Luring audiences with lavish new stages and Chinese themes.
BEIJING - After years spent building spectacular, state-of-the art opera houses around the country, China is experiencing a boom in Western-style grand opera.
“Opera development is like a miniature of the country,” said Chen Zuohuang, music director of the National Center for the Performing Arts here. “Too fast and very ambitious.” The past year alone brought the establishment of an Academy of Opera at Beijing University; the second annual National Center Opera Festival, with 12 different operas performed in 10 weeks; the premiere of Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle in Shanghai; and the grand opening of the $202 million Guangzhou Center for the Performing Arts, designed by the Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid.
In addition, three operas were performed in just one week at the Beijing Music Festival; and a Sino-European Summit for the Performing Arts was held in Beijing that included directors of major European institutions like the Barbican (London), the Theatre du Chatelet (Paris) and Deutsche Oper Berlin.
A comic-opera festival mounted by the Beijing impresario Li Wei, who has said that he wants “to make Western opera a common art” in China, began just before Christmas, and the national center honored the holiday with a “World Classic Opera Gala,” to be followed by its production of Verdi’s “Traviata” and Hao Weiya’s “Village Teacher.”
Most of the operas are from the standard romantic repertory, sung in the original languages, often as co-productions with overseas opera houses. Increasingly, however, the productions are created in China and the stories adapted to Chinese settings.
More imaginative adaptations are also under way, like Zhang Huan’s version of the Baroque opera “Semele” by Handel, which was set in a 450-year-old Chinese ancestral temple and included Mongolian long singing, a Tibetan funeral song and some racy scenes involving monks.
“Anybody could direct Handel, but only I could do this,” Mr. Zhang said.
The focus is on building a corpus of modern opera that will find audiences both at home and abroad.
In China there are added complexities for the creators, language chief among them.
Spoken Chinese is tonal, with the meaning of a word dependent on its pitch.
Composers must nonetheless strive to make the melodic line reflect the tone of each word, or audiences may laugh.
Another linguistic challenge is the dearth of non-Chinese opera singers able to sing in Chinese.
Politics is also a complicating factor, with certain government officials able to demand cuts and alterations at will, but some artists argue that the censorship problem is improving.
Ultimately, China may become an operatic force.
“They are all looking to China for the survival - the only hope for growth - for all classical music, frankly,” said Shirley Young, chairwoman of the US-China Cultural Institute. “The future of classical music is here.”
By SHEILA MELVIN
