china dispatch #10 - peony pavilion
We just got back from a perfect evening. You might recall that we had planned on going to a Beijing Opera on May 15th, my birthday, but were thwarted. So glad we were! We'll still do one of those soon, but tonight we went to a Kunqu opera and had a truly good night.
Beijing Opera is less like what you think of when you think of opera than vaudeville. As I mentioned before, don't picture Hildegard Behrens in a viking helmet and braids: picture Ed Sullivan in a red silk dress. It's a hybrid of several different stage traditions that melded over the centuries, and Kunqu opera is one of them. Highly stylized singing and balletic movement, gorgeous costumes, and a chamber group playing the music, all very high-culture.
The crown jewel of Kunqu opera is The Peony Pavilion, a 16th-century story of love, death, redemption, war, and restoration that runs well over twenty hours. To give you some perspective on this, think about the Western tradition of opera. It had a few golden ages, one in the late nineteenth-right-up-to-the-twentieth century; one earlier in the age of Mozart and Rossini; and the first big bloom of operas by Purcell and Handel. Beyond that, it begins to sound pretty primitive. Monteverdi's Orfeo is wonderful, but really just outside what we consider the classical tradition. And that was in the 17th century. A hundred years before that, Tang Xianzu was writing China's Ring Cycle.
I'm afraid I've probably missed my chance to see the 20-hour version (which, I've been informed, was significantly truncated) that cropped up in New York and I think one other place in the US about ten years ago. There's currently a nine-hour version that's touring several major cities. Tonight's show was abridged to two hours, and only covered the love-story portion of the plot, ending about halfway through the full story, at a nice ending where boy and girl are united in love.
(At the end of the show, the woman of my dreams, the life-love of my destiny, said, "What! It's over? It feels like it should be intermission!" Ahhh. No measly two-hour opera for my girl.)
It was staged at the Royal Granary, newly restored as an arts district, with beautiful, subdued art galleries and bars and restaurants, as well as this performance space. The granary itself was built around the same time as the opera came along, so it made for a beautiful synchrony of Tang Dynasty culture.
Beforehand, they served a spectacular meal, with thinly-sliced summer squash sauteed with similar disks of mushroom, tender beef with red and green peppers, a deliciously spiced chopped green leafy thing wrapped in a thin egg crepe, perfectly spiced shrimp-and-potato thingies, peanuts roasted in seaweed (I loved, Catherine didn't), cashews in a sticky-spicy glaze, peanuts glazed with sesame-seed, garlic chicken, hot-sour soup, pea cake, and that's just what I can remember. To drink, there was unlimited red wine, cucumber juice, kiwi juice, and tomato juice. But, as far as I could see, no tea. Weird! Of course, right next door was a tea place that offered several varieties that ranged from 900 to 1400 dollars a pot.
The show itself was just about perfect. The orchestra consisted of six musicians: koto harp, shakuhachi (I don't know what the Chinese names or varieties of these instruments are, but close enough), percussion, two-stringed fiddle, flute (whose player switched between several types and was a magnificent performer, with the easy and playful confidence of a true master), and a mouth organ. When I say "mouth organ" don't think harmonica. Instead, picture a miniature pipe organ held up to the mouth, with ten or fifteen pipes sticking up and controlled by the hands, with a sweet, accordiony sound. The gal who played it must have been exhausted.
Later I went up to see what their musical notation was. Not a single note of Western-style notation. Instead, it was all Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, which means they were just writing out the pentatonic Chinese traditional melodies by degree), surrounded by various diacritical markings that no doubt indicated rhythm and dynamics and other performance specifics. Fascinating! Certainly not the original Tang Dynasty notation, though.
Placed around the hall, which seated around fifty, with Catherine and me on third row center, there were huge bowls with water and several goldfish swimming around, spotlighted dramatically. At various points in the play, the bowls were receptacles for falling rose-petals (during the spring rhapsody aria), and water (beautifully evoking a rainy afternoon). The lighting and set design were, therefore, distinctly modern. Though "traditional" in taste, it would have been utterly unrecognizable to anyone in the fifteen-hundreds — mesmerizingly so.
The costumes and staging were highly traditional. We couldn't help but know that there was tons of material we simply missed: facial expressions, movements, little things they did with their hands, stylized makeup — no doubt it was all as laden with meaning to anyone familiar with the tradition as a scene from La Boheme would be to a Westerner, even one who didn't think they knew much about opera. At several points the Chinese people in the audience laughed, apparently at something that didn't translate into the subtitles.
After a brief time of getting used to the movement and vocal tones (falsetto for both men and women), and odd ornamentations and so on, you could just enter in to the story and let it overwhelm you. The very first moments of the piece literally knocked the wind out of me. That's something that happens when I respond to art, for some reason. If you've been around when it hits me emotionally, you've probably heard me go Hhhhhhhhhhhhhh at some point. Utilizing costume, drama, dance, music, poetry, and — gorgeously — calligraphy, which was done live on stage by a calligrapher to announce separate sections of the story, it was a stunning gesamtkunstwerk. I can only imagine that the full production had the same effect on audiences as Der Ring des Nibelungen and its modern-day film ripoff have had in western opera houses and movie theaters.
What a night! Afterward, they invited audience members to have pictures taken with the stars. I'd have liked to take a picture with the musicians as well, but by that point they were gone. The musicians, by the way, were dramatically costumed, as were the four men who served as chorus, extras, props, and, at times, scenery. One of the opera hostesses asked us where we'd found out about the production. I had two answers: the first was that I'd chanced on a notice about this particular performance in an issue of one of the several free entertainment mags found around town; the second, that I'd heard about The Peony Pavilion when I was young, and then later in the nineties had longed to be able to see it staged, and have always wanted to experience it, I was unable to utter without choking into tears.
