforts have continued to be provocative. Each of their collaborations explores topics among the most contentious geopolitical challenges of our times: ideological conflict and human rights abuses in Nixon; terrorism and radical Islamophobia in The Death of Klinghoffer (1991); and the moral implications of atomic physics and threat of nuclear annihilation in Doctor Atomic (2005).Footnote ¹ Consequently, these works have given rise to controversy and prompted scholars and critics alike to contemplate how these operatic representations are situated, especially since they are tied to delicate issues of recent social and political turmoil in which wounds are still fresh, protagonists are still living, painful ideological debates are still evolving, and we as nations, cultures, and individuals are still grappling with what recent history has meant and will mean. Nixon arguably initiated this phenomenon in contemporary opera.

It is by now well established that Peter Sellars, a director whose guiding philosophy centres on the notion that theatre and opera are suitable for the ‘discussion of the most urgent issues in our lives,’Footnote ² first had the vision for Nixon and approached Adams and Goodman about collaboration. Its premiere at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987 set off a wave of opera commissions that privileged recent historical subject matter and attracted new audiences to American opera houses.Footnote ³ Performances of the work were relatively infrequent for a number of years, but the opera recently received acclaimed showings in New York (2011), Paris (2012), and San Francisco (2012), and its lasting power continues to surprise critics, audiences, and even the composer himself.Footnote ⁴ In its best productions, Nixon strikes a balance between humour and elegiac reflection, presenting multiple profiles of the Nixons, Mao Tse-Tung, Chou En-lai, Chiang Ch'ing (Madame Mao), and Henry Kissinger, likewise confronting socio-political tension and human rights traumas of the Cultural Revolution. Above all, Nixon affirms Adams's distinct voice as an opera composer and stands as a landmark in his musical course from the late twentieth century into the twenty-first.

Although the opera is a well known commodity, Timothy A. Johnson's John Adams's Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives is the first book-length analysis devoted to the work. Earlier studies by Johnson himself, Stephan Prock, Rebecca Burkhardt, and Matthew Daines, among others, examine Nixon , Footnote ⁵ but Johnson's book is by far the most comprehensive investigation of the opera to date, exceeding previous inquiries in analytical and historical breadth. The author focuses on musical relationships in Adams's score as a means for accessing insight that is ‘missing from, or merely latent in, the newsreels and other documentary evidence of Nixon's historic trip to China’ in 1972 (5). He deliberately takes his cue from Sellars, whose aim for opera is ‘to go inside to a place where the headlines aren't going … to find what was not in the news, what was missing from the news’Footnote ⁶ (5). It should be noted that the analytical expansion of Sellars's remarks is at once the book's strongest and weakest feature, as will be seen below. Overall, however, Johnson's attention to musical detail is extraordinary. Together with well researched historical and political anecdotes (he read all the sources read by the creators, in addition to more recent material on the subject), he provides another perspective on the historical event through musical analysis, making connections that inevitably enrich the listening and viewing experience.

The book's publication came two decades after Johnson wrote a pioneering dissertation on Adams's music in 1991; he has now come full circle. In his dissertation, Johnson takes up the issue of harmony in Adams's works leading up to Nixon and focuses on relationships among pitch classes to describe Adams's ‘sudden key-shifts after long stretches of static harmony.’Footnote ⁷ His study helped to clarify the idea of a ‘post-minimalist’ approach, specifically the notion that by the late 1980s ‘minimalism [had] evolved even further, at least in the hands of Adams.’Footnote ⁸ He later published on this topic in Musical Quarterly in 1994, arguing that ‘minimalism may be defined most fruitfully as a technique’ rather than a style or aesthetic.Footnote ⁹ By 2011, he is less concerned with the issue of minimalism, adopting the view that Nixon ‘bears the markings of minimalism but goes beyond the bounds of the term in many important ways’ (6). (At one point, the author cites Matthew Daines's stance that ‘Nixon is in no sense a ‘minimalist opera’’Footnote ¹⁰ (7).) Here, Johnson puts his analytical ideas into a wider context, asking what analysis can tell us about major structural events in the score that inform the opera's deeper dramatic layers. The study is fundamentally pedagogical in scope and requires readers willing to engage in close listening (Johnson includes helpful references to the original 1988 Elektra/Nonesuch recording) and score study, as well as traverse historical terrain.

