NIXON IN CHINA
When Richard Milhous Nixon narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, he put his political career on hold and wrote the memoir Six Crises. “The public likes to glamorize its leaders,” he wrote, “and most leaders like to glamorize themselves. . . . But I have found that leaders are subject to all the human frailties.” In 1969, having defeated Hubert Humphrey the previous year, Nixon was sworn in as the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Few presidents have been so glamorized or have had their frailties so devastatingly exposed. A zealous cold warrior (“aggressive international Communism is on the loose in the world”) and sometime congressional ally of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Nixon appears to history as the supreme pragmatist and opportunist, whose campaign strategies had as early as 1950 earned him the nickname “Tricky Dick” and who saw his career in terms of opportunities snatched from the jaws of crises. In November 1972, nine months after his visit to China, Nixon was reelected with a spectacular victory, winning 60 percent of the popular vote and carrying forty-nine states. He seemed invincible. “It’s a helluva damn year,” he told Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff. “That’s what I’d write as a book. 1972, period.” But 1973 was different, seeing Nixon dragged down by the scandal surrounding his complicity in his administration’s attempt to cover up the bugging of, and subsequent break-in at, the Democratic Party Headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. By the summer of 1974 the president’s position was untenable, and on August 8th he resigned via a televised address to the nation.
The knowledge of the Watergate scandal—and what it revealed about Nixon’s paranoia, his corrupt instinct for power, and his deluded egoism—hangs over Alice Goodman’s libretto for Nixon in China. The events of the opera, however, take place in February 1972, well before the president’s downfall. By that time the United States had been mired for more than a decade in a war in Vietnam against a Communist insurgency that had the military backing of the People’s Republic of China. Nixon reached the zenith of his domestic support on a platform of robust and decisive prosecution of a war which he had privately concluded was unwinnable, and in which an estimated three hundred American soldiers were dying each week. Nixon’s authorization of bombing raids even as peace negotiations were ongoing in Paris was combined with a policy of replacing U.S. troops on the ground with Vietnamese. “You want to bring your boys back home,” Mao teases Nixon in Goodman’s text. “What if we do? Is that a crime?” The meeting between an anticommunist ideologue and the leaders of the Chinese Revolution caused astonishment around the world, but Nixon and his “right-hand man,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, saw negotiations with China as vital not only in achieving leverage with the Soviet Union but also in breaking the deadlock in Vietnam. Most of all, as White House tape recordings later proved, Nixon saw the event as a show for his public back home: “The China thing was important from one standpoint only—hope. The American people are suckers.”
The China to which Nixon made his visit was officially a state united behind the leadership and personality of Chairman Mao, but Mao’s personality was a complex set of paradoxes. In his firsthand account of the founding of the People’s Republic, Red Star Over China, the American journalist Edgar Snow wrote: “[Mao] had the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant. . . . He was plain-speaking and plain-living, and some people might have considered him rather coarse and vulgar. Yet he combined curious qualities of naïveté with incisive wit and worldly sophistication.” For Goodman, Mao was “probably the closest thing to Plato’s Philosopher King that the world will ever see” (and she did not mean it as a compliment, adding: “millions died who opposed his thought”). His philosophy—known as “Mao Tse-tung Thought” and articulated in oblique aphorisms that millions of Chinese people learnt by rote—commanded a unanimous public assent that by the late 1960s was a fig leaf for a bitter contest between the factions surrounding the aging chairman. On one side stood the stoic and practical premier Chou En-lai, an elusive and brilliant Mandarin who has been painted as everything from Talleyrand to Mao’s Napoleon to Albert Speer to Mao’s Hitler. Set against Chou, and seeking his destruction, was the ultra–left wing Gang of Four, led by Mao’s young and zealous wife, the former movie actress Chiang Ch’ing. By 1972 the Gang of Four was in the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long ideological purge of Chinese society that soon degenerated into a bloody and bewildering war of all against all. The delegation who stepped onto the tarmac of Peking Airport with Nixon saw themselves as envoys of the free world to a homogenous one-party state, but they found themselves on a battlefield between multiple parties struggling for power.
THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER
One possible historical note to The Death of Klinghoffer goes like this: Leon Klinghoffer was born in New York in 1916, the son of Pinchas (1881–1929) and Lena (née Rief, 1889–1942) Klinghoffer, two of the more than two million Jewish refugees to arrive in the United States from Eastern Europe in the four decades either side of 1900. Heinrich and Eva Guggenheimer’s Jewish Family Names and Their Origins gives the Middle High German klinc (music, sound) as the root of the name; another line of thought suggests a Germanization of the Polish place-name Klimkówka. From immigrant origins Leon Klinghoffer’s life reads, right up to its final chapter, like a dazzling American parable. Raised in New York City on the Lower East Side, he worked in his family’s hardware store before joining the Army Air Corps in 1942. After an honorable discharge in 1944, he took over the business with his brother Albert, and shortly afterwards they turned inventors. They made their fortune with a home rotisserie oven. On November 14, 1955, an advertisement in Life magazine for their bestseller, the Roto-Broil 400, showed a smiling man in a chef’s hat (possibly one of the brothers) offering readers a turkey “crisp and golden brown on the outside—tender and tasty on the inside with all the ‘outdoor goodness’ of a charcoal grill.” By common testimony Leon Klinghoffer combined hard work and toughness with many acts of kindness and charity. He married Marilyn Windwehr in 1949, and the couple had two daughters. When, in his sixties, two strokes left Leon wheelchair-bound, Marilyn cared for him devotedly despite her own cancer diagnosis (she survived her husband by only four months). The couple took a Mediterranean cruise in 1985 to celebrate their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, during which Klinghoffer was murdered by hijackers. His body was thrown in the sea and later washed up in Syria; he is buried at Beth David Memorial Park in Kenilworth, New Jersey.
Another possible note begins nineteen years before Leon Klinghoffer was born. In 1897, the first Zionist conference was convened by Theodor Herzl in Basel, Switzerland. Spurred by the vicious anti-Semitism uncovered by the Dreyfus Affair in France, Herzl’s movement sought “the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” As many early Zionists realized, Palestine was already settled by Muslim and Christian Arabs and so the movement was on a collision course with a people whose claim to the land was also ancient and powerful. After decades of campaigning, diplomacy, purchasing of land, and peaceful settlement by Jewish workers, the State of Israel was established in 1948 and successfully defended itself in a war against its Arab neighbors, known in Hebrew as milhemet ha’atzmaut, the War of Independence. In Arabic the events of 1948 and 1949 are known as al-nakba, the catastrophe, during which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, many becoming refugees. By 1985, a series of conflicts had considerably expanded the Israeli state. A spectacular victory in 1967 left Israel occupying the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank. With Israel and Egypt signing peace accords in 1979, the Palestinian people were increasingly isolated; tensions were building which in 1987 would break out in the first intifada (Arabic for “shaking off”), a grassroots uprising against occupation. Palestinian nationalism had begun to find expression through organizations like the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF), founded in 1961, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964. Under the leadership of Abu Abbas, the PLF launched a series of attacks during the 1980s on both civilian and military targets, of which the Achille Lauro hijacking was among the most audacious. Four men occupied the ship and took American and British hostages; one, Youssef Majed al-Molqi, shot Leon Klinghoffer. They handed themselves over after two days in exchange for safe conduct, but the plane carrying them was diverted by U.S. military aircraft to Sicily, where they were arrested and imprisoned in Italy.
There is a third historical note, though, which reaches back into an ancient mythological past that can barely be called “history” at all. The book of Genesis records how God promised Abraham the land of Canaan (modern-day Israel) for his descendants’ inheritance. Abraham is the mythical ancestor of the Jewish people through his son Isaac, but also through Ishmael—his son by the Egyptian slave Hagar—the ancestor of the Arabs. In the Hebrew account God favors Isaac: “I will make [Ishmael] a great nation. But my covenant will I establish with Isaac.” But Islam also regards Abraham as a foundational prophet, and Muslim tradition identifies the beloved son Abraham is prepared to sacrifice as Ishmael. The origin myth of the Jews and Arabs is a tale of brothers who are rivals for land and for parental and divine favor. And the Hebrew Bible has many similar sibling pairs: when Alice Goodman writes “Let the supplanter look / Upon his work,” her line recalls Abraham’s grandson Jacob (the name means “usurper” or “supplanter”) who tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright, and who came to be known as Israel. The complexity of The Death of Klinghoffer lies in its simultaneous attention to all of these histories, and much of the critical controversy surrounding the work has been a result of privileging one over the others.
