Nixon in China

In the organizer's words:

Two of the most powerful men in the world shake hands - and the world watches: With their opera about the state visit of American President Richard Nixon to Mao Tse-tung in 1972, composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman brought contemporary history to the stage ... Conductor: Daniel Carter; Production: Hauen und Stechen; With Kyle Miller, Thomas Lehman, Seth Carico, Ya-Chung Huang, Heidi Stober, Hye-Young Moon and others.
Two of the most powerful men in the world shake hands - and the world watches: With their opera about the state visit of American President Richard Nixon to Mao Tse-tung in 1972, composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman brought contemporary history to the stage. They envisioned a "heroic opera" that told of modern myths and the power of images. The rapprochement of the two systems was one of the most powerful media spectacles of the 20th century; Nixon himself equated the event in its historical significance with the moon landing. Like a satirically exaggerated TV documentary, the minimal music opera largely follows the protocol of the state visit, which lasted several days, and shows its larger-than-life protagonists between self-dramatization, the search for understanding and perplexity.

36 years after its premiere, Deutsche Oper Berlin brings NIXON IN CHINA to Berlin for the first time in a new staged production. John Adams, one of the most frequently performed composers of our time, is, together with Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley, one of the best-known representatives of minimal music, which emerged in the 1960s as a counter-design to the European avant-garde. Yet even though Adams' best-known opera is considered a showpiece of this musical style, the work's hybridity defies such narrow stylistic attributions. Colorfully orchestrated and in trance-like repetitions, the sound magician John Adams brings to life the big band sound of the swing era as well as the heritage of European classical music.

The music theater collective Hauen und Stechen, led by founders and directors Julia Lwowski and Franziska Kronfoth, is known for its performative directorial handwriting and its contemporary, genre-bending theater evenings. In their production of NIXON IN CHINA, they focus primarily on the propagandistic aspect of the summit meeting, which deliberately left out such sensitive topics as the Vietnam War or the tense relationship with Vietnam. After their evening of Rossini's IL VIAGGIO A REIMS as part of the performance series AUS DEM HINTERHALT, the collective is now returning to the Deutsche Oper Berlin and realizing a production on the big stage for the first time with NIXON IN CHINA. This content has been machine translated.