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Composer Breaks the Rules
Sheila Melvin IHT
Wednesday, October 17, 2001
For China's Guo Wenjing, the Language Is All
 
BEIJING When Guo Wenjing sets out to compose an opera, there is one thing paramount in his mind. "The most important part of writing an opera is the language," he said between puffs on a pipe. "The sound of the language and the music."

It is precisely language that makes Guo's work difficult. While he writes primarily for opera stages in Europe, the language to which he melds his compositions is not Italian, French, German or even English, but Chinese. "Foreigners who sing my work have to use Chinese, but their pronunciation isn't always very good, even though they try very hard," he said. "It's much more difficult for me to write an opera to be sung by foreigners because of language."

Nevertheless, in an era when it is all too rare for a contemporary opera in any language to be mounted more than once, Guo's first was staged in four European cities, and his second, a revised version of which premiered in Paris at the Festival d'Automne early this month, is scheduled to be performed in Perth, Brussels, Berlin, New York and Caen, France.

For a composer of Chinese-language opera to achieve such success in the West is accomplishment enough, but Guo is all the more remarkable in that he has never lived outside China except for a few months in New York, and he speaks no other languages. As Guo, 44, readily acknowledges, his success can in part be attributed to the same source as the difficulties of the work he has undertaken: the language and culture of China.

"I think there are a lot of good points about living here that you don't have outside China," said Guo, who was born and raised in the southwest province of Sichuan but now lives in Beijing. "When I'm creating and I need to study anything, I can find the best person here. If I want to learn more about the pipa, or use a Peking Opera singer, they are all here."

Staying in China has also enabled him to immerse himself in its traditional music, especially that of Sichuan. Learning about his country's traditional music is in fact not natural in China, where conservatory training is dominated by Western classical music and composition techniques. "The students in the traditional music department study Western music, but the students in Western music don't study Chinese traditional music."

In his own work - and in his position as head of the composition department at the Central Conservatory - Guo has sought to break down this barrier. The result is compositions for orchestra and voice that absorb aspects of traditional Chinese music - the emphasis on percussion, the falsetto voices of Chinese opera, the rhythmic work songs of laborers - to create resonant, highly original music that transcends geographic boundaries and rigid classifications.

Guo finds that Chinese music not only inspires him but also is well suited to operatic interpretation, since music and storytelling are so closely intertwined in Chinese culture. "It's not hard to tell a story in Chinese music," he said, "this is a special characteristic of Chinese music. It's too easy! In Chinese culture, so many stories were sung by storytellers."

When composing, Guo works closely with his librettist, Zou Jingze, and finds additional inspiration in his country's nonmusical culture: in literature, history and painting. Like his compositions, the librettos for his operas are unique, not the same old stories of emperors bidding concubines farewell that are regularly recycled in music and film.

His first opera, "Wolf Cub Village," was based on the short story "A Madman's Diary" by Lu Xun, modern China's most famous writer. Its protagonist, who may or may not be mad, gradually comes to the horrific realization that he lives in a nation "where for 4,000 years human flesh has been eaten," and that he is about to be eaten, too.

In composing the music, Guo strove to express Lu Xun's feelings, and his own. "I wanted to tell both Lu Xun's story and the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to focus on the Chinese language to create the atmosphere and express the characters' emotional states, the cruelty and the fear."

His second opera, "Night Banquet," was inspired by a famous 10th-century scroll painting by Gu Hongzhong. The painting was commissioned by Emperor Li Yu as a means of spying on Han Xizai, a former official who does not want to serve the new dynasty because he considers it corrupt. Unable to criticize the emperor openly or to refuse a position if offered one, Han instead chooses to demonstrate that he is morally unfit to serve by holding wild, orgiastic revels night after night. The painting is a recording of these revels.

The operatic version of "Night Banquet," which just premiered in Paris, is Guo's first collaboration with Chen Shizheng, the director whose production of the Kunju opera "Peony Pavilion" was banned by the government in 1999 but subsequently staged to great acclaim in New York, Paris and other cities.

While Guo finds inspiration from Chinese culture, he is determined not to be bound by it. "I use many materials, but they are just materials. I am not interested in Confucius or Lao Tzu or any of that," he said. "I'm not inspired by the old art forms from China; they are like shackles."

Guo is now completing a harp concerto and starting work on his third opera, which will be based on the life of the 14th Dalai Lama. "I have a lot of ideas for my third opera," he said. "When you write an opera, you're like a director: You decide how long someone talks, how long he stops. It's very interesting to write operas."

Sheila Melvin, a free-lance writer, divides her time between China and the United States.

Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune