Behemoth

The people are the heroes now
Behemoth pulls the peasant’s plough
When we look up, the fields are white
With harvest in the morning light
And mountain ranges one by one
Rise red beneath the harvest moon

So go the lyrics in the first scene of John Adam’s opera Nixon in China. The second line “Behemoth pulls the peasant’s plough” is one which I find particularly evocative. I’ve repeated it in my mind over and over, and had to unpack it.

Behemoth is a large and powerful biblical beast, the land-dwelling counterpart to Leviathan. The latter is the namesake of Thomas Hobbes’ famous treatise in political philosophy in which Leviathan was used as a metaphor for the state as something which derives its power from the union of its many parts. Hobbes would later write a book titled Behemoth which discussed the English Civil War, with a biblical creature again used as a metaphor for the state (in this case that of the Long Parliament). It is this meaning in which the opera refers to Behemoth. The people worked for and had been exploited by those in power, but now it was the state which was to work for the people.

This was the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong of course, a repressive totalitarian one-party state. In a single line the hopes of the people who had long suffered is brought to clash with our knowledge of what actually happened. The peasants pulled Behemoth’s plough.