Supported by the Macau Cultural Bureau, a group of local artistic and cultural professionals have created Macau’s first local chamber opera, A Dream of Fragrancy, to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of the great Chinese play write Tang Xianzu. The performance will premiere on October 14 as one of the highlights of 30th Macao International Music Festival. So far all the tickets are sold out, including the extra two performances.
The original chamber opera is loosely based on the experiences of literature giant Tang Xianzu when he travelled to Macau in 1591. Tang wrote four poems about Macau during that trip, including one piece describing a beautiful Portuguese girl. Seven years later, when he started to write The Peony Pavilion, he mentioned Macau again in some scenes.
The main ideas of the script of the opera were discussed extensively, then passed to local play write Lawrence Lei to begin working on the final version.
The story starts with Tang’s dream about a quick-witted Portuguese lady, Maria, who he encounters and develops a heart-warming relationship with as they tour around Macau seven years before he finishes writing The Peony Pavilion.
“He was 41, and it was his first time to meet a Portuguese girl with a brave and strong attitude towards pursuing love, which was completely different from Chinese girls restricted by traditional ethical codes. Those feudal ethics and rites, those (Confucian) books at that time, always taught people to hide personal feelings deep inside, so to Tang it was quite a spiritual attack,” explains Lei.
“In our story, we rationally assume that Tang not only met a Portuguese girl, but also experienced some culture shocks. The western views of love might have led him to come up with the idea that Du Liniang (the heroine of The Peony Pavilion) could pledge her own marriage without parental permission and pursue her own love, which is very rare in traditional Chinese operas,” adds Un Sio San, the librettist of the chamber opera.
For Tang’s time, The Peony Pavilion was a daring and subversive work. Not only did the whole work challenge some standards that traditional operas of the period usually followed, but the whole story, with Du Liniang pursuing love with all her life, is completely against Neo-Confucian ideals that argued for suppressing people’s natural desires and creativity.
“Our opera has ideas that echo with Tang’s”, continues Lawrence. “The main theme of his works was love, and all relevant to dreams, especially The Peony Pavilion. The story of our opera is about how Tang becomes inspired to create parts of his masterpiece through his experiences in Macau. We combined four basic elements – dreams, The Peony Pavilion, Macau, and love – to create this story, including fictitious and true content.”
The creative team of A Dream of Fragrancy also includes composer Liu Chenchen, director Tam Chi Chun, script consultant Tong Mui Siu, as well as a group of singing virtuosos. All are from Macau.
Though experienced in their own professions, to create a chamber opera using western art form to tell an oriental story was not an easy task. How to tell a story that spans seven years in just 60 minutes? How to put the story to lyrics that can be sung and performed? How to compose a western chamber opera to tell a Chinese love story and express rich emotions in a relatively simple story? These were just a few of the challenges facing the team who had never written a chamber opera before.
“Creating the opera has not only helped us to promote chamber opera as an art form, but has also provided opportunities for many people to participate and to do new things. Overcoming the many trials not only benefited us, but also the choir, the costume and set designers and even project manager,” comments Un Sio San, who joined the project last June. “It is an interesting creation and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what it will be like when we perform it to a real audience.”
