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Opera open thread: 20th Century history in opera [1]
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Date: 2025-05-03
It could have been a lot worse for the Central Park Five. Business buffoon Donald Trump, already notorious in 1989, wanted the five falsely accused young men executed. Forced to confess to a crime they did not commit, they spent too much time in prison before DNA evidence conclusively proved they were innocent and the true culprit was arrested.
Sending the Central Park Five to a torture hellhole prison in El Salvador was fortunately not an option. The five of them would have died by the time DNA evidence exonerated them in 2002. Given that Trump is a prolific criminal who would rather falsify a weather map (which is against the law, by the way) than admit he was wrong about a weather forecast, it’s not surprising that he hasn’t acknowledged the innocence of the Central Park Five.
As of 2016, he certainly still hadn’t, Victoria M. Massie reported for Vox.
Donald Trump still refuses to recognize the innocence of the Central Park Five, a group of black and Latino teens wrongfully accused of brutally raping a jogger in New York’s famed park, 14 years after their exoneration. Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, told CNN on Thursday that the group is still seeking an apology from the GOP nominee. After the woman’s story made headlines, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News in 1989 with the headline “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” even before the trial began. But what followed was hardly an apology. In a statement to CNN, Trump said: “They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.” It’s true. The teens confessed to the crime under duress — including intense interrogation without access to food, water, or sleep. But their testimony was coerced. The actual rapist confessed in 2002, with DNA evidence that matched. The men were absolved of wrongdoing, after spending seven to 13 years in prison. The group sued the city of New York, reaching a $41 million settlement in 2014. The case exemplified the ways America’s criminal justice system unfairly targets people of color. It also exemplified two of Trump’s key flaws: his flagrant bigotry and his inability to apologize even when faced with evidence demonstrating that he can’t be right ... Trump’s campaign to “make America great again” over the past year has almost exclusively depended on making Black Lives Matter activists, Muslims, and immigrants enemy No. 1 to national security. Trump’s message has been likened to that of Richard Nixon in the 1968 campaign, who also advocated for “law and order” following the social unrest of the 1960s. But Trump is also simply echoing himself.
Remember when President Richard Nixon (R, 1969 — 1974) was the most embarrassing man to have ever had the title of United States president? Simpler times. Nixon actually had redeeming qualities. As Captain Spock will say in a few centuries, “only Nixon could go to China.”
Nixon’s 1972 visit to China is the subject of the opera Nixon in China, libretto by Alice Goodman and music by John Adams. Here’s a little preview of Nixon in China from the Met. I’d been aware of this opera for a very long time, but it wasn’t until just yesterday that I actually sought it out. I didn’t realize what I’d been missing all this time. It’s both hilarious, kind of like Gilbert and Sullivan, but also serious and entrancing like Wagner.
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There’s a longer excerpt of this same production on YouTube but it’s not from the Met Opera channel.
I’m going to put in the whole opera in a production from France. It’s almost three hours, but at least for me it goes by much faster than Act I of Götterdämmerung — we can argue over whether the lengthy prologue is part of Act I or not on another occasion. For what it’s worth, Götterdämmerung and the rest of the Ring has been recontextualized to the 20th Century in some productions, such as in this video of Act II from the Bayreuth 2016 production.
Anyway, the French production of Nixon in China is in English with French subtitles. The actor playing Nixon looks a little too heroic to me, more like he should be Superman rather than Nixon.
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John Adams also did an opera about Oppenheimer, Doctor Atomic, which was nowhere near as controversial as The Death of Klinghoffer. That one prompted Rudy Giuliani to protest outside the theater.
John Adams doesn’t plan to do an opera about Trump. in an interview with KQED’s Gabe Meline, the composer said that
The idea of a Trump opera doesn’t interest me in the least. First of all, because so much of what he does is theater to begin with. It’s a terrible form of exploitive theater, ... Furthermore, you don’t want to spend time as an artist giving your very best to a person who is a sociopath, he’s not an interesting character, because he has no capacity for empathy. The only empathy that he can extend is to his family, who are just extensions of his own ego, and beyond that, he doesn’t care. Everyone else is someone to be manipulated and controlled.
And even that might be giving Trump too much credit.
The thing with Nixon was he was interesting because he was vulnerable. His weaknesses were marvelously mixed up with his idealism. At the moment in Nixon in China where he comes off the plane, and he greets Zhou Enlai, he sings this aria about being aware of himself as president, and being like the Apollo astronaut. He’s the pilot who’s piloting the ship through shoals. You can believe that there’s a part of Nixon that is actually noble despite all his paranoia and his faults.
Adams doesn’t completely rule out a Trump opera, but it’s unlikely. I certainly wouldn’t want to, if I was a composer of Adams’s stature, or even as I’m not.
But composer Anthony Davis, on the other hand, had no choice but to include Trump in one of his operas. A week from today, Detroit Opera will be putting on a production of The Central Park Five, an opera with libretto by Richard Wesley and music by Anthony Davis.
Anthony Davis, composer of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Music for this true story adaptation of systemic discrimination. This gripping opera follows the wrongful convictions of five African American and Latino teenagers in the assault of a white female jogger in Central Park.
Despite racial injustice, resilience and redemption emerge as the five men fight for freedom.
There will also be performances on May 16 and 18. I might attend the last one. Tickets start at $30.
The open thread question: What do you think of how contemporary operas present historical events of the 20th Century?
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