Beijing Opera is less like what you think of when you think of opera than vaudeville. As I mentioned before, don't picture Hildegard Behrens in a viking helmet and braids: picture Ed Sullivan in a red silk dress. It's a hybrid of several different stage traditions that melded over the centuries, and Kunqu opera is one of them. Highly stylized singing and balletic movement, gorgeous costumes, and a chamber group playing the music, all very high-culture.
The crown jewel of Kunqu opera is The Peony Pavilion, a 16th-century story of love, death, redemption, war, and restoration that runs well over twenty hours. To give you some perspective on this, think about the Western tradition of opera. It had a few golden ages, one in the late nineteenth-right-up-to-the-twentieth century; one earlier in the age of Mozart and Rossini; and the first big bloom of operas by Purcell and Handel. Beyond that, it begins to sound pretty primitive. Monteverdi's Orfeo is wonderful, but really just outside what we consider the classical tradition. And that was in the 17th century. A hundred years before that, Tang Xianzu was writing China's Ring Cycle.
I'm afraid I've probably missed my chance to see the 20-hour version (which, I've been informed, was significantly truncated) that cropped up in New York and I think one other place in the US about ten years ago. There's currently a nine-hour version that's touring several major cities. Tonight's show was abridged to two hours, and only covered the love-story portion of the plot, ending about halfway through the full story, at a nice ending where boy and girl are united in love.
(At the end of the show, the woman of my dreams, the life-love of my destiny, said, "What! It's over? It feels like it should be intermission!" Ahhh. No measly two-hour opera for my girl.)
It was staged at the Royal Granary, newly restored as an arts district, with beautiful, subdued art galleries and bars and restaurants, as well as this performance space. The granary itself was built around the same time as the opera came along, so it made for a beautiful synchrony of Tang Dynasty culture.
Beforehand, they served a spectacular meal, with thinly-sliced summer squash sauteed with similar disks of mushroom, tender beef with red and green peppers, a deliciously spiced chopped green leafy thing wrapped in a thin egg crepe, perfectly spiced shrimp-and-potato thingies, peanuts roasted in seaweed (I loved, Catherine didn't), cashews in a sticky-spicy glaze, peanuts glazed with sesame-seed, garlic chicken, hot-sour soup, pea cake, and that's just what I can remember. To drink, there was unlimited red wine, cucumber juice, kiwi juice, and tomato juice. But, as far as I could see, no tea. Weird! Of course, right next door was a tea place that offered several varieties that ranged from 900 to 1400 dollars a pot.
The show itself was just about perfect. The orchestra consisted of six musicians: koto harp, shakuhachi (I don't know what the Chinese names or varieties of these instruments are, but close enough), percussion, two-stringed fiddle, flute (whose player switched between several types and was a magnificent performer, with the easy and playful confidence of a true master), and a mouth organ. When I say "mouth organ" don't think harmonica. Instead, picture a miniature pipe organ held up to the mouth, with ten or fifteen pipes sticking up and controlled by the hands, with a sweet, accordiony sound. The gal who played it must have been exhausted.
Later I went up to see what their musical notation was. Not a single note of Western-style notation. Instead, it was all Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, which means they were just writing out the pentatonic Chinese traditional melodies by degree), surrounded by various diacritical markings that no doubt indicated rhythm and dynamics and other performance specifics. Fascinating! Certainly not the original Tang Dynasty notation, though.
Placed around the hall, which seated around fifty, with Catherine and me on third row center, there were huge bowls with water and several goldfish swimming around, spotlighted dramatically. At various points in the play, the bowls were receptacles for falling rose-petals (during the spring rhapsody aria), and water (beautifully evoking a rainy afternoon). The lighting and set design were, therefore, distinctly modern. Though "traditional" in taste, it would have been utterly unrecognizable to anyone in the fifteen-hundreds — mesmerizingly so.
The costumes and staging were highly traditional. We couldn't help but know that there was tons of material we simply missed: facial expressions, movements, little things they did with their hands, stylized makeup — no doubt it was all as laden with meaning to anyone familiar with the tradition as a scene from La Boheme would be to a Westerner, even one who didn't think they knew much about opera. At several points the Chinese people in the audience laughed, apparently at something that didn't translate into the subtitles.
After a brief time of getting used to the movement and vocal tones (falsetto for both men and women), and odd ornamentations and so on, you could just enter in to the story and let it overwhelm you. The very first moments of the piece literally knocked the wind out of me. That's something that happens when I respond to art, for some reason. If you've been around when it hits me emotionally, you've probably heard me go Hhhhhhhhhhhhhh at some point. Utilizing costume, drama, dance, music, poetry, and — gorgeously — calligraphy, which was done live on stage by a calligrapher to announce separate sections of the story, it was a stunning gesamtkunstwerk. I can only imagine that the full production had the same effect on audiences as Der Ring des Nibelungen and its modern-day film ripoff have had in western opera houses and movie theaters.
What a night! Afterward, they invited audience members to have pictures taken with the stars. I'd have liked to take a picture with the musicians as well, but by that point they were gone. The musicians, by the way, were dramatically costumed, as were the four men who served as chorus, extras, props, and, at times, scenery. One of the opera hostesses asked us where we'd found out about the production. I had two answers: the first was that I'd chanced on a notice about this particular performance in an issue of one of the several free entertainment mags found around town; the second, that I'd heard about The Peony Pavilion when I was young, and then later in the nineties had longed to be able to see it staged, and have always wanted to experience it, I was unable to utter without choking into tears.
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