Peony Reborn

By Corrie Dosh

BIG APPLE OPERA: An American audience watches The Peony Pavilion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on November 30

In a quiet garden in the middle of New York City, the sound of trickling water fills the air and the resounding call of a gong transports a small audience hundreds of years back in time to the Ming Dynasty(1368-1644). A zither and bamboo flute call to each other in a duet that tells the love story of classical Chinas great Kunqu Opera—The Peony Pavilion.

It was first performed in 1598—around the same time that Shakespeare penned his famous tale of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet. The Peony Pavilion tells a similar love story of Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei. The original version of the opera is performed over 20 hours and was traditionally staged in the gardens of wealthy landowners and royal families. Kunqu Opera is similar in style to Peking Opera, but is an older and more influential form.

The newest version, produced by celebrated Chinese composer Tan Dun and staged in a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (the Met) from November 30 to December 2, was aimed at bringing a modern interpretation to the classic, stripping out grand orchestration in favor of natural sounds of fountains and traditional Ming Dynasty instruments. The 70-minute abbreviated performance was held in front of an audience of just 50, seated diagonally in the garden courtyard on a makeshift stage. The performance was also filmed and streamed live to larger audiences and is available on the Met website.

Vocal calligraphy

It is Tans fifth staging of the classic opera, which he calls a form of “voice calligraphy,”but perhaps his most faithful. The garden setting is how original audiences would have enjoyed the opera. The Chinese garden on display at the Met is a near exact replica of a well-known garden in Suzhou, called The Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets(Wangshi Garden). For the performance of The Peony Pavilion, Tans production company imported many traditional elements and even 24 authentic Chinese goldfish, which did not adjust well to New York City water.

The result, said Tan, is that “outside has become in, and inside has become out.” Its a concept that relates to the spirituality of what Chinese gardens represent. One visits a garden to soak in the outside natural world, and explore inner feelings and thoughts.

“The garden courtyard stage is as much a part of the performance as the music and costumes,” said Tan. He draws his interpretation from two significant moments in his creative life, one of which was a magical moment of listening to bird songs and the sound of water and insects while sitting in a garden in China.

“A strong wind blew, very briefly, and when the sound of the birds and water came back it was so dramatic I thought to myself‘My god, this is opera,” said Tan. “This is why they used to perform opera in the garden, instead of on a stage.”

Kunqus muse

The other inspiration for Tans performance dates back to the first time he heard the traditional work, as a student at Chinas Central Conservatory of Music.

“I met a beautiful revolutionary opera singer once, her name is Yang Chunxia (an actress in modern revolutionary operas of the 1970s),” Tan said. “She sang The Peony Pavilion for me. I decided to be a composer from that day forward.”

“The blending of traditional opera and instruments with modern sensibilities and technology is a hallmark touch of Tans,”said Maxwell K. Hearn, Director of Asia Department of the Met. Four cameras filmed the performance, and six strategically placed speakers surrounded the audience with the sounds of the original Suzhou garden thousands of miles away.

“[Tan] is an extraordinarily creative composer as well as conductor. He has really transformed world music by his amazing integration and blending of Western and Eastern traditional music, the blending of classical with contemporary musical form—all from a man who grew up in Hunan in a very provincial part of central China,” said Hearn, “One of his earliest experiences in music was the shamanistic rituals he witnessed as a young boy in which the ceremonies involved using water and rocks and other natural objects to create a musical backdrop to those rituals.”

Revitalization

In the 1980s, Tan studied at New Yorks Columbia University, where he became inspired by the experimental work of Phillip Glass and John Cage. He has staged and composed work for leading philharmonic orchestras around the world and won many awards, including an Oscar and a Grammy. He has also contributed many of Chinas most recognized modern musical works, including the film score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the themes for the award ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Patrons at a preview performance praised Tans modern interpretation of The Peony Pavilion, saying the composers abbreviated distillation resonates with Western audiences. Joan Lebold Cohen, a Chinese art historian, photographer and curator, said while the longwinded traditional Kunqu Opera usually puts her to sleep, she enjoyed Tans staging.

