Between East and West: an opera on China

Nicholas Michael Smith
Thursday, October 24, 2024

Nicholas Michael Smith introduces his new opera The Stone God and discusses Chinese culture's perspective on the art form

When people ask me why I chose this particular story to create an opera, I always reply truthfully that it was intuitive. Chinese author Hong Ying has asked me to be the translator for the first book in the Sangsang series, which I later adapted as a symphonic illustration called The Girl From the French Fort. Having translated the first book, I couldn’t really say no when she asked me to translate the others. As I was working on New Moon Rise, the third book in the series, it struck me that the story would make a terrific opera as it contains so many of the classic opera situations: a case of mistaken identity, the need to right historical wrongs, a statue coming to life, a pure heart saving the day, and I got excited to try.   

By this time, The Girl From the French Fort was getting a few performances each year, and I decided to build the opera out of the same sound world. The result, while not specifically aimed at children, is certainly suitable for children or first-time opera goers, and I use the same tonal style and even a number of the same melodies and motifs from the earlier work. 

I hope to convey a genuine sense of the people I have been privileged to live among for more than 30 years, and through small and large details, the music convey something of what it feels like to live in China. I’ve taken a somewhat 'cinematic' approach, and I’ve also tried to create music that reflects, at least to a degree, the differences in the emotional life of the West and China.

The way of expressing emotion here is not the same as in Europe, and the unbridled 'let it all out big time' style of Italian opera would just feel wrong for this story. That isn’t to say there aren’t intense emotions though. The libretto blends elements of mystical, ancient China with the modern day one, and includes what are still very contemporary clashes between old and new China (traditional and western medicine, to give just one example).  I’m confident that I’ve created something enjoyable for seasoned opera goers and opera newbies. 

Paradoxically, given what I’ve said above, out of the western opera canon, Chinese audiences are actually most attracted to Italian opera, and of this repertoire it’s the Verdi and Puccini war horses that are usually performed. Interestingly, over the years, I’ve come to realise that audiences here enjoy these works not because of the emotional content of the arias, but because Verdi et al. have very clear, relatively easy to remember tunes, and because this Italian opera style so heavily informed early Chinese 'western style' music.   

Composer Nicholas Michael Smith | Credit: Yang Qianwei

Things haven’t changed that much since the 1930s when Whitey Smith and his Shanghai jazz band had to drop all the 'trick harmony' and complex rhythms to focus exclusively on melody in order to get Chinese punters into the nightclubs. Verdi and Puccini also have the advantage of being 'acrobatic', something Chinese audiences admire enormously, and an element that is much prized in home grown opera too (both those in traditional and western style). That isn’t to say China has no audience for Britten or Richard Strauss, but it is a very small one as a percentage of the concert going public, and certainly not large enough for a production to cover its costs.   

Over the years, I have been involved with opera in a small way – back in the late 1990s I was a member of an International Salon which put on the highlights from a chosen opera every few months. Those were always fun evenings, but even back then the preference of the singers to focus on big tunes and acrobatic arias and to junk any recitative was noticeable.   

In the early 2000s, when Beijing was more culturally flexible and there was a large pool of expat talent to draw on, I experimented with some Gilbert and Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance and Iolanthe. The Pirates of Penzance was simply baffling to the Chinese cast members and audience, although the male voice choir I found to act as the policemen stole the show every performance in their British policemen’s helmets. Iolanthe was much easier for local audiences (men vs women), and I even conducted a production at Shanghai’s Lyceum Theatre with Margot Fonteyn’s portrait gazing down knowingly at us. Italian opera is still around, and Wagner has recently been making some inroads at least in Beijing and Shanghai, however, the trend of the last few years has been to encourage home-grown works that blend western and local musical styles and tell specifically Chinese stories. 

The Stone God is at the Bloomsbury Theatre from 1-3 November. Tickets available here

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