The Chairman Dances

Program notes

About the Work

John Adams wrote The Chairman Dances in 1985, and it is the piece on this programme that most people will already know. Its subtitle is ‘Foxtrot for Orchestra’, and the word ‘dances’ in the title is a verb: the Chairman is Mao Zedong, and he is the one dancing.

The piece belongs to the story of Nixon in China, Adams’s first opera, though it is not taken from it. In 1985 Adams owed the Milwaukee Symphony a commission that was long overdue. He had already read the scenario for the last act of the opera, written by the director Peter Sellars and the librettist Alice Goodman, and by his own account he could not wait to start on it. So the commission became a trial run. He later called the result an ‘out-take’ of Act III, and was firm that it is neither an excerpt nor a fantasy on the opera’s themes. The Milwaukee Symphony gave the first performance under Lukas Foss on 31 January 1986. The opera itself did not reach the stage, in Houston, until October 1987.

The scenario printed with the score is short and strange. Chiang Ch’ing, Madame Mao, gatecrashes the banquet given for the American president. She gets in the way of the waiters, hangs paper lanterns round the hall, changes into a cheongsam slit to the hip and signals the orchestra to play. Mao, who is present only as a portrait on the wall, climbs down from the frame, and the two of them foxtrot, back in Yenan as young revolutionaries, ‘dancing to the gramophone’.

Adams knew what he had. He described the image of a youthful Mao dancing with a former film actress as ‘slightly ridiculous but irresistible’, and said that the music was a parody of what he imagined Chinese film music of the 1930s to sound like. That is why it could not go into the opera, whose style and scoring are different. A few of its tunes do return there, in the final act, when the Nixons and the Maos think back to when they were young.

This concert opens with it and ends with the Doctor Atomic Symphony. The two pieces, written more than twenty years apart, show the two ways in which Adams has brought his operas into the concert hall: once by accident, before the opera existed, and once by design, after it.

What to Listen For

Adams describes the form as three parts, A-B-A, with ‘a persistent, chugging pulse in the basses’ in the outer sections. That pulse drives the opening, and the tunes ride above it. The percussion section is large for a piece of this length. The score lists, among much else, sandpaper blocks, castanets, a hi-hat and a pedal bass drum, with harp and piano besides: something of the kit of a dance band has been added to the symphony orchestra.

The middle section slows down and, in Adams’s words, romance makes an appearance. Here the foxtrot arrives in earnest. Adams calls his themes ‘sometimes slinky and sentimental, at other times bravura and bounding’, and both kinds are on show.

Then the motor starts again. The piece ends not with a climax but by running out of power: the sound, as descriptions of the score have it, of a gramophone winding down.