As opera characters, both Nixon and Mao Zedong are faintly ridiculous and faintly noble, singing of their hopes and dreams in Goodman’s enigmatic, evocative lines. And Kissinger — Nixon’s national security adviser in 1972 and, a year later, his secretary of state, too — is there by their side, just as he was in history. “When Peter Sellars proposed the idea of the opera,” Adams said in an interview, “he had just finished reading Kissinger’s ‘White House Years,’ which I seem to recall being pretty pompously self-congratulatory. The opera’s Kissinger, though, is never really human; he doesn’t get the exposure of thoughts and ambivalence granted to the other main players. “He’s not the character we go into great psychological depth with,” Adams said.

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