E-Mail This Article to a Friend Good art Opera Boston’s powerful Nixon in China, plus The Death of Klinghoffer on DVD, Emmanuel Music’s secular Bach, and remembering Vera Gold BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Three cheers — big ones! What rare satisfaction when the little engine that could can. The smaller of our two major opera companies has just pulled off one of Boston’s most ambitious opera projects: this country’s first new staging of John Adams’s Nixon in China since Peter Sellars (whose idea it was) directed it for the Houston Grand Opera in 1987. It was telecast for PBS and had runs in Brooklyn, LA, and Washington. But despite its local connections (composer, librettist, director, major cast members), it was never done in New England. Then Opera Boston (formerly the Boston Academy of Music), which has a remarkable if spotty record, scheduled the first local production. And not only did its two performances at the Cutler Majestic sell out, but every element in this most cooperative of genres — the singing, the acting, the conducting, the orchestral playing, the staging, the choreography, the scenery, the costumes, the lighting — came together on the highest artistic level. A small budget and a big vision gave us a new touchstone for all future opera in Boston.

We live in even more pervasively political times than when Adams and his librettist, poet Alice Goodman, first created Nixon in China. I liked the first production — some things in it will never be surpassed, like the uncanny performances of two Boston baritones, James Maddalena as Nixon and Sanford Sylvan as Chou En-lai. But this time the opera got to me in a deeper way. Maybe because of September 11, we’ve all been through more. In 1987, we could look back with ironic nostalgia to the Nixons’ re-opening of communication with Communist China 15 years before. But right now, the world is in even greater peril, and that peril has struck closer to home. Opening doors to world peace and international cooperation don’t seem priorities of the current administration. I’m 15 years older, too, and Chou En-lai’s final question — "How much of what we did was good?" — seems even sadder and a comforting answer seems even farther away. Chou sings: "I am old and cannot sleep/Forever, like the young." Now I think I might not live to see the peace that 15 years ago I thought I someday might.

The opera is largely about idealism. Nixon himself earns your sympathy because for all his political maneuvering, he’s excited by these new political possibilities, like a kid in a candy shop (of course, he’s also calculating the size of the TV audience for his arrival). He even admits he had been wrong about China. Andrew Schroeder (Nixon) has a beautiful voice, and he impersonated the president — the hand wave, the hunched shoulders — without caricature, though his marvelous opening aria ("News has a kind of mystery") had only a little of Maddalena’s boundless, virtually innocent enthusiasm.

This new production moved me more in its greater focus on the women characters, who take over the second act: Pat Nixon and Chiang Ch’ing (Mao’s wife). The first lady’s aria is more a self-confirmation than a reassessment ("Let routine dull the edge of mortality," she prays), and soprano Elizabeth Weigle delivered it with great poignance ("I treat every day like Christmas. . . . Trivialities are not for me"). At the end of it, a little Chinese boy plays a game of which-hand-has-the-penny (not in the original version). She guesses wrong and the child starts to leave; then he runs back and gives her the present anyway. It seemed genuine because Weigle made Pat Nixon a figure of touching dignity. Not profound — she can’t help seeing elephants as symbols of her husband’s party — but very real.

The next scene is one of the strangest in opera, and it worked here because Edmiston’s staging and Susan Zeeman Rogers’s minimal set design (a square box surrounded by red silks, in turn surrounded by filmy white veils, with very little furniture) balanced Gail Buckley’s realistic costumes (Pat Nixon’s famous red coat) with archetypal and symbolic rather than literal images. The Nixon entourage is invited to see Mme. Mao’s political ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, which is about the evils of the pre-Communist regime — a kind of Chinese Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with female workers slaving for the evil overseer Lao Szu, the Simon Legree, who is made up to look like a caricature of Henry Kissinger — and is slyly played by Drew Poling, who also plays Kissinger! As the victim (affectingly danced by Callie Chapman) is brutalized, the first lady rushes to protect her. "Real life" and theatrical "artifice" are suddenly inextricable.

The ballet was originally choreographed by Mark Morris. In the new production, it was very athletic modern dance. I wish the choreographers, Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett, had responded to Adams’s surprising musical references (Wagner, for example), but they and the dancers of their Prometheus Dance Company created a compelling narrative. You could almost believe Pat Nixon’s confusion. Then Mme. Mao (the intrepid Anne Harley) takes charge, in an aria whose obsessive self-assertion ("I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung") is embodied in relentlessly repeated high D’s (her part must be harder to sing than the Queen of the Night’s). A former movie actress, she also gets one of Goodman’s best lines: "We’ll teach these motherfuckers how to dance," as she and the Chairman (tenor Daniel Norman) sail off into a tango.

Edmiston is a widely respected theater director — this was his first opera. But he has ideal instincts. The production was clean, sharp, and smooth and the details were telling.