On a steamy afternoon in late July, 20 young singers recruited from the United States and Italy clustered together on the cavernous shop floor of an electric boiler factory on the western outskirts of Beijing. They were joined by several dozen of the factory’s workers, clad in blue hard hats and dusty overalls and clutching camera phones. Orange cranes with yellow grappling hooks swung overhead and the searing sound of shearing metal rent the air—but nobody seemed to notice.
Instead, they all gazed, transfixed, as renowned basso cantante Hao Jiang Tian played the accordion and belted out Chinese revolutionary classics like “The Soldiers of Chairman Mao Always Follow the Party.” When Tian had finished, a worker named Liu Xiurong stepped forward to sing an aria from the revolutionary Peking opera Shajiabang, and then soprano Juliet Petrus sang “I Love You, China” in Chinese. The shop floor sing-along concluded with singers and workers, Western and Chinese, joining together for a bilingual, accordion-accompanied rendition of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—and then everyone retired to a deluxe banquet hosted by the factory director.
While this participatory concert at a Chinese factory may sound unusual, it was just one of many remarkable events organized for members of the premier class of I Sing Beijing, a bold new initiative that aims to promote Mandarin Chinese as a lyric opera language. Recruitment for the second I Sing Beijing class—to be held from July 26-August 31, 2012—is already underway, with applications due December 15 and auditions scheduled for January 8-20 in New York, San Francisco, Rome, and Vienna.
I Sing Beijing is funded by the Chinese Language Council International, an agency of the Chinese government better known as Hanban, and the Asian Performing Arts Council. But credit for the idea—and much of its execution—goes first and foremost to Hao Jiang Tian, I Sing Beijing’s artistic director and master teacher.
“I have been thinking about this program for years,” said Tian, who worked for seven years in the above-mentioned boiler factory before he emigrated to the United States, learned English, studied opera, and ultimately made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera as well as countless other opera houses around the world.
“Twenty-eight years ago I went to the U.S. and received so much help,” he told I Sing Beijing participants at the program’s opening ceremony. “Scholarships help so many people. Of course I want to help you to come here and get scholarships and study Chinese and sing in the best opera house in China.”
If reciprocity was one inspiration for creating the program, the changing realities of the global opera world were another.
“In recent years, I was involved in so many contemporary Chinese operas,” Tian explained. “Twenty Chinese contemporary operas have been premiered or performed in the West over the past 20 years. . . . I think it is about time to introduce Chinese as a new lyric language for opera.”
Opera is indeed booming in China, as cities around the nation invest in state-of-the-art, multifunctional “grand theaters” that generally contain opera houses. The trend—which includes cutting-edge designs, often created by the world’s most sought-after architects—has moved from such major cities as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou to second- and even third-tier cities. By some estimates there are 50 new theaters with opera houses in China, all of them scrambling to fill their stages. This has encouraged the increasingly innovative staging of a growing number of works from the traditional Western repertoire and the creation of new operas by Chinese composers.
Of course, many of the new operas by composers from China have been written for English librettos—Tan Dun’s First Emperor was sung in English as was Zhou Long’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Madame White Snake. Tian himself sang in several such English-language “Chinese” operas and thought little of it until he performed in a production of Tan Dun’s Tea in Lyon, France, and read a French review that followed it.
“The reviewer asked why the opera was not sung in Mandarin,” Tian explained. “‘Why sing a Chinese story in English?’ So that all made me think.”
A final impetus behind the program was Tian’s sense that many of his colleagues from around the world had a minimal understanding of China and the vast changes that have happened there in recent years. He recalls chatting with an international cast who “knew nothing about Chinese culture or music or history . . . China is really different from the past—it is really open to the world.”
This openness is underscored by the Hanban’s receptivity to Tian’s proposal for I Sing Beijing, which went from idea to reality in just one year. With this unequivocal support from Hanban director Xu Lin and Asian Performing Arts Council president Martha Liao, Tian was able to recruit a stellar international faculty on comparatively short notice, among them Katherine Chu, former assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and current musical assistant to Seiji Ozawa; British conductor Gareth Morrell; Peter McClintock, a stage director at the Metropolitan Opera; Fugen Wei, a voice instructor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music; and many coaches, language instructors, and guest lecturers.
I Sing Beijing was designed as a four-week intensive study of Chinese language and modern operatic repertoire, peppered with cultural background, and culminating in a gala performance. Judging from interviews with participants and faculty and reviews of the final concert in Chinese media, it was a resounding success.
“It was a great experience,” said Maria Antunez, a soprano from Charleston, South Carolina. “For me, it was life-changing—it was beautiful.”
Baritone Brian Wahlstrom from San Diego and tenor Thomas Glenn from San Francisco both echoed Antunez’s enthusiasm. All three said they would recommend the program to others, although Wahlstrom had a caveat: “I would recommend it—but I don’t want anyone to take my space! I hope I can do it again!”
Wahlstrom was impressed by the “huge energy for music” that he saw in China, noting the surge in new opera houses. “That’s all drying up here [in the U.S.], so we are thinking, ‘This is a place we could work.’” Antunez likewise saw in China “a really good market for Western opera and singers” as did Glenn, though he noted that the abundance of talented Chinese singers (six of whom joined in the program, studying English language and Western operatic repertoire) makes it somewhat “presumptuous” for Western singers to assume they can find jobs singing in China.
The Chinese repertoire chosen for I Sing Beijing ranged from an opera composed at the Communist base camp of Yanan during World War II (Ma Ke’s The White-Haired Girl) to a so-called “revolutionary model opera” performed so extensively during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) that almost any Chinese over the age of 50 can still sing along to it, to Guo Wenjing’s widely praised 2007 opera Poet Li Bai.
“I’m not an expert on the [Chinese] repertoire,” said Antunez, “But I heard very interesting music and very dramatic, intense operas.”
Glenn, who sang a widely known aria from the revolutionary model opera, “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy,” found the piece to be “strange and a challenge” and noted that it gave him an appreciation for traditional Peking opera.
“Traditional Chinese opera is a very cultivated art—those who participate in it start very early. . . . They are proficient at more elements of their stage art than we are.”
Surprisingly, none of the singers found the Chinese language itself to be a major obstacle. “Actually it was easier than other languages,” said Wahlstrom. “The vowels are straightforward, like Italian, [and] unlike French, where there are six ways to sing an ‘e.’”
I Sing Beijing participants studied Mandarin Chinese, the official language of China that is also known as Putonghua. It is written in characters, rather than an alphabet, and has four distinct tones with the meaning of a word dependent on the tone. Foreigners generally learn Chinese through the Pinyin Romanization system, which is also studied by Chinese children as they are learning to read and is a common method for entering Chinese characters into computers and cell phones. Mandarin is generally considered a difficult language and it can take years to acquire fluency, but the singers said that learning to sing it is easier than learning to speak it because the tones dissolve in the music.
“I thought it was a wonderful language for singing, to my surprise,” said Antunez. “It was easy to sing. There were a couple of new sounds, but overall it was very comfortable.”
Glenn concurred and, by way of comparison, considered the difference between studying a romance language and Chinese: “We always do things in arcs in romance languages,” he explained. “In Chinese—because of the tones—it’s like kung fu for your mouth. But in singing, all those are slowed down.”
Liao, of the Asian Performing Arts Council, attributed the relative speed with which singers learned their Chinese repertoire to very hard work, on the part of both singers and coaches.
“At the beginning we were really worried,” she admitted, “[because of t]he language. And people were getting sick
. . . but everybody worked so hard . . . they worked together for I Sing Beijing. There was no other agenda.”
The measure of the singers’ success came in the highly public forum of an August 18 concert before a packed house at Beijing’s premiere venue, the stunning, titanium-domed National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA), which is entered through a glass-ceilinged underwater tunnel.
“The performers really brought the house down,” said Liao. “I’ve never seen a Chinese audience this crazy. . . . They sang beautifully and with passion. . . . When they sang songs like ‘I love you, China’ they really meant it.”
Glenn, who sang the aria from the Cultural Revolution-era opera, was overwhelmed by the reception he got. “It was insane! I have never performed a concert like this before,” he gushed. “Chinese audiences are impressed by virtuosity and bravura—every note I sang above the staff, they stood up and cheered. I couldn’t hear the orchestra! I’ve never had an audience erupt the way they did.”
Glenn says that he is continuing to study Chinese on his own back here in the United States. Antunez’s newly acquired ability to sing in Chinese already got her a gig, making her the “perfect candidate” to sing an excerpt from The White-Haired Girl at a Kennedy Center concert of music from China held in September.
“I had to learn a new piece and I prepared it myself. With all I learned from that month, I was able to learn the piece!”
The opportunity to spend a month in China immersed in its language, music, and culture is clearly appealing to many singers on an individual level, but the ultimate goal of I Sing Beijing is to promote the use of Chinese on opera stages worldwide. Asked how they perceive the prospects for Chinese as a lyric opera language—and the odds that an opera will be sung in Chinese in a major U.S. opera house—the three participants interviewed were again in general agreement.
“I’m a true believer that Mandarin is a lyrical language,” said Wahlstrom. “It’s just a matter of content for it to be taken seriously. I think it could definitely happen—faster than we think.”
And when it does happen, it may again be Hao Jiang Tian leading the way.
“Within two years we will see operas sung in Chinese in this country,” promised Tian. “There is great, great potential for Chinese operas. My next dream is to have a new contemporary opera from China sung completely by Western singers.”
