I don’t have a lot of interest in high-brow culture. I don’t have strong memories of the operas my mother took me to as a child. But a modern opera is a unique enough phenomenon that I had to see Nixon in China for myself.

I’m a bit of a political history buff, but reading the Wikipedia page is not adequate preparation. My favourite scene was the meeting with Mao, where I had to work hard just to understand the references to the Cultural Revolution, never mind Mao’s sex life. The Third Act, about the characters’ private lives, went right over my head.

The minimalist music works exceptionally well with the enhanced singing voices. According to the program and reviews there were all sorts of references that make this music postmodern, but I missed them all. The basic repetition and drifting transformations make pleasing harmony with the repetition in the lyrics.

The kung fu – classical ballet hybrid dancing in the second act have some moments of shear brilliance, although most of the dancers fall into one or the other exclusive styles. The set design and lighting is very high-end, including projected rain that would have fit right in to the Olympics Opening Ceremonies.

The script feels a little uneven because Henry Kissinger is basically just an extra, without a solo to properly balance his counterpart, Jiang Qing (Madame Mao). (Zhou Enlai is actually Pat Nixon’s opposite: the way this works might be the neatest part of the whole script.)

I’m not sure who I’d recommend this to. You’d have to be really into listening to people sing and appreciate the minimalism of an opera plot. But your enjoyment would be higher the more you knew about the history.