A Henry Kissinger Playlist

One of the proudest moments of my life took place at the 2016 Opera News Awards. Seated at the Plaza Hotel for the annual gala, I realized Henry Kissinger’s table was cater-corner to mine. At one point, seeing him get up, I scurried out of my seat under the guise of going to the restroom. As I passed the statesman, much in the way of a chariot race out of “Ben Hur,” I sunk the heel of my right foot onto his left. Hard, but not so hard that I couldn’t play it off as an embarrassing accident when I turned around, hand on my heart, to excuse myself. 

As Key Playerson told VAN, “No one who’s studied or appreciated classical music has ever gone on to oppress or hurt other people.” With that in mind, we present this tribute to a great lover of classical music, and an even greater war criminal. 

John Adams: “Oh what a day! I thought I’d die!…Whip her to death!” from “Nixon in China” (1987)

Kissinger, a noted opera lover, became an opera character himself in John Adams and Alice Goodman’s 1987 opera about Nixon’s historic visit to China. Dramatically speaking, however, his character is mostly a eunuch: His greatest moment of action onstage is when he doubles as an actor playing the landlord’s factotum in Jiang Qing’s ballet-opera, “The Red Detachment of Women.” (His first line in this opera-within-an-opera now seems prophetic: “Oh what a day! I thought I’d die!”)

“It’s terrible!” Pat Nixon exclaims during the performance, turning to Kissinger and her husband. “I hate you both.” 

The real tragedy of “Nixon,” as the late baritone Robert Orth once told me, is that we know what happens to these characters once the opera ends. Nixon was impeached the year following his trip to China, Pat suffering the embarrassment of Watergate stoically at his side. Mao Tse Tung died in 1976 leading to a coup and the life imprisonment of Jiang. Kissinger outlived them all. 

Chinary Ung: “Spiral” (1987)

As Greg Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, Nixon’s Secretary of State saw bombing as an “instrument of diplomacy.” The most-cited use of this “diplomacy” came from the U.S.’s secret carpet-bombing campaign in Cambodia. Kissinger ordered American generals to set “anything that flies on anything that moves.” 

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands,” writes Anthony Bourdain in A Cook’s Tour. “Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”

Composer Chinary Ung moved to the United States to study music as much of this history was taking place, behind closed doors and in the so-called Killing Fields. He graduated from Columbia University a year before Pol Pot assumed power, and, as Ung’s own student Jacob Sudol notes, he then spent nearly a decade not composing. During the time of the Cambodian Genocide, Ung focused instead on preserving his native musical culture in the face of total eradication—an eradication that Kissinger himself may not have conducted, but at least orchestrated. “Spiral” was one of the first works Ung wrote when he felt it was safe to return to his own compositions. 

Composed in 1987, “Spiral” was the first of a series of works in which the order of composition for the work’s sections doesn’t match their eventual order in the piece. The sections “spiral” out of sequence, eventually stabilizing with the final movement. Ung also plays with the Buddhist concept of emptiness—in Cambodia’s Theravada tradition, the doorway to enlightenment and the end of suffering—juxtaposing upper and lower registers as if to create a void between the two extremes. 

Ravi Shankar: “Bangla Dun” (1971)

“Mr. President, we’re going to wind up on the worst side if we start backing a rebellion there now,” Kissinger told Nixon in 1971, referring to the growing resentment in East Pakistan towards the government’s cleansing of ethnic Bengalis. Despite American diplomats on the ground in Dhaka reporting horrific casualties and denouncing what U.S. consul general Archer Blood described as “moral bankruptcy” in response to “genocide,” Kissinger persuaded Nixon to remain steadfast in both symbolic and military support of the Pakistani powers.

In the same year as this phone call, sitarist Ravi Shankar (who was born in Benares, India, to parents of Bengali heritage) would team up with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and more for “The Concert for Bangladesh,” a fundraiser for Bengali refugees held over two nights at Madison Square Garden. Shankar’s own contribution to the program would be, as the title puts it, a Bengali melody that grows and pulsates out of a traditional improvisatory raga. This was the first megawatt benefit concert of its kind, and so we can therefore—by extreme extension—blame Kissinger for the eventual advent of Band Aid’s yuletide earworm, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” I’m not saying it’s comparable to a literal genocide, but that doesn’t make it good. 