Johnson divides the book into three parts, not act by act, but rather topic by topic with the purpose of correlating ‘historical events with those depicted onstage’ and highlighting ‘the actions, emotions, feelings, and motivations depicted in the opera through music’ (5). Commendably, he does not proceed in a linear fashion blow by blow but relies on three organizing principles to guide his discussion. Part I, ‘Setting the Scenes,’ considers the work's emphasis on visual representation and sense of place. Here, Johnson describes how the music offers an appropriate counterpart to conflicting viewpoints on various settings, including the natural landscape of China, State ceremonial events, Mao's private study, and Pat Nixon's sightseeing tour. In Part II, ‘Characters and Musical Characterization,’ the author amplifies Alice Goodman's vision to ‘give everyone a voice’Footnote ¹¹ in order to access the private inner worlds of the people involved, not just their public ones (13). In this section, he examines the historical background of the main characters and through detailed description suggests that the music reveals more about each figure than is first apparent. Johnson shows, for example, how Adams musically represents a paradox in Chou En-lai's character. As described by historian, Dick Wilson, Chou embodied ‘the old-world Chinese virtues of gentleness, politeness and humility,’ yet using these qualities in the service of ‘a political ideology that invoked violence and destruction as a necessary part of its programme’Footnote ¹² (154). Johnson demonstrates how Chou's ostensibly insignificant musical role as a polite host at the outset of the opera (set to harmonic accompaniment that ‘lends a more complex undercurrent to Chou's restful and happy declaration’ (147)) harmonically prefigures his extensive role in Act III in which he reflects on the weight of the dead and questions the possibility for atonement. Part III, ‘Nationalism and Cultural Distinction,’ takes a broader view of international relations between the two countries’ contrasting economic policies, attitudes towards human rights, and the issue of détente initiated by Nixon. In this final part, Johnson focuses on how political, social, and cultural tensions and the warming of relations are accented structurally in Adams's score. Throughout, the author's emphasis remains analytical, yet he confronts the opera's rich thematic material and provides a multilayered view of its underlying subtexts.

Johnson's theoretical underpinning combines Harold Krebs's theory of metrical dissonance with Neo-Riemannian language. His thesis is relatively straightforward, namely that when metre and harmony are most dissonant, events on stage are at their most unstable (or foreshadow such instability). It is a point well considered, particularly in the author's description of the opening. As if operating from a Wagnerian standpoint, Johnson argues that the opening orchestral music sets the tone for what is to come. It foreshadows not only the conflicting viewpoints on the Chinese landscape presented in the first scene, but also the larger undercurrents of tension – politically, socially and culturally – between East and West. Johnson locates this tension in Adams's ascending A aeolian scales that unfold at different rates in each voice and present a range of shifting metrical relationships. He shows how the metrically dissonant placement of instrumental layers (the woodwinds and trombones, for example) against the metrical structure of the strings and other orchestral voices contributes to an unstable musical setting, even though the scalar material lends itself to consonance (18–20). It is this tension between metrical and harmonic dissonance and consonance, Johnson argues, that serves as the musical and dramatic heart of the opera. He works out this idea with remarkable precision over the course of the book, identifying metrical and harmonic dissonance in the majority of his examples and making connections to the opera's larger socio-political and dramatic concerns.

