Richard Nixon

Nixon in China asks the strangest question a baritone can be handed: what does it cost to play a living myth who knows he is being watched? Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman built the part not as biography but as a study in how history is manufactured — Peter Sellars's 1987 Houston staging put the President on the tarmac outside Peking the way the cameras did in 1972, and the man arrives already aware that the world is listening.

His first aria, "News has a kind of mystery," is the whole role in miniature. Nixon repeats the word "news" until it stops meaning anything — a politician hearing his own significance echo back at him. I sing the public bravado and the private dread as one line, never two: the handshake with Chou En-lai is a triumph and a trap in the same breath, and the voice has to hold both without choosing.

Adams's minimalism is the instrument of that unease. The looping figures are not decoration — they are anxiety made audible, the same phrase circling until the calm cracks. The challenge is endurance and exposure: rhythmic precision against a churning orchestra, English diction that stays plain and human, a man who must sound utterly in control while the music underneath him refuses to settle.