Featured Book: The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross (continued)

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Mr. Ross writes in Chapter 15, "Sunken Cathedrals": "Nothing seems more inherently unlikely than the idea of a great American opera — possibly the greatest since Porgy and Bess — based on the events surrounding President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. When the director Peter Sellars first proposed the subject, [composer John] Adams assumed he was joking. At the premiere, which took place at the Houston Grand Opera on October 22, 1987, many critics thought the same. Yet Sellars knew what he was doing. By yanking opera into a universally familiar contemporary setting, he was almost forcing his composer to clean out all the cobwebs of the European past. Adams also had the advantage of an extraordinary libretto by the poet Alice Goodman. Many lines come straight from the documentary record — the speeches and poetry of Chairman Mao, the fine-spun oratory of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, the convoluted utterances and memoirs of Nixon — but they coalesce into an epic poem of recent history, a dream narrative in half-rhyming couplets" (pp. 536-537.