Catching up

This blog is supposed to be "life as General Director of COT" - well it can not be the whole of my life here but I feel I am too busy just now to catch most of it - so now it is time to catch up.

From time to time opera companies have unforseen cast changes.  We have been remarkably free of those but alas we have lost our Osmin for Entfuehrung, Morris Robinson.  He just didn't feel confident enough in the German so has bailed out.  That is a shame, but better now than later!

However, one of those amazing young Northwestern singers, Paul Corona, is stepping in and this will be a great thing for all.  Here is a prodigiously gifted young man on the cusp of what I predict will be a major career.  He has won the regional Met competition and goes to New York for the final stages on March 18.  I was up at Northwestern on Wednesday to re check him out!  No need - he is the real thing!

And I was back at Northwestern yesterday afternoon for the Nixon event.  And an event it was indeed.  It was a great thing to hear Nicholas Platt who as a young officer, a "China Boy" (Nixon's words not mine), at the State Department in 1972 went on the great trip which is the subject of John Adams' opera.  He gave a detailed and vivid description of the trip, his part in it, and its significance.  And we had Pat Nixon's interpreter, Jia Zhao, as well.  Like Chou en Lai she fell in love with the famous red coat!  She will see it again when she comes to the performance in the theater across the street from her office at the law firm of Baker and Mackenzie where she is a leading China specialist.  She was the first student from the Peoples Republic to gain a JD degree from Harvard Law School - and she is a charmer, full of wonderful stories about her relationship with the Nixon family, not least during the post Watergate part of his life. 

The whole event was delightfully moderated by Lee Huebner, who was a speech writer on Nixon's staff in 1972, and went on to be Publisher of the International Herald Tribune and much else.  He is now teaching at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.

The day finished with Bernard Haitink's second program at the CSO.  Webern's Op 1, Debussy's La Mer, and Beethoven 7.  Not to be missed - on again this evening and tomorrow.  Go to one of these if you care about music making at the highest level.  There was a full house of course - including my old friend Martin Campbell-White of Askonas Holt in London, and Pamela Rosenberg, who is commuting between San Francisco and Berlin until the end of the Summer.  Chicago is a nice stopover point!

Comments

[Tom Adolphson]

I enjoyed the Symposium. I am delighted you are presenting "Nixon in China," and I have absolutely no objection to the artistic liberties taken in the libretto. You are right: it does capture the momentous feel of that time. However, I still believe we in the West have some curious myopia about dictators. I think Mao and Zhou have somehow entered the realm of radical chic, and as such, have been purged of the horrors they committed. They are treated as everyday
statesmen, who we fawn over and wax nostalgically about. I mean, you don't see Warhol paintings of Hitler in the Art Institute, but there is Mao. Debbie Oberschelp has the Little Red Book on her desk, but Mein Kampf would be verboten. US tourists pose in front of his picture in Tiananmen. Mao and Zhou are "in," it seems, folksy, almost loveable "characters," and "hip" in the mold of Che Guevara. Hitler has always been the dictator we love to hate, and his henchmen are regarded with equal bile. Yet Mao hijacked an entire country and led it through decades of unnecessary violence and horror. Chang and Halliday are not far off when they cite him as responsible for "well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader." He wins the genocidal sweepstakes, eclipsing Hitler (bad!) and Stalin (worse than Hitler, too, but not so bad because he was our ally in WWII). The picture of Nixon and the little girl, with Zhou beaming in the background--remember all those lovely shots of Hitler with darling children?--how vile they seem. So Mao and Zhou with posing with children strikes me as vile as well, considering Mao intentionally allowed 30 million Chinese, including children, to starve to death during the Great Leap Forward. Not the same as rail cars streaming to the death camps? Or perhaps it is not so different at all. The books surrounding Mao during the Nixon-Kissinger visit were looted from homes and museums during the Cultural Revolution. Think about the millions forced into the countryside to work as virtual slaves or denounced and paraded through the streets. Americans love to refer to people in a negative manner as "Nazis" or "another Hitler" or "Gestapo." Where are references to the KGB...or the gulag, or Mao? I just don't get it--Mao, the worst of all, seems to get off the hook...or think of the Ambassador, pointing out that Nixon was no angel, either. As if you can truly equate the two. As a friend of mine observed when I told him:  
"Interesting point about the seemingly unkillable romanticizing of Mao and Stalin.  Actually I am still amazed to hear this, given what we now know which, as you say, seems to be true.  Also the idea of comparing Mao and Nixon is grotesque.  Jerk that the latter was, and criminal too, he wasn't responsible for murder of millions!  But this is classic American radical-chicy, moral equivalencing, so to speak...Not that one shouldn't acknowledge the charisma, power of personality, sheer historic achievement of someone like Mao, but I think you need to start with the evil of the man and the system.  I am surprised you were the only one to make this point, but kudos to you for doing it.  Having said that, I should remember that you were in the lion's den, so to speak, an American university setting, where probably the majority of the faculty really believe that Nixon was as bad (or good!) as Mao, that Bush is not better than Osama bin Laden and so forth." Well, forgive me for rambling on, just wanted folks to stop and think about Mao and Zhou in the context of the horrors they inflicted. Yes, it was a momentous time,,,and Nixon and Kissinger were willing to ignore the horrors in the name of political expediency, just as FDR and Truman did when they met Stalin.