Jackie
O! by John Adams: a Review and Criticism
By E.W. Wilder
The new opera by the same man who brought us Nixon in China is
a mixed success. No matter what one believes about Adams's modified minimalism,
one must accept that it is a force to be reckoned with in contemporary
music--perhaps even the only particularly innovative thing going on. That
said, the most recent of his operas slightly returns to some of the characters
and themes of Nixon in China but certainly expands upon Adams's
Postmodern retelling of the Modernist age.
But in order to understand it as an opera, a quick review: Cecilia Bartoli
is inspired as Jackie O and Samuel Ramey villainous as the evil Mr. Nixon--Nixon
here transformed into a bass to better represent the shifting perspective
of the opera: no longer tenor anti-hero, Nixon must now come across as
more one-sidedly evil, a feat Ramey seems eminently suited to, but this
move is also important to the Relativistic universe of 1959-60. For all
this, Placido Domingo is unconvincing as John Kennedy, lack of blond hair
and blue eyes notwithstanding. Especially of interest, however, is Jose
Carreras as Bobby Kennedy: he seems to have just the right verve to pull
it off.
Of course more important than the particularities of the premier performance,
there is this opera as cultural history. As inimitable and fully contemporary
as Nixon in China is, Adams is here able to re-explore the relationship
between media and individual, but this time from a female perspective.
Following the history of the feminist movement, Jackie O goes from being
essentially the media's hapless victim in 1959 to becoming the transcendent
embodiment of liberation--a massive psychedelic butterfly in this production--upon
her death. She represents perfectly a release from the perpetual cycle
of news-not news-news at this stage, freeing herself from the ponderous
cultural collapse envisioned by Umberto Eco, hurtling herself into a personal
culture in complete opposition to the mass culture encircling her. This
idea is reflected in Adams's minimalist score: each stge of Jackie O's
life until her ultimate death/liberation are repeated incessantly . Her
transcendence allows him (for the first time I can think of) to break
form and allow Jackie O a totally new, melodious and unified theme, sung
through once, then once as a variation (not a repetition!) and once as
a reprise.
The audience was as startled as I at this the revelatory powers of this
musical Nirvana. The endless cycle of media death and rebirth is broken
and Jackie O becomes a whole being, freed from the media and therefore
at one with her world. Bodily death is, of course, the only way this can
happen as death closes the media book on her repeating life spans (here
themes) and allows the completeness of self and freedom from want.
Like Foucault's Panopticon, all players, including the ostensible antagonist
Mr. Nixon, are under constant media scrutiny, as they play, not to the
audience, not to one another, but in a stroke of pure genius to various
large television cameras placed randomly about the stage which move their
positions occasionally to represent a changing news cycle. We see in Adams,
then, not only what it means to be under the media's gun, but what petty
squabbling and political animosities mean in the contemporary age: all
of our difficulties are nothing; the media are the real enemy.
Like quantum physics, their observation influences results: the fact
of media observation determines outcomes, exacerbating problems: Jackie
is unable to become herself as she is squashed by a ponderous camera in
one scene, going off with a strangely silent Aristotle Onassis in an obvious
and confused attempt to confound the cameras in another. Until her final
liberation, the state of her scrutiny determines her nature; Jackie O
is the cat in a media-driven Schroedinger's experiment.
Jackie O's increasing power over the media, represented here by her slow
cocooning of her costume, becomes a sort of physics: she gains what knowledge
she can, and given epistemological constraints (the cocoon), formulates
ways to construct things from it, in this case her liberated self.
Again, parallels arise with the feminist movement. Jackie O goes from
being unknowledgeable of the ways of Man, the man-made media, to being
in a state of control over them, and, eventually in a state of control
over herself. Ironically, being fully herself requires her death, which
brings up the spectre of female characters throughout Western literature:
like Anna Karenina, the unvirtuous woman, or at least the woman who plays
by her own rules, must die. This idea reverberates in Adams's music as
the beautiful aria "What was My Crime?" in which Bartoli as
Jackie O asks again and again "What was my crime? Marrying the Greek?
Keeping safe my name and fame? Reclusiveness, seclusion, recursion, the
evil done by perfect beasts, the selfishness of celebrity refused?"
The repetition of the line inverts our power relationship with her as
performer, with Jackie O as celebrity, where the entertainer becomes accuser
and the observers are forced to deal with the guilt of voyeurism.
And so we see subtlety of change as evinced by Adams's minimalism, as
repetition of the news cycle, as the tragedy of living feminist reflected
in one life. We see in Jackie O! the opera how to go beyond our
electronic jungle, how to move the movement, how to live the life of this
past half-century.
