What is the first name of the person who persisted in attempting to get Adams to write an opera?
In 1983, theater and opera director Peter Sellars proposed to American composer John Adams that he write an opera about Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Sellars was intrigued by Nixon's decision to make the visit, seeing it as both "a ridiculously cynical election ploy ... and a historical breakthrough". Adams, who had not previously attempted an opera, was initially skeptical, assuming that Sellars was proposing a satire. Sellars persisted, however, and Adams, who had interested himself in the origin of myths, came to believe the opera could show how mythic origins may be found in contemporary history.  Both men agreed that the opera would be heroic in nature, rather than poking fun at Nixon or Mao.  Sellars invited Alice Goodman to join the project as librettist,  and the three met at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in 1985 to begin intensive study of the six characters, three American and three Chinese, upon whom the opera would focus. The trio endeavored to go beyond the stereotypes about figures such as Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-tung and to examine their personalities.As Adams worked on the opera, he came to see Nixon, whom he had once intensely disliked, as an "interesting character", a complicated individual who sometimes showed emotion in public.  Adams wanted Mao to be "the Mao of the huge posters and Great Leap Forward; I cast him as a heldentenor".  Mao's wife, on the other hand, was to be "not just a shrieking coloratura, but also someone who in the opera's final act can reveal her private fantasies, her erotic desires, and even a certain tragic awareness.  Nixon himself is a sort of Simon Boccanegra, a self-doubting, lyrical, at times self-pitying melancholy baritone."Goodman explained her characterizations:
A writer tends to find her characters in her self, so I can tell you ... that Nixon, Pat, Mme. Mao, Kissinger and the chorus were all 'me.' And the inner lives of Mao and Chou En-Lai, who I couldn't find in myself at all, were drawn from a couple of close acquaintances.
Peter