Opera Review: Nixon in China
On May 1, 1994, Hunter S Thompson published his celebrated obituary of former US president Richard Nixon, whom Thompson remembered as “a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. If the right people had been in charge of his funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles.”
The 20th anniversary of Nixon’s death is a good time to revisit the only opera to have taken a living American president as its subject (it premiered in 1987). Nixon in China, with a libretto by Alice Goodman and a score by John Goodman, follows the president’s visit to China, to meet with Mao Tse-tung, in 1972.
