本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Next week Tan Dun will be the first composer in more than 60 years to conduct his own opera at New York's Met. Ten years in the making, it's a hugely ambitious project for all involved, he tells Ed Pilkington
Friday December 15, 2006
The Guardian
'Opera is the primitive cinema' ... Tan Dun, whose The First Emperor starring Placido Domingo (pictured) opens in New York next Thursday. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday December 19 2006
Schoenberg not Shoenberg, as we said in the article below.
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In the late 1980s, when Tan Dun had just arrived in New York from his native China, he used to play the fiddle on the streets of downtown Manhattan to make a living while he studied music at Columbia University. He was reminded of those lean times several years later when he bumped into one of the buskers with whom he used to compete for the most lucrative spots. Where was he now, the busker asked. Tan Dun told him: the Lincoln Centre.
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"I didn't know you could play outside there. Where can you stand?"
"No," Tan Dun replied. "These days I play inside."
On December 21, Tan Dun will be very much inside the Lincoln Centre. He will be standing at the conductor's dais of the Metropolitan Opera, baton in hand, at the world premiere of his own composition, The First Emperor.
It will be the culmination of an extraordinary journey that began more than 30 years ago in the paddy fields of southern China, where he worked picking rice. Only in 1973 did he hear his first western classical music, when the Philadelphia Orchestra followed Nixon to Beijing. Now Tan Dun will be commanding one of the most prestigious classical music venues in the world.
December 21 represents the end of a very long journey for the Met, too. The First Emperor will be the most expensive production in the history of the opera house, costing nearly $3m. It is also unusual for the Met to allow a composer to conduct his own work; the last time it happened was in 1940, with Italo Montemezzi's L'Amore dei Tre Re. Most of all, though, it is a surprisingly risky commission from an institution known for its caution.
Tan Dun is a composer who defies definition. He is popularly associated with his film music, having won an Oscar and a Grammy for the score of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and written the music to Zhang Yimou's 2002 movie Hero. More dedicated followers of his work will know that he has also composed several orchestral and operatic pieces with such un-Met titles as The Map: Concerto for Cello, Video and Orchestra.
As we sit in the spartan canteen in the bowels of the Met, Tan Dun explains that he hopes this clash of cultures - the opera house's traditions meeting his inventiveness - will pay dividends and draw a new audience to the Lincoln Centre. His aim, he says, is to attract young people while retaining the loyal but ageing supporters of the Met. The words he uses in his fluent but heavily accented English are: "To keep the existing fans of opera but bring a new audience from my eastern opera tradition."
That's an ambitious undertaking, but then he did take on the commission, offered to him by the Met's music director, James Levine, fully 10 years ago. And that in itself has been another journey of extraordinary length and intensity. Tan Dun says he divided up the decade it took him to create The First Emperor into three parts. The first phase saw him become a student again, this time of western opera, in which he immersed himself over a four-year period. He listened to all the major works, from Monteverdi to Schoenberg, and attended almost every performance at the Met during that period.
The second phase saw him begin to frame his conceptual plan for the opera, drawing on his own earlier work and combining it with his new-found knowledge of western opera. How can one combine the ritual rhythms of Peking opera, he wondered, with the melodies of Puccini. His answer is what he calls a philosophical formula: one plus one equals one.
Mathematicians will groan, but what he means is that he is stretching for a new musical form that is neither oriental, nor western, nor, crucially, a fusion of the two. Never mention the word "fusion" to Tan Dun; he doesn't like it, his forehead breaks into a deep frown. Instead, he says, this new form will embody both eastern and western traditions - a sort of operatic synthesis.
Tan Dun conjures up a cooking metaphor in explanation: "You may want to put chocolate with spices, but if the dish that comes out still has the chocolate tasting of chocolate and the spices of spices, that is much less interesting to me. People will praise you for being a brave cook. But what I want to do is create a new taste - one that is neither chocolate nor spices."
That new taste is The First Emperor. The opera revolves around the brutal leader who unified China in the third century BC, Qin Shi Huang. Out of seven warring regions, he created one language, currency and system of measurements, and began building the Great Wall. But what Qin really wanted to do was unify people's hearts. He could only do that, the opera suggests, through music - an anthem for the newly united China.
In the new opera, Qin is played by Placido Domingo in what I suggested to Tan Dun must be a very unfamiliar and challenging role, both theatrically and vocally, as he is required to adopt something of the swoops and yelps of oriental singing.
"When I rehearse with Placido, and other singers, they have very sophisticated voices of the west," Tan Dun replies. "I help them to vocalise the eastern tradition by using calligraphy, ink paintings, as an illustration. One stroke of the pen spreads itself out over the rice paper. So it is with the voice." His arms move in great expressive arches as he speaks.
Similarly, with the orchestra, he has had to teach the violins how to do pizzicato in eastern style, and oboists how to emulate the buzzing bee sound of a Japanese shakuhachi (a type of flute). "But I tell them, don't pretend to be shakuhachi players - we are striving for something completely new."
The other great synthesis that will be on display next week is between cinema and opera. The director of The First Emperor is Zhang Yimou, China's best-known film-maker. The pair's earlier cinematic collaboration, Hero, is also about Emperor Qin, but a later point in his rule, when the country had already been unified.
Tan Dun believes their work together, first in cinema and now on the operatic stage, has been hugely positive. The two media are natural companions. "Opera in my understanding is the primitive cinema. Wagner, Puccini - they created a culture of moving sound. Wagner is like an orchestral drama; Puccini is really like a film director. Zhang Yimou too feels that, and his way of shooting film is very operatic."
Audiences can expect to see in The First Emperor some of the epic and awesome beauty of the Hero, which blended gigantic wide-angled cinematography with the evocative zither music of Tan Dun's film score. The Met's stage will be dominated by wooden blocks to represent the building of the Great Wall, held together by hundreds of hanging ropes - seven miles of rope in all.
From the opening moments when the curtain is pulled back, the music, too, promises to be epic. The overture will have not one but two orchestras playing at full pelt. While the Met orchestra will be performing from the pit, Tan Dun has placed a second one on stage, replicating his impression of ancient Chinese sounds. Musicians will strike and scrape stones against ceramic urns and chimes, backed by a chorus that at times will be 150 strong.
That will be just the start of more than two hours in which Tan Dun will roll out his conceptualisation of one plus one equals one. It promises to be a long but exhilarating journey.
· The First Emperor opens on Thursday at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The premiere will be streamed live at www.metopera.org from 1am on December 22 (UK time).更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net