Nixon in China

Once upon a time I went to an opera I didn't know. At the end of Act 1 I was very tempted to leave without staying for the rest.  But being a parsimonious and hard-up student, I thought since I'd paid for my ticket I would stay for the whole thing. When the curtain fell at the end of Act 3 I wanted nothing so much as to sit and watch the whole thing all over again straight away. That opera was Jenufa,  it's  one of my favourites, and that's a timely lesson in sticking with stuff, because you never know how things will turn out. 

I had cause to reflect upon this at the recent performance of Nixon in China, because there was nothing I felt like after Act 1 so much as just going home but,  remembering the Jenufa experience, I didn't even suggest it to the OH. In any case the tickets cost exponentially more than the Jenufa ones did back in 1975! Part way through Act 2 I thought perhaps I was having a rerun of the Jenufa thing, but Act 3 confirmed me in my opinion that alas! Nixon in China is not for me. 

It's not difficult to pin down why, although let me say immediately it has nothing to do with the Scottish Opera production. Staging, singing, acting, choreography, orchestra were all good to very good, but it just seemed in the end to add up to less than the sum of its parts. 

I think at the end of the day that it's really just not a particularly good subject for an opera. Act 1 is largely political fractiousness,  Act 2 is fun and Act 3 is reminiscence but there's no heft to any of it: possibly because at the end of the day the only important thing about Nixon going to China was that he went, even though nothing very concrete was achieved. And given that he arrives in the first ten minutes of the opera, that's another three plus hours of nothing very much to sit through. Possibly there is operatic potential in this meeting of two world views as represented by two world weary men brought face to face, but if there is, this opera didn't find it.