Jonathan Berger: “Mỹ Lai” (2017)

In 2004, the National Security Archive published a series of telephone transcripts and recaps conducted with Kissinger, Nixon, and other U.S. officials between the late ’60s and early ’70s. This includes a series of phone calls that discuss how to spin “the atrocity thing” that was the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre, which killed roughly 500 Vietnamese civilians. Eventually, Kissinger and Co. fixed the blame on 26 low-level military personnel. Only one, Lieutenant William Calley Jr., was convicted. 

Jonathan Berger and librettist Harriet Scott Chessman’s monodrama, “Mỹ Lai,” doesn’t focus on Calley, or the cover-up. Instead, it tells the story of Hugh C. Thompson Jr., an Army helicopter pilot who, along with two teenage colleagues, attempted to intervene in the massacre by making three spontaneous—and unauthorized—landings on the morning of March 16, 1968. Their actions, under Thompson’s orders, saved about a dozen people. Despite Thompson’s radio reports from that morning, the true nature and extent of Mỹ Lai—and the Nixon administration’s attempted cover-up—was still effectively swept under the rug for decades to come. Calley was sentenced to life in prison, but his sentence was almost immediately commuted by Nixon to three years of house arrest. He managed to live the rest of his life largely outside of the public eye. Thompson, on the other hand, was vilified as an un-American traitor. His heroic actions were only officially recognized three decades later. 

Written for the Kronos Quartet, tenor Rinde Eckert, and Vietnamese multiinstrumentalist Vân Ánh Vanessa Võ, “Mỹ Lai” places us in Thompson’s consciousness in 2006, as he lay dying of cancer. Despite being decades and worlds away from the trenches of the Sơn Tịnh district, mentally, Thompson is still there, haunted by the ghosts of what he saw and afforded little comfort for what good he was able to do. The haunting unease of the score doesn’t paint an easy picture of heroism, reminding us that the right side of history is rarely seen as such in the moment that history unfolds. 

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George Crumb: “Black Angels” (1971)

“Mỹ Lai” wasn’t the first time Kronos brought the Vietnam War into the concert hall. In fact, the quartet’s origin story traces its roots to when violinist David Harrington heard George Crumb’s “Black Angels” in the summer of 1973. “For a moment the world made sense,” Harrington recalls of the experience, also describing the work as “absolutely the right music to play.” Crumb dated the score: “Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli),” the Latin addition meaning “in times of war.” There is no question what war he refers to in “Black Angels,” which opens with screeching violins mirroring the “electric insects” of helicopters hovering above Vietnam. It’s an ignominious inversion of the Wagner-underscored choppers in “Apocalypse Now.” It’s also a pretty good, albeit unintentional, sonic indictment of the U.S. government’s own electronic insect, as Kissinger was later found to have sabotaged a potential peace deal between the United States and the Viet Cong under the Johnson Administration in 1968. Five years later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Sylvia Soublette: “Spleen” (1978)

After the U.S. aided a 1973 military overthrow of Chile’s progressive socialist president Salvador Allende, which led to the 17-year dictatorial rule of Augusto Pinochet, Kissinger told Nixon: “We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them… [unintell] created the conditions as great as possible.” 

Potato, po-war-crime. 

Composer Sylvia Soublette, who counted Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen among her teachers, was married to politician Gabriel Valdés (who served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs under Allende’s presidential predecessor, Eduardo Frei Montalva). She also held a view of music as “a democratic art” that produced “a kind of fraternity” and eliminated “class differences”—Pinochet’s army went after people for far less. 

Soublette and Valdés were able to escape Chile following Pinochet’s rise to power. When they returned to Santiago in the early ’80s, Soublette was met with a deep depression: “I found that Santiago was so changed. I felt like a stranger in my own country.” She wrote “Spleen” a few years prior to this return, in 1978. Still, that sense of being a stranger in one’s own home—a feeling tinged with loneliness, isolation and a bit of Romantic-era nostalgia—is presaged in this duet for flute and guitar. 

