While watching The Red Detachment of Women, former US president Richard Nixon (James Maddalena) and his wife (Janis Kelly) are drawn to the protagonists' fates. Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

John Adams' musical masterpiece has made its long-awaited debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera, and a prominent feature of it is the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women. Chen Weihua reports from New York.

American theater director Peter Sellars was working on Haydn's Armida and reading Henry Kissinger's memoirs when he suggested an opera about former US president Richard Nixon's historic trip to China.

He proposed the idea to young composer John Adams at a New Hampshire music festival in 1983. Adams, less known then, was skeptical at first but he soon realized it was a great idea to "find our mythology in our contemporary history".

The opera Nixon in China made its world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera, 1987, with Adams' score, poet Alice Goodman's libretto, Mark Morris' choreography and Sellars' staging.

Over the last 24 years, the opera has been performed by opera houses across the world and is considered a masterpiece. But it wasn't until Feb 2, the eve of Chinese new year in 2011, that Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in New York staged the piece.

Met general manager Peter Gelb, said that when he took office in 2006, he wanted to redress the opera house's most significant repertoire omission - the absence of works by Adams - and what he had in mind was Nixon in China.

But since Adams had just launched his Doctor Atomic, that opera became his premiere at the Met. This time, Nixon in China was Adams' premiere at the Met as a conductor, and he wielded his baton to his own score.

It was also Sellars' premiere at the Met as a director. As a young man in his 20s, Sellars traveled to China in the 1980s to see a country he was fascinated with. He loved Mao Zedong's speech in Yan'an.

"I really believed, as a young American, that Mao talked about the role that culture should play in the life of the people in working society. I was very moved by those talks," the 53-year-old says.

He also loved China's revolutionary ballet, which he believes is much better than Giselle.

"Giselle and Swan Lake present women as pathetic things, who are constant victims This is not a useful social program for anyone," he says.

On the contrary, The Red Detachment of Women gave women a positive and powerful role. "They weren't just victims. They were strong and active," Sellars says, adding he believed revolutionary ballet solved the problem of Western ballet rather brilliantly.

"There was a subject matter. One of the things that drove me crazy about the official culture of the Lincoln Center variety is that you can admire it as technique, but what is the subject matter? What are they talking about? Absolutely nothing," he says. His efforts to stage a revolutionary ballet in New York in the 1980s were foiled due to opposition on ideological grounds.

Anyone who watches Nixon in China, which is scheduled for six shows at the Met this month, will probably be most impressed by the scenes from The Red Detachment of Women, which Nixon, his wife Pat and Kissinger, were invited to watch during the five-day landmark trip in February 1972.