PBS presents the Met’s premiere of John Adams’ “Nixon in China”

It would really be cool if, when people talk about how good music was in the ’80s, they meant John Adams.

In 1987, the opera world saw something really new — the premiere of Nixon in China, an opera by composer Adams with a libretto by Alice Goodman based on the 1972 meetings between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung. Not only was it a major work set in fairly recent times, but it represented a landmark step for one of America’s most vital composers as well as a milestone in contempory music. At the time, Adams was consistently lumped in with the minimalist composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley who had been making (repetitive, evenly cadenced and harmonic) waves with their mesmerizing, shimmering tones. With Nixon in China, Adams went a long way to taking the musical language developed by his minimalist contemporaries and took it into new territory, incorporating elements of 19th-century Wagnerian bombast. It was a moment of potential musical heresy — as an assumed minimalist, Adams was already flying in the face of the overwhelming 20th-century influence of Schoenberg, but in throwing back to 19th-century aesthetics, he could have alienated the contemporary audience that had thus far supported him.

But what’s also exciting is that Nixon in China has, over time, become one of the most frequently performed modern operas. This February, the work made its Metropolitan Opera debut — and was simultaneously broadcast to theaters nationwide, as Met productions have been for a while now — and tonight, June 1, PBS will broadcast Great Performances at the Met: Nixon in China. Directed by the renowned, if not controversial director Peter Sellars (who commissioned the opera and directed its premiere at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987), the production also stars baritone James Maddalena as Richard Nixon, who created the role onstage at the Houston premiere.

It’s hard to articulate the significance of this event for fans of modern music. When this opera premiered slightly less than a quarter century ago, its first appointment in New York was with the Brooklyn Academy of Music — a worthy institution, but really, hard to compare with the prestige of Lincoln Center. It’s a sign that this work has managed to tap into the mainstream of high culture, no mean feat in an opera world struggling to keep patrons in the seats and typically resorting to the canonical “hits” (Verdi, Puccini and more Verdi, with an occasional Stauss or Wagner) to keep the box office flush. By far, the majority of new operas, once premiered, fall by the wayside for lack of performers familiar with the roles, for being too great a box-office risk or for simply failing to leave a significant impression on the opera-going public.

The success of the Met’s Nixon, on the heels of Adams’ 2008 Met triumph, Doctor Atomic, further establishes Adams as a commercial success, but it’s the music, pulsing and teeming with electric invention, that will determine whether it will continue to be performed in decades to come. The opera’s success at the Met — and on PBS — is an undeniable milestone in its history, and likely one that will cement its reputation and help secure its continued vitality for the future.