274 Vol. 14/1 2025 1 See, for example, Bokina (1997, pp. 1–12) and Cohen (2017, pp. xiii–xiv). Internationalism Hits the Opera Stage: Nixon (and Dewey) in China Kalle Puolakka John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987) is one of the most iconic operatic works of the end of the 20 th century. It is also an interesting case to study the relationship between aesthetics and politics. In this paper, I offer a reading of the political and aesthetic sides of the work in light of John Dewey’s philosophy. Central to my account is to examine the effect that Dewey’s own trip to China had on his political philosophy. I argue that Nixon is not just a series of anecdotes related to Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, as has been claimed by some critics, but that the Deweyan perspective I take particularly on Nixon’s third act shows that the opera has genuine political substance, which is also tied to the work’s musical and aesthetic features. | Keywords: Adams, Dewey, Opera, Politics, Aesthetics 1. Opera, Politics, and Adams’s Nixon in China – An Introduction Ever since it emerged in the aristocratic courts of early 17 th century Italy, opera has had close ties to politics. Already the first operas by Monteverdi like La Favola d’Orfeo (1607), Il Ritorno Ulisse di Patria (1640), and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642) examine three different kinds of rulers from the development of the young prince in Orfeo to the more emotional and tradition-defiant prince of Poppea. Later examples of such ‘ruler operas’ include, for example, the 19th century operas by Modest Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov (1874) and Khovanshchina (1880). Moreover, the thematic developments in opera’s history reflect well the development of European political history and thought: class conflicts, the fall of the aristocracy, the rise of the bourgeois, Enlightenment ideas, republicanism, the ideals of the French revolution, political utopias, and the appropriate expression of emotions in the pressure of social norms. This is to say nothing of the more explicitly politically inclined operas by Giuseppe Verdi (Attila, Don Carlos, Nabucco), as well as operas, which became victims of political censorship (Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) or the 20th century operas that deal with the societal role of the artist in an age of political turmoil (Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Schönberg’s Moses and Aron, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler). 1