A little more than a year later we met in Washington D. C.—almost equidistant from John Adams's home in California and mine in England—to work out the opera’s structure. There were all the back issues of the various news magazines and the tapes of the television newscasts; the beginning of our research. Once it was clear what exactly had happened on each of the six historic days (21–27 February 1972), that the President had met with the Chairman on the first day, that the guards had started smiling on the second, that the Great Wall was viewed on the fourth, and so on, we began to simplify. The opera would have three acts, the first comprising three scenes, the second, two, and the third, one. We gave the characters voices: Mrs. Nixon would be a lyric soprano, and Chiang Ch'ing a coloratura, and Mao's secretaries would have lower voices and sing backup. We discussed the atmosphere of each scene and worked out where the various arias and choruses would go. When I got back to England, I resumed reading, relentlessly ignoring everything published after 1972 except for the Nixon and Kissinger memoirs. Having started out blissfully ignorant, I was not going to become wise after the fact. I read Agnes Smedley's biography of Chu Teh; Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and the richly purple prose of Han Su-yin; the authorized edition of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung;not to mention his pamphlet on the arts and A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire. I broke my ban on books published after 1972 when I came across We Will Always Remember Premier Chou En-lai (1977), the memorial volume with essays by committees, and Roxane Witke's Comrade Chiang Ch'ing. Odd little biographies of Richard Nixon turned up, written while he was a congressman, or a senator, or vice-president, or wondering if he could possibly make a comeback after losing the California gubernatorial election of 1962. I began to collect translations of Mao's poems. And there was more: books, good, bad, and indifferent, pertinent or ostensibly irrelevant, magazine articles, newspaper clippings, photographs. Certain facts became important: Mao's classical education, the way in which his writing takes the allusions of the Chinese literary pantheon, and its meter, and turns them to its own ends; his admiration of Western philosophy and the heroes of the American Revolution; Nixon's stint in the navy during the war, the fact that he was stationed on various Pacific islands, Mrs. Nixon's letters to him, the poverty of her childhood, and the various rented accommodations of the early years of their marriage; the poverty of Chiang Chi’ing’s childhood; Chou En-lai's insomnia. There was the Long March to be thought about, “one year of almost continuous marching, totaling 6,000 miles,” as Snow succinctly puts it, the epic feat of Mao's revolution—astonishing that it should have taken place as recently as 1935—and the Chinese Communist Party's years in the wilderness in northwest China, and its various internecine feuds before the Second Civil War began in 1946 and ended with the taking of Peking three years later and the exile of Chiang Kai-shek. There were details of the famines of the first half of the century, echoed in the 1950s. And the Cultural Revolution. What can one say about that blood bath on Platonic principles? And having said it, what can one say about the famines and the Long March? I pondered Nixon's love of history and his belief in peace and progress, and I pondered the significance of the characters’ ages: the Nixons, Kissinger and Chiang Ch'ing in late middle age, Mao and Chou, two old men; all with the ambition of their youth either achieved or abandoned. I became more and more certain that every character in the opera should be made as eloquent as possible. Everyone should have a voice. It would be a heroic opera—that would be the character of the work and an opera of character—that had become inevitable and the heroic quality of the work as a whole would be determined by the eloquence of each character in his or her own argument. In February 1985, greatly to everyone’s relief, I wrote the first couplet. I think the last was written in December 1986. During that time, and since, I discovered a fair amount about the nature of collaborative work. Choruses that I loved had to be cut for the greater good, and arias were composed and inserted. We disagreed violently about one thing and another, and while some of these disagreements were resolved, others were amicably maintained. There are places where the music goes against the grain of the libretto, and places where the staging goes against the grain of both. My Nixon is not quite the same character as John Adams's Nixon, and they both differ slightly from Peter Sellars's Nixon, not to mention James Maddalena's [the originator of the role of Richard Nixon]. My view of the Cultural Revolution is not the same as theirs, and theirs are not the same. I suspect we disagree about peace and progress. This collaboration is polyphonic. We have done our best to make our disagreements counterpoints; not to drown each other out, but, like the characters in the opera, each to be as eloquent as possible.
This program note, written by Alice Goodman in 1987, appears in the score to Nixon in China.