Part I, which covers the visual aspects of the opera, includes some of Johnson's most instructive analytical observations. Chapter 1, ‘Portraits of the Chinese Landscape,’ for example, focuses on the initial scene, which begins with Adams's well known orchestral opening, followed by the chorus of Chinese citizens, the climactic arrival of the Nixons on the Spirit of ‘76, and finally Richard Nixon's ‘News’ aria. In great detail, Johnson addresses how the music represents differing perspectives of the Chinese landscape from the viewpoint of both the Chinese citizens (identified with E Major/minor) and the Americans (identified with C Major). Goodman's poetry captures these contradictory views. ‘Whereas [China's] inhabitants saw fruitful soil, vivid colors, and serene openness,’ Johnson paraphrases, ‘its Western visitors saw barren fields, a gray canvas, and emptiness’ (17). After describing the harmonic transformations that occur during the presentation of each position, the author makes a compelling assertion, notably that ‘the primary harmonic transformations in the two depictions of the landscape are identical … They are all, in fact, looking at the same landscape’ (25). To be sure, this kind of analytical insight offers a satisfying sense of coherence and provides an engaging frame for thinking about the musical and dramatic structure of the scene. Similarly, Johnson uncovers a relationship between the opening and closing moments of the opera, calling attention to the notion that the opera begins and ends at dawn, ‘with alternative perspectives on both its colors and its significance’ (17). Here, he offers a thorough account of the opening large-scale harmonic motion and shows that the opera ends with the inverse harmonic transformation from which it began, ‘a fitting close to the harmonic structure of the opera as a whole’ (27). Undoubtedly, observations like these offer insights that can inform one's hearing of the work.

As with Part I, Part II charts the opera's harmonic and metrical content but in the context of each character's public and private worlds. Johnson begins the section with an analytical portrait of Richard Nixon, whose ‘News’ aria stands as one of the centrepieces of the opera. The author emphasizes the historical prominence of the media, especially television coverage of the event, since 1972 was an election year, and there was pressure to keep Nixon in the headlines. As Johnson notes in his historical outline, Nixon's press staff arrived early in China to scout a strategic place for the Spirit of ‘76 to land so the photographers and cameramen could capture the best shots of Nixon's arrival (81). The aria reflects the president's unsettled frame of mind as his thoughts wander from feelings of elation at the thought of being broadcast to 60 million viewers to paranoia, insecurity, and despair regarding the political realities of Sino-American rapprochement. Johnson's analysis foregrounds the tension between hexatonic systems at play in the aria. When Nixon's thoughts begin to unravel, Johnson demonstrates how Adams moves from one stable hexatonic system to its polar opposite. ‘[W]ith no common tones between the two systems,’ he writes, ‘Adams harmonically shows just how far Nixon's thoughts have turned’ (96–97). Similarly, the author illustrates how the role of musical tension informs the other characters' intrapersonal concerns. In his chapter on Pat Nixon, for example, he suggests that ‘Adams musically portrays [her] remarkable vision and insight,’ which stands in contrast to her personal difficulties in a public role, with ‘oscillations between consonance and dissonance at multiple hierarchal levels’ (104). When discussing Chiang, he argues that Adams's ‘shifts in harmonic language and transformations reflect [her] contradictory nature’ (139); likewise, for the author, Adams represents Mao's ‘suspicious attitude through harmonic and metrical dissonances’ (201).

These analytical points are frequently revealing; their broader implications, though, are unexplored. For one thing, the musical language Johnson seeks to define in the context of Nixon, notably aspects that create a sense of musical tension, can be applied to Adams's music more generally. Shifting metrical patterns and complex harmonic transformations are key components of Adams's compositional vocabulary and occur frequently in his early works, such as Harmonium (1981) and Harmonielehre (1984–85), as well as in his more recent compositions. To make direct associations between musical tension (ubiquitous in Adams's oeuvre) and dramatic tension seems all too convenient and assumes that the opera's value is defined by overt relationships between musical gestures and what they represent.Footnote ¹³ Adams's music happens to work well for opera precisely because it confirms music's expressive capacity for capturing particular human situations. But to embrace a technical apparatus that aims to locate political and historical truth in musical tension means relying on presumptions that are fundamentally questionable (i.e. a correlation between metrical dissonance and ideological conflict in the drama does not necessarily make for an explicit relationship). This is not to say that Johnson's intellectual connections do not tell us something important, for his interpretations have the potential to bring meaning and relevance to our experience of the opera and the history it reflects. But in the end, one must be aware of how his assertions are situated.

