Kevin Jackson
Aria Rage
History Is Our Mother: Three Libretti
By Alice Goodman
NYRB Classics 202pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
In the late 1980s, I went to the Edinburgh Festival for the UK premiere of Nixon in China, a new opera by the American composer John Adams, with a libretto by the American poet Alice Goodman. I knew the music of John Adams only slightly, from the BBC, and the poems of Alice Goodman not at all. About the only knowledge I brought with me was that this work tackled the unlikely subject of a state visit to Beijing by President Nixon in 1972.
It was a coup de foudre. I loved the music from the very first notes of the stately, melancholic overture. Then the chorus, representing hundreds of Chinese troops, began to sing:
Soldiers of heaven hold the sky
The morning breaks and shadows fly…
And on it went – a terse, startlingly lyrical exposition of Mao Zedong’s ‘Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention’. After a few more lines came a couplet that lodged in my head at once and has never been shaken out:
The people are the heroes now
Behemoth pulls the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma