Dream of the Red Chamber: a Chinese epic bursts into song
The book is China’s equivalent of War and Peace, and now it’s been turned into an opera. Is this the 21st-century Turandot – or something more authentic?
Dream of the Red Chamber in rehearsal: ‘We’re trying to create something which at least treats both cultures equally.’ Photograph: San Francisco Opera/Cory Weaver
Damian Fowler
Thursday 8 September 2016 11.24 EDT Last modified on Thursday 8 September 2016 12.04 EDT
Dream of the Red Chamber is considered to be China’s greatest novel – an 18th-century epic by Cao Xueqin that runs to 2,500 pages in translation – so much so that an entire field of literary study in China known as “redology” is devoted to that novel alone. In world terms the novel is said to rank alongside such masterpieces as Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. And yet in the west, the novel remains virtually unknown (as Michael Wood commented in these pages earlier this year). But now the book has been adapted into a lavish new opera, which has its world premiere at San Francisco Opera on 10 September, with six performances in all. Can this American opera attract a new audience to this timeless Chinese classic?
“I initially didn’t want to do this,” says David Henry Hwang, the celebrated American playwright who co-wrote the opera libretto with the composer Bright Sheng. “It was daunting on so many levels with too many characters – over 400 in the novel – to be boiled down. I would be adapting something that would be under such a microscope from so many people who know it incredibly well, who revere it, it just seemed there were lots of opportunities to fail.”
Despite his initial reservations, Hwang relented and agreed to work on the opera when Sheng offered a treatment of the story that centred on the love triangle. That personal story focuses on the son of a great, dynastic family in its waning days and his love for “a poetic but sickly cousin who is his soulmate”, says Hwang. But then he meets a second woman, yet another cousin, who is the ideal of the marriageable Chinese girl, “wealthy, practical, and smart”. Will true love prevail, or will the socially sanctioned, arranged marriage save the day for the grand old family? Without giving the plot away, there’s a famous scene that involves a bride switch, which matches Shakespeare’s theatrical penchant for deception and disguise.
The love story is just one aspect of a more richly braided tale, one that deals with socio-political aspects of the fall of a great family, what Hwang dubs the “House of Cards story”. Dream of the Red Chamber captures a time of transition as one of the world’s oldest cultures, Imperial China, is about to end. There is also a spiritual, metaphysical layer to the story, wherein the main characters in love are reincarnations of a stone and flower having existed in a spiritual realm before coming to Earth to learn what it means to be mortal. “The thing that made it an opera is that there are very high emotions at the core of it,” says Hwang. “Once we boiled it down to that love triangle, it felt like it had the elements of a conventional opera.”
Though the subject matter is Chinese, this is an opera whose musical language will not be unfamiliar to western opera-goers. When David Gockley, the recently retired general director of San Francisco Opera, commissioned the opera he approached Sheng and expressed his desire for “a lyrical, harmonically consonant piece with a lot of Chinese folk colour”. That is what Sheng has delivered. While the music evokes a Chinese soundscape with ritual elements, along with hints of the pentatonic scale, in its grand gestures it draws on the great Italian masterpieces of Puccini and Verdi. “I do love lyricism,” says Sheng. “When you write for singers, you need to show off their voices but then you have to have drama, too. For me there’s beauty and the beast in that approach.”
The opera was commissioned as ‘a lyrical, harmonically consonant piece with a lot of Chinese folk colour’. Photograph: San Francisco Opera/Cory Weaver
The composer, who was born in China and grew up during the Cultural Revolution, moved to the United States in 1982. Sheng jokes that he is 100% Chinese and 100% American, which means as a composer his influences are multifarious and cannot be reduced to any one tradition. “I think that one has to understand both cultures … When I was composing I didn’t really think about what was Chinese or what was western,” he says. “For me the idea of fusion has to come from the bottom up not from the surface.”
On the face of it, Dream of the Red Chamber would seem to be a work that fits into a grand opera tradition, an east-west historical love story perhaps akin to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Although Puccini never travelled to China, musicologists have surmised that the composer drew inspiration from a “Chinese” music box he heard, using certain tunes in Butterfly and, later on, in Turandot, his fairytale opera about a cold-hearted Chinese princess who beheads her suitors.
Yet there is a more fundamental difference between Puccini’s version of the east and its 21st-century treatment in Dream of the Red Chamber. “I think that the Chinoiserie and Japonism of the late 19th century felt like, well – now we use the word – appropriation, it felt like picking individual pieces that seemed appealing to the composer or the artist and kind of shoehorning those into a dominantly western aesthetic,” says Hwang. “And now we’re trying to create something which at least treats both cultures equally, and doesn’t feel like a hodgepodge but feels like an integrated musical language with an identity of its own.”
A rehearsal of the opera, which is likely to provoke strong reactions in America and China. Photograph: San Francisco Opera/Cory Weaver
Part of the challenge in creating the Dream of the Red Chamber opera was to create an artistic work that crosses that divide between east and west, a work that ideally feels relevant to the different traditions involved. And while the principals in the creative team are all Chinese, they are, says Hwang, “different kinds of Chinese”. For a start Hwang is the most American, born in California. Acclaimed as an American playwright, librettist and director, he read the novel in translation since he admits he cannot read Chinese. Sheng grew up in China but moved to the United States and teaches at the University of Michigan; Stan Lai is one of China’s most renowned theatre directors and playwrights; and designer Tim Yip – who won an Oscar for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – primarily still lives and works in Asia. “I’m hoping that the meeting of our respective cultural and artistic identities will end up creating a work that also encompasses that wide range,” says Hwang.
Within the last 30 years there have been two television series in China based on the Dream of the Red Chamber; the first one in 1987 ran to 36 episodes and is held in similar esteem to the BBC’s 1996 adaption of Pride and Prejudice. And yet, both of these adaptations continue to stir passionate debate in China, specifically about which is the more authentic. But that’s par for the course for a novel which still has questions swirling around its authorship. Scholars agree that the first 80 chapters are written by Cao, but that latter 40 may not have been written by the original author. We’ll leave this to the redologists to debate.
In any event, the opera will probably provoke similarly strong reactions on both sides of the aisle. “That’s not a bad thing if you can create a work that makes people re-engage with this novel on a different level, not to mention people from around the world that didn’t know this novel before,” says Hwang. “That would be a wonderful achievement.”
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