THE MAGIC FLUTE
The cliché “man of the theater” seems the only correct description of Emanuel Schikaneder. Born in 1751 in the small town of Straubing, on the Danube, he became a member of the acting troupe of F. J. Moser in 1773 or ’74 and toured central Europe as both a singer and an actor. His performance as Hamlet at the Munich Court Theater in 1777 was so well received that he repeated the final scene as an encore. In 1780, during a lengthy season at Salzburg, Schikaneder first became acquainted with Mozart. In 1789 he took over the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, and for much of the decade that followed concentrated on the production of opera with an emphasis on singspiel in the German language. A manager, performer, and impresario, he was also the author of more than fifty libretti for mostly forgotten operas: Der Spiegel von Arkadien, with music by Franz Süssmayr; Der Höllenberg, with Joseph Wölfl; Babylons Pyramiden, with Johann Mederitsch and Peter von Winter. He was also, on occasion, the composer of his own scores, as well as the writer of more than forty spoken plays.
Schikaneder did not meet Mozart through Freemasonry, although by the time they collaborated on Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) in 1791 it was part of their shared background. “Herr Emanuel Schikaneder, a poor candidate in a state of darkness . . . now comes of his own free will and accord”: with these words, or some version of them, he would have been presented, blindfolded, to the Masonic Lodge in Regensburg sometime around 1787. During the ordeal of initiation, candidates swear to keep the secrets of Freemasonry on pain of having “my tongue torn out by the root, and buried in the sand of the sea.” How well Schikaneder kept these secrets remains unclear; his membership in the Regensburg lodge was suspended for six months in 1789 following a private scandal, and, unlike Mozart, he seems not to have taken up membership in a lodge in Vienna. Early in act 1 of The Magic Flute, Papageno (the role played by Schikaneder himself) is punished for speaking out of turn; his mouth is sealed with a padlock and he can only sing in muffled sounds: “Hmm hm hm hm hm hm. . . .” It is hard not to wonder whether there is a memory of the terrible Masonic oath behind this scene. Yet what characterizes The Magic Flute as a Masonic opera is, in no small part, the way it gravitates to questions of what can and cannot be said, what can be revealed and subjected to rational discourse and what remains occluded or occult.
Freemasonry was a channel for eighteenth-century rationalism insofar as it embodied a belief in enlightenment. By the end of the ordeal of initiation the blindfold is removed, and the candidate is relieved of his “state of darkness”; his journey through the Masonic degrees is a journey into illumination. With its deist theology, universalist morality, and manly egalitarianism (within “generously drawn social limits,” in the careful words of the historian J. M. Roberts), Freemasonry spoke to common progressive instincts. At the same time, “the Craft” was grounded in occultism and mystery, implying a world in which all but an elect remained in the dark (subjects, as it were, of the Queen of the Night). Its collective dramas and complex self-mythologizing spoke the language of Gnosticism, Rosicrucianism, and ancient Egyptian religion: it was the stuff of superstition and imagination. The Masonic penchants for allegory, numerology, and ritual gave Schikaneder a framework as he patched together his fairy-tale libretto out of popular sources such as Dschinnistan (1786)—an orientalist anthology containing J. A. Liebeskind’s story “Lulu, oder die Zauberflöte”—and Abbé Jean Terrasson’s learned Egyptian hoax, Sethos (1767).
Schikaneder never managed to re-create the success of The Magic Flute (although he tried, writing a sequel called Das Labyrinth with Winter in 1798) and his fortunes waned until he died in poverty in 1812. What makes the Flute unique in Schikaneder’s oeuvre is, of course, the music of Mozart; but what distinguishes it among canonical operas is its uncanny ability to reflect both sides of its age simultaneously: the rationalist and the fantastical, the sententious and the populist, the earnest moral aspirations of the Enlightenment and the glamorous violence and chaos that was the Enlightenment’s shadow. It was not Freemasonry as such that made this possible but the complicated dialectic of imagination that it sustained: Masonic ritual was an attempt, among other things, to put imagination in the service of wisdom, but in the century of the philosophes imagination was widely considered suspect, a high road to falsehood and superstition. As Simon During characterizes it, “imagination is shadow; reason is light,” but The Magic Flute is through and through a work of light and shadow, both an Enlightenment parable and a fairy tale that is a high-water mark in the century of Gulliver’s Travels and Mother Goose, Baron Munchausen’s Narratives and the early Gothic.