Victor Jara: “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” (1971)

“My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger told Pinochet, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” He obviously forgot about the tens of thousands of Chileans that Pinochet tortured, disappeared, and executed—including leftist folk singer Victor Jara. A minor detail.  

Joseph Kabasele: “Table Ronde” (1960)

1960 marked “The Year of Africa,” a rapid decolonization movement across the continent that led to 17 countries declaring independence that year alone. Congolese jazz musician Joseph Kabasele set the soundtrack for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s independence from Belgium with both “Indépendance Cha Cha” and “Table Ronde,” marking the beginning of a trend towards politically-informed music that would later gain steam in the works of Fela Kuti (who shared a guitarist, Kiala Zavotunga, with Kabasele). 

The DRC’s independence victory was short-lived, as its first democratically-elected leader, Patrice Lumumba (a friend of Kabasele’s), was overthrown by Col. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu in late 1960—with assistance from both Belgium and the United States. Lumumba was executed in 1961, and Mobutu reigned as dictator for 36 years. Kissinger regarded him as a friend, one who was “courageous, politically astute, conservative in his approach to government, and relatively honest in a country where governmental corruption is a way of life… [with] a personal style redolent of De Gaulle.”

Yannis Kyriakides: “Varosha (Disco Debris)” (2010)

In the days following Kissinger’s death, much has been written about Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and East Timor. Less has been said of Kissinger’s involvement with the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Then-British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan said of Kissinger’s part in the invasion—he’s been accused of being its “green-lighter,” if not its full “architect”—that it was “obvious that Kissinger cared more for the goodwill of Turkey and in keeping it as a bulwark between the Soviet Union and the Arab states.” Christopher Hitchens wrote in The Trial of Henry Kissinger that Kissinger’s “decision to do nothing was therefore a direct decision to do something, or to let something be done.” 

That summer of 1974, a four-year-old Yannis Kyriakides was with his family in the Northern Cyprus vacation town of Varosha. Air raid sirens signaled an air strike in the early days of the invasion, and Kyriakides traces his earliest memory to that day: sitting in the basement of the Hotel Loiziana, drawing pictures on the floor with limestone chalk—a medium produced by the Turkish bombing outside. Varosha has remained a ghost town since that summer, held, as Kyriakides puts it, “as a possible bargaining-chip for peace negotiations, which never transpired.” His sound installation, “Varosha (Disco Debris),” captures his early childhood memories, as well as the experience of returning to the abandoned resort town in 2008. His sonic landscape is a dilapidated memory palace; echoing with the ghosts of Cypriot disco music, emergency sirens, and the stillness of time. 

Mary Kouyoumdjian: “Bombs of Beirut” (2014)

“We were determined from the beginning to prevent an Arab victory, which we looked at as a Soviet victory,” Kissinger said of his involvement in 1973 Arab-Israeli War. He didn’t believe peace in the region was possible, and so aimed for a “step-by-step” agenda. Those steps, as Charles Glass points out, “led to the Lebanese civil war, Israel’s many invasions of Lebanon, the creation of Hezbollah and the expulsion of Israel from Lebanon, unrestricted Israeli colonization of the West Bank, the Palestinians’ intifada uprisings, and the continuing degradation of Palestinian life. Indeed, the situation is worse than it was when Kissinger left Harvard for government service in 1969.”

Directly and indirectly, Kissinger’s policies—and the impunity with which he carried many of them out—have shaped the ongoing cycle of crisis in the Middle East (as well as parts of North Africa and Central Asia). Composer Mary Kouyoumdjian, who was born in California after her parents fled the Lebanese Civil War, traces part of this legacy in “Bombs of Beirut,” which collects oral histories of people who lived through the war. These interviews are scored against a string quartet that presents the war as a human tragedy, not a political agenda. 

Bonus Track: William Joel: “Only the Good Die Young” (1977)

A song for when you die six months after your hundredth birthday. ¶