ABSTRACT
Richard Nixon's 'News' aria, the featured musical event in Act 1, presents the effective musical characterizations of the President in the opera. Musically John Adams depicts the shifting mood of the President especially through the control of harmonic transformations, through the alternation of areas of consonance and dissonance, and through a well-conceived and meaningful large-scale harmonic design. As the aria continues with some of the poignant lines in the libretto, set by the most lyrical melodic writing in the aria, Nixon can see both sides of the venture. The Southern hexatonic system provides a stable harmonic underpinning to Nixon's thoughts at this point in the aria. The harmonic design of the aria, based on hexatonic systems, captures the essence of Nixon's varying state of mind, as his thoughts move from optimism to despair and weave in and out of reality. At the same time the large-scale harmonic structure provides a sense of musical unity to the aria as a whole.
