***

The so-called “minimalists” (most prominently represented in opera by Glass and Adams) did not emerge from that resentment-filled academic cloister. They certainly didn’t find their styles by shrinking from contact with popular music. In asking above whether anyone truly loves those (to me) less-than-lovable operas, I left out their names, because I know there are people who do love the music of Satyagraha and Einstein on the Beach. I don’t, but I hear enough in it to imagine trying again. And I loved Nixon in China alike at first sight (BAM in 1987), during long subsequent study, and on re-encounters in the theater. Even in less-than-satisfying encounters. As with Il trovatore, I know I’m spending time with something worth caring about even if I don’t think the performers of the moment are doing it justice.

I have no idea whether Adams grew up knowing the traditional operatic repertory, but if not, then he did an amazing job of learning its ways and means in preparation for his first essay. Every role in Nixon “works” for a recognizable operatic voice-type. Madame Mao has a show-stopper high-soprano aria that sounds good in the voice of every singer who does well with Cunegonde, Lucia, Konstanze, and Gilda. (I say this from experience, because the piece has become a standard “audition aria” for exactly that group of performers.) Pat Nixon has not one phrase that would be found awkward or ineffective by a qualified singer of Ellen Orford, Mimì, Eva, or Marguerite. Chairman Mao is hard to cast because full-voiced tenors are hard to find – but if you can sing the Drum Major, Bacchus, Peter Grimes, or Dick Johnson, this is a role for you. In the same-range but different-style baritone parts of Nixon and Chou En-Lai, Adams seems to have had an ear for the actual sounds of James Maddalena (hearty and bluff with a certain nervous edge) and Sanford Sylvan (smooth and contemplative) in his original cast. When, in the surreal and much-criticized third act, Chou suddenly steps through the imaginary boundary to offer Pat his handkerchief, the delicate yet hall-filling resonance of Sylvan’s head-voice on the last syllable of “please accept mine” created one of those heart-stopping, once-heard-never-forgotten moments. An opera composer who knows how to let a voice create a moment knows something important.

This was not accomplished by simple imitation of past writing. The show-stopper aria mentioned above, “I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung,” works in many of the same ways as Handel’s “Tornami a vagheggiar” or Bellini’s “Ah non giunge” (to name a pair in the same key), but it is a completely individual creation that does not overtly resemble or recall others. It defines its own terms. Its rhythms are sui generis; they use a modernist technique in which exact but non-standard proportions are employed to reach a faster tempo without simple acceleration of a previous one, and this has proved irresistibly exciting in performance. Setting the word “book” repeatedly to a legato two-note phrase follows no tradition and even breaks what were once the rules of English prosody, but it is an inspired choice (again, once heard never forgotten). The only thing “traditional” about the aria is that it embraces the soprano voice for what it can do.