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It's 22 October 1987, and the composer John Adams is daring to put politicians – not Greek gods, medieval kings or stylishly impoverished artists but actual, still-breathing, real-life politicians - on the opera stage. What’s more, he has written a comic opera that plays out like a newsreel about global superpowers, due to premiere during the dying embers of the Cold War. How does he get away with it?

Nixon in China was a dramatisation of Richard Nixon’s pioneering 1972 visit to Beijing to meet Mao Zedong. It was the director Peter Sellars who came up with the notion, and who suggested that Alice Goodman should be the librettist. That choice was inspired: Goodman came up with a text that doesn’t flinch at the subject matter. It isn’t satire, and it doesn’t resort to any of the stuff of classic grand opera: no doomed love affairs, no revenge killings, no cross-dressing, no sacrificial heroine. In a way, Nixon in China is plain reportage.

The simple facts are dramatic enough. There are big colourful crowd scenes – grand welcomes, huge banquets. There are tender moments around the private lives of the public figures. Instead of making myths of politicians, this operatic treatment makes them mortal. And they really work in song: Mao Tse-Tung is a high tenor; Pat Nixon is a lyric soprano; Henry Kissinger is a sotta voce baritone.

Meanwhile, in the orchestra pit, minimalism had never sounded so lush, or so reflective. Until this point, minimalism and opera had only ever really collided in the works of Philip Glass, who made his surging arpeggios the backdrop to grand myths and rituals. Adams shares a basic music language with Glass, but his minimalism is human. He infiltrates the orchestra with a large saxophone section, loads of percussion and an electronic synthesizer.

Mao nods off in the middle of discussions with Nixon. Nixon sings of bright visions of America. In real life, the characters don’t share a common language. In the opera, they share their music.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 3’s Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This is an archive recording of "The Chairman Dances" from Adams' Nixon in China, by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Yutaka Sado.

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