John Adams

At a time when the exploits of Jerry Springer and Monica Lewinsky have become the stuff of operatic fare, it’s hard to imagine how strange it was for a large-scale opera to deal with familiar, living characters, as it did in 1987. That’s when Nixon in China — John Adams’s retelling of the president’s 1972 meeting with Mao Tse-Tung — received its world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera. In his New Yorker review of the event, Andrew Porter pointed out that three of the opera’s five protagonists — the Nixons and Henry Kissinger — could all have attended the first performance. (Madame Mao could have come as well if she’d been able to obtain a furlough from prison, where she was serving a suspended death sentence for her role in the Cultural Revolution.)

"It’s just very odd to see these characters — it’s very odd to see Richard Nixon open his mouth and sing," explains conductor Gil Rose, who’s in the midst of rehearsals for the opera’s Boston premiere next weekend, a co-production of Opera Boston and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Although it’s been around for only 15 years or so, the event seems a long time in coming: Nixon is probably Adams’s best work to date, perhaps even the best American opera yet written.

When we think of his music, of course, the first word that comes to mind is minimalism, a rather worn-out label at this late date. Rose, what’s more, doesn’t think that the "M word" fits Nixon particularly well. "When we think of minimalists, we think of making statements by reducing the complexity of things, and rhythmic patterns, like a lot of Steve Reich’s and Philip Glass’s music. But John Adams is a more traditional composer than either Reich or Glass; he writes in a more narrative style, a less temporal style." Rose also points to Adams’s "lush" orchestral writing — which he compares to Ravel’s — and the breadth of the opera’s musical references, including Copland, Ives, Stravinsky and jazz. "It’s very much connected to musical history in a way that minimalists have tried to disconnect themselves from musical history."

The conductor is as full of praise for poet Alice Goodman’s libretto as he is for Adams’s music. "I know it’s great because I keep repeating lines from the show — they stay in your brain. They’re very clever and pointed and immediate." Goodman’s sophisticated, contrapuntal, and sometimes chilling wordplay forced Rose and stage director Scott Edmiston to consider whether they needed supertitles. The conductor says they plan to "go halfway" with them, "just at the key moments where we feel like we have to help the story along, and not go word for word like you would in an opera in a foreign language."

Asked for a favorite part of the opera, Rose points to act one scene two, where the president, Mao, Kissinger, and Prime Minister Chou En-Lai meet for the first time and Nixon is almost unable to hold his own in the repartee. It’s politically and linguistically complex, and "you have to read it slowly to even grasp what’s going on, because there’s a lot of political interplay and philosophical interplay." And he calls Adams’s contribution "a real barn burner of intense music."

Act two is devoted to the two women, Pat Nixon and Madame Mao, and Rose draws attention to the subtlety of Adams’s respective musical depictions. "Pat is portrayed in a very innocent way, she’s just this person who’s taking a tour through China, and the music is very light — it almost feels like Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov in a way. It’s got a kind of gleam and shine to it. And then the second scene is really about Madame Mao, and there’s a kind of a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary fervor — the color for that would be blood red. Inside those two scenes are the different explorations of them as forces in this kind of political drama."

One of the most interesting points about Nixon in China is the way it subverts the conventions of the standard heroic opera, in which ordinary characters attain a higher status through extraordinary action. Here, Rose notes, "the opera starts in sort of heroic terms, where the characters are bigger than life. And then slowly through the course of the opera, they become more and more humanized, both in good and bad ways. So at the end, everything’s been just kind of stripped down to a character setting — the convention of the grand opera has been given away to a very interior dialogue among five very human characters."

Opera Boston and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project present Nixon in China on March 12 at 7:30 p.m. and March 14 at 2 p.m. at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont Street in Boston. Tickets are $24 to $85; call (800) 233-3123.