The bulk of Part III confronts the opera's broader social and political perspectives, here using analysis to probe the work's emphasis on human, ethical, and cultural concerns. In his chapter, ‘Human Rights’, Johnson delves into the thematic and musical workings of the re-enactment of Chiang's political ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, a propaganda piece that examines human rights abuses of the peasant class and the rise of militant Communism. Johnson surveys the ballet's history and compares the original orchestral score to Adams's treatment, both of which share certain dramatic features but differ in overall musical design (222). Ultimately, he understands this re-enactment within the opera as an open-ended vehicle for contemplating issues surrounding political, economic, and physical exploitation – issues that also serve as meta-commentary on Nixon's visit, notably the ‘potential for exploitation of China by the leaders of the United States’ (227). The final chapter, ‘Détente,’ addresses Act III, in which the leaders share their memories of war and revolution, and focuses on how the music depicts a profound sense of shared humanity. Here, Johnson displays his most subtle writing as he identifies metrical and harmonic connections between the leaders' sung reflections: ‘In counterpoint to the Nixons’ intense exchange about the air raid and its aftermath, Chiang … describes her memories of her own initially timid approach to assuming a role in the revolution. Through this [musical] overlap, Adams again links the different characters' experiences and shows their commonalities. Both Nixon and Chiang recognize their own mortality but are not paralyzed by it' (257). As with his observations in Part I, the author provides a useful frame for thinking about the musical and dramatic structure of this complex and often bewildering final act.

Although Johnson makes an effort to avoid Adams's reflections on his own music (in his acknowledgements he writes, ‘I wanted to offer my own observations on the music reflecting what Adams did, rather than what he said he did’ (xv)), he relies on external perspectives concerning the opera's message. He often draws on Sellars, Goodman, and the popular press for authority and inspiration, not to mention the work of numerous historians. In the introductory chapter, Johnson takes Sellars's perspective regarding the director's attraction to Adams's musical ‘ability to build and sustain tension’Footnote ¹⁴ as a literal basis for his analytical approach (3). The author explains that it was important for him to try to approach the work as the creators approached it – to read everything they read, to ‘take observers beyond the newsreels,’ to ‘provide a glimpse of what it might have felt like for the people involved in this great dramatic event,’ and to ‘go further still’ vis-à-vis musical analysis (5). However, by mapping Sellars's vision onto his analytical agenda, Johnson bypasses the goal he set out to accomplish in the first place: to tease out musical relationships on their own terms and reflect on what they tell us about the drama. This inconsistency in his method results in a discussion that shifts from dense objective analysis to journalistic anecdote to historical quotation. At times, some of his most stimulating analytical ideas hide beneath this jumbled approach. One often wishes he held the discussion together with a more cohesive framework.

To be sure, Adams, Sellars, and Goodman were unapologetically interpretive in their aim to create a multi-sided portrait of the ‘person-to-person’ relations that defined Nixon's historic meeting with Mao. Similarly, Johnson's book draws strength from its interpretive goal to show that the music, too, provides insight into this history and its politics in a way that may otherwise be inaccessible; these are issues that do not come through the programme notes, pre-concert talks, or history textbooks. He has produced an essential contribution to the literature on Adams that demonstrates the depth of his engagement with Nixon and asks us to hear these parts of the story in a new way. While it is hard to imagine a more comprehensive account of the opera, Johnson's book points to future critical readings of Nixon and Adams's operas more generally that integrate musical analysis with the socio-political and historical themes central to these important stage works.