“I learned to sleep sitting up during Kunqu performances,” Cohen said. “But this was great. Fantastic job.”

Zhu Wanjin, Deputy Consul General of China in New York, said viewing classical Chinese opera at the Met was a unique experience.

“It was very exciting for me to watch the show within such a small distance from the performers. Kunqu Opera is one of the intangible cultural heritages of China,” said Zhu.“The Peony Pavilion is about a love story. Love lies inherent in human beings; it is also an everlasting topic in art creation worldwide.”

Symbolically, as this year marks 40 years of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, the performance of traditional Chinese opera at one of the leading American art institutions is “meaningful in terms of cultural exchange and communication,” Zhu said.

“The 70-minute version of The Peony Pavilion is also valuable and innovative in terms of how to refine Chinese classical operas, making them understood by local audiences. Even in modern China, classical operas are less prevalent among people in recent years than ever before since many such operas tend to be lengthy and progress at a very slow pace, which do not cater to the taste of current audiences,” Zhu told Beijing Review. “The highly condensed version of The Peony Pavilion, with its clearer topic, fewer protagonists and aesthetic scene, promotes a closer communication between the actors and the audience, allowing the classical opera to be more acceptable and understandable to the local audience. Viewed from an international cultural exchange perspective, this is undoubtedly a successful starting point for the traditional Chinese opera to gain popularity among Western audiences.”

Tan said his approach is “hi-tech organic”and a “vegetarian” revolution against the trend to beef up traditional operas with grand compositions and big orchestras. The sound of the gong and the water from the fish pond begins the performance, a symbolic transportation into the gardens of the Song (960-1279) and Ming dynasties. The dialogue between the sounds of the pond and willow is simple and natural, but is a metaphor for the larger story and represents the relationship between modern China and its traditional culture. “Real China” can be found in the silences between arias of the traditional Kunqu, recounting the journey of the two lovers, he said.

“Its like the unrolling of a hand scroll be- cause you cross the section of brocade before you enter the painting proper. That brocade is called the ge shui—the moat—and every Chinese painting from the Ming Dynasty on features a little stream and a bridge that the viewer is invited to cross in a movement of time and space. Youre leaving your world behind and entering into the world of the painting,” Hearn said. “[Tan has] recreated this in sound. Its a portal into this Ming world and also a portal from New York to Suzhou.”

For Tan, the staging of The Peony Pavilion represents a more personal journey into the past, when he was searching for“beautiful China” while living as a student in New York. His Columbia professors taught him “how to be complex, but not about simplicity.” The reality, Tan said, is that success is found within simplicity.

“I feel revolutionary again, where has this beautiful China gone?” Tan said. “I tried to find China from New York—and I did.”

(For full coverage please visit bjreview.com)

Behind The Peony Pavilion

In four scenes, instead of the original 55, Tans The Peony Pavilion tells the classic story of the lovesick maiden Du Liniang and the scholar Liu Mengmei. Du and Liu first meet in a dream, and when Du awakens without her love she falls ill and dies from loneliness. She leaves behind a selfportrait, which Liu uses to resurrect his ghostly wife. Tan used only a few instruments—the bamboo flute, lute, the guqin (zither) and percussion—as well as the sounds of water for an elegant, sparse interpretation of the Chinese classic written by Tang Xianzu (1550-1616).

Tan performed his arrangement for two years in a garden in Suzhou, a picturesque town outside the city of Shanghai, where it was seen by Maxwell Hearn, Asian Art Curator for New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hearn invited Tan to bring the performance for a special showing in New York City.

“The one challenge we have is that the garden is very small and the fire code prevents us from having more than 50 individuals in the garden as an audience, because of the number of people who are in the performance itself,” said Hearn.

Zhang Ran, who played the maiden Du Liniang, said adapting the opera to the gallery space was difficult.

“We are much closer to the audience in [the New York Mets] Astor Court. Each of our movements and expressions on our faces and in our eyes is closely observed by the audience, which is a greater challenge for us,” she told Beijing Review.