“But I went and listened to some of his music. “John was unknown to me at the time,” Gockley says. He had already sketched the idea out in his head and even had a composer in mind to write the music: John Adams. He blurted out, ‘What about an opera on Nixon’s visit to China?’, and I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”īut if Sellars was crazy, he was crazy like a fox. “I met with Peter in New York, and talked to him about coming to work for us in Houston. “Peter brought me the idea,” says Gockley, speaking from San Francisco, where he recently retired as general director of the San Francisco Opera. The story of Nixon in China began three years earlier, in a meeting between David Gockley, the HGO’s general director from 1972 to 2005, and the brilliant young opera director Peter Sellars. And Nixon put Houston on the operatic map in a prominent way. They’re real, modern political figures from America and China. But its characters aren’t drawn from European history and literature. Nixon in China is an opera – like Carmen, Tosca or The Barber of Seville. And when baritone James Maddalena, portraying Nixon, walked down the gangway and started to sing, people in the audience realized they were watching something at once very familiar and very strange. There, to the dramatic, pulsating sound of an orchestra, a replica of Air Force One descended onto the stage. The three-act production burst into the world at the shiny new Wortham Center. In October 1987, the Houston Grand Opera took a big gamble when it staged a new, unorthodox opera about President Nixon’s famous 1972 trip to China.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |