Looking Back at ‘Nixon in China’

“You will never see the world more clearly than you see it right now,” said acclaimed theater director Peter M. Sellars ’80 to an audience of undergraduates, professors, and others in the Harvard community as he sat among his collaborators—including composer John C. Adams ’69, and librettist Alice A. Goodman ’80—to discuss the creation of the opera “Nixon in China.” “I love that artists have to find their own path here,” Sellars went on to say.

The proliferation of art at Harvard certainly leads to hard choices for artists between various media, publications, and academic pursuits. But as Goodman said, the main factor that changes an aspiring artist’s future is passion. “If this is the sort of thing you want to do,” she advised her audience, “you have to have the courage to do it.”

These and many other words of wisdom for young artists were shared on Tuesday, November 15 at the American Repertory Theater as part of Harvard’s 375th anniversary celebrations. All three speakers at the talk, moderated by University President Drew G. Faust, graduated from Harvard College and went on to collaborate on “Nixon in China,” a groundbreaking opera that just ended a revival season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

“I was delighted at the prospect of bringing them here to do what they just did … which was to talk in such inspiring and powerful ways about the arts and what the arts mean in our world today, and how their lives as Harvard students turned into their lives as we now see them,” said Faust.

What Adams, Goodman, and Sellars set out to do in producing the opera was to change the way the world thought about preserving history. Too often, opera is perceived as an archaic art, too long and overwrought to be relevant to our culture today. “Telecast dead from the Met,” Sellars joked, but he claims that opera doesn’t have to be an art just for the elderly. The team took a risk in portraying the dramatic tale of Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 through opera, and they changed the face of the medium in the process.

‘Nixon in China’ premiered in 1987 at the Houston Grand Opera in Texas to a moderately enthused audience, but earlier this year, critics welcomed the unique piece to the Metropolitan Opera as an undoubted classic of American theater. The beauty of performance art is that it can be reborn in a time when the public is ready to reflect and accept a different spin on history. “The world manages to change enough to make the opera seem more relevant,” Adams said.

At one point, Faust asked what influence Harvard College specifically had on each performer’s career. Adams grinned, re-crossed his legs under his chair, and cocked his head to the side. “The most delicious irony was that we had our very first meeting in the Kennedy Center,” he said. Goodman mentioned that she and Sellars met in their freshman year, and Sellars talked about his participation in theater at Harvard. He said that one of the reasons he chose to come to Harvard was that Harvard does not have a theater major. “I regard theater departments as the death of theater in America,” Sellars said jokingly. But the freedom that students have here to create and to experiment is unique, and perhaps not having a theater department is a benefit in that respect—though there is now a Committee on Dramatic Arts.

Elaeanor T. Regan ’13, also a Crimson arts editor, was intrigued by the importance Sellars ascribed to undergraduate collaboration. “It’s interesting thinking about the fact that the friends we’re making here are the people whom we will collaborate with for the rest of our lives,” said Regan, a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club Board.

Certainly Adams, Goodman, and Sellars are excellent examples of undergraduate collaboration finding success in professional life. The supportive arts initiative on campus, spearheaded by Faust, is perhaps inspired by a similar attitude, providing opportunities for students to learn from artists in seminars and initiate creative, individual projects. “What you have at the moment is beyond precious,” said Sellars.