UNDER WESTERN EYES
WIEDER, LAURANCE
UNDER. WESTERN EYES Chinese Opera Comes to America By Laurance Wieder This summer, in three performances, Lincoln Center in New York presented something rarer than Halley's Comet: The Peony...
...At times the line between audience and player is crossed onstage, such as when the actors applaud a sword dance or tumbler's solo...
...There is no lack of dream lovers in this world...
...Unwilling to let his scholarly talents go to waste, he sets off for the capital to compete in the imperial examination that will establish his career...
...Such stagecraft may be familiar to Western theatergoers: Bertolt Brecht wrote his own version of the Chinese play The Good Woman of Szechuan...
...When did anyone ever die of a dream...
...When Liu presents himself to Du Bao as a son-in-law, the old man's rage and bitterness prevent him from believing Liu and accepting his daughter's resurrection...
...The young Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng, who emigrated to America in 1987, brings Western notions of textual completeness and authentic performance practice to Tang Xianzu's Eastern masterpiece...
...When Liniang tells her story to the Tenth Judge of the Underworld, his first response is disbelief: "This is all lies...
...No records exist of a complete presentation of the opera...
...Du Liniang's journey through dream to death and back to life, and Liu Mengmei's quest for distinction and appointment, bring to the stage maids and scholars, priests and officials, loyal servants and rebel bandits, merchants, farmers and soldiers, prostitutes and demons, a Judge of the Underworld and the offstage voice of the emperor himself...
...Overwhelmed by a stroll through a springtime garden, she falls asleep and encounters a scholar-lover in a dream...
...Below the side platforms are hung wooden cages with yellow finch, who sing throughout...
...Such ideas encounter inherent resistance when applied to an opera written in a performance style, Kunju, that has been transmitted by oral tradition...
...costume changes are made off to the side...
...This relation between the natural and artificial, real ducks in man-made settings, quacking and birdsong underlying singers and orchestra, informs the entire production...
...Where Brecht's intention was to heighten the tension between social life and dramatic illusion in the service of a realism that was sardonic and material, the Peony audience and players participate in the same event, in a kind of community enchantment...
...And the modern Chinese opera companies that carry on the Kunju tradition greeted Chen Shi-Zheng's notion of a complete presentation with disbelief...
...At Liniang's command, Liu digs up her corpse, and restores it to life...
...The flute often sings the aria along with the character...
...Far from sounding alien or inaccessible, the music has a real beat and sounds akin to a Scotch-Irish string band of banjo, fiddle, and guitar, with flute and percussion added...
...It illuminates an A frequent writer on opera for The Weekly Standard, Laurance Wieder is a poet living on Long Island...
...The "dead" wife reappears, and in the end all are established in their proper places...
...She wakes up and, unable to fulfill her dream of love, eventually dies of longing...
...By contrast, the low characters—a Taoist nun and the wife of the lead bandit (both played by men), poor scholars, servants, soldiers, the outlaw rebels, barbarians, and the administrators of Hell—are more natural in their movements, more vulgar in their language, and less conflicted in their appetites...
...Travel-weary and ill, he recuperates near the tomb and shrine of Liniang...
...In Western opera—in The Magic Flute or Aida—the oppositions of heart and head, family and duty, parent and child, intuition and tradition, usually resolve in the triumph of one side over the other...
...Her ghost has been given leave to return to earth by the Judge of the Underworld...
...Must the love that comes in a dream necessarily be unreal...
...In The Peony Pavilion, the noble figures of Du Liniang, her scholar Liu Mengmei, her father Du Bao (a descendant of Du Fu, China's greatest poet) and her mother express their heightened sensibilities through restricted forms and stylized gesture, their voices suddenly high or low, sleeves passed before the face or twirled around the hands...
...The opera is spectacular, accessible, funny, and incredibly refined...
...The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again...
...The form may be artificial, but the longing, the grief, the rage, the delight, the rapture they express are direct and piercing...
...distinct melodies were attached to verse forms...
...Part of the rarity of the opera is due to its length: When staged in entirety, Peony takes nearly twenty hours to perform, and the new production at Lincoln Center required attendance over three consecutive days...
...The music of disorder, when there are barbarians, or battles, or demons about, is a structured New Year's Eve celebration played on flute and double reeds (which sound like a shawm or bagpipes...
...In addition to supporting the dancers, coloring scenes, and bridging action, the orchestra also provides sound effects...
...Like the unquiet souls of its protagonists, and the vexed wishes of parents and children, the thirteenth-century China where the story takes place is divided and out of harmony...
...makeup is applied in full view...
...The couple travels to the capital, where Liu wins the academic prize...
...entire world as its fifty-five scenes employ poetry, song, dance, acrobatics, martial arts, puppetry, and instrumental intermezzi to proclaim the primacy of love...
...In the world of Peony, love and belief are countered by authority and skepticism...
...puppeteers stand behind their puppets...
...Her dreamed lover, Liu Mengmei, has also seen a beautiful girl in a garden as he slept...
...Recalled to the capital, he is made chief minister...
...the archives contain no indication even how it would have been performed...
...Rather than closing in a triumphal march or sobbing over a heap of corpses, this drama travels enormous distances to attain spiritual poise...
...the search for the prize candidate begins in and is carried out through the audience, then onto the stage...
...The story begins with the sixteen-year-old Du Liniang, only child of the prefect Du Bao and his wife...
...WESTERN EYES Chinese Opera Comes to America By Laurance Wieder This summer, in three performances, Lincoln Center in New York presented something rarer than Halley's Comet: The Peony Pavilion, the classic Chinese opera written at the end of the sixteenth century by Tang Xianzu (who died in 1616, the same year as William Shakespeare...
...But—like staying up all night to see a comet—going day after day to see The Peony Pavilion repays the effort...
...Meanwhile, Liniang's father has been called to defend the Southern Song Empire against a rebel attack fomented by the barbarian North...
...elaborate rules govern the numbers of syllables in a line, the use of rhyme, and the subjects associated with forms...
...In Hell, there is only interrogation, and law, and punishment...
...But in The Peony Pavilion, imbalance is only the beginning and the engine of the plot...
...In this production of The Peony Pavilion a silk placard announces scene changes...
...For Chen Shi-Zheng's production, Lincoln Center used the La Guardia Concert Hall with two small platforms projecting into the orchestra pit and a Southern Song style landscape painting of water and mountains as backdrop...
...the narrator approves of certain scenes...
...Assigned the first poem in the Book of Songs by her tutor, she regrets her maidenhood...
...Every turn of plot has an apposite literary response...
...He succeeds, but is deceived into believing his wife has been killed during the disorders...
...Only for those whose love must be fulfilled on the pillow and for whom affection deepens only after retirement from office, is it entirely a corporeal matter...
...The opera travels from study to garden to sickroom to shrine, from agricultural villages to besieged cities, from the Court of the Underworld to the court of the southern emperor...
...The twelve-player orchestra of flute, percussion, double reeds, strings, gongs, and cymbals occupies a platform and plays for all but a few moments of the epic performance...
...The earliest instrumental musical score dates from 1792...
...She steals into Liu's room at night, where they become (again) lovers...
...Classical Chinese poetry prizes the reinflection of traditional images...
...In his 1598 preface (as translated by Cyril Birch), Tang Xianzu wrote: Love's source is unknown, yet it grows ever deeper...
...Love, the source of poetry, and music, and intuition, rather than lore, distinguishes the realm of the living from the land of the dead...
...The platforms reflect in a pool of water about thirty inches deep and as long as the stage, stocked with live carp and mallards...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 43
