2009: a French odyssey

SP Somtow

Special to the Nation

 Opera may well be the "queen of the arts" in its fusion of music, text, design and staging, but it is also the weirdest of all the fruits of Western culture. Indeed, we may think of it as the durian of western performing arts … tough to crack, emitting a bizarre odour, yet containing within it all that is considered finest, most profound and most exalted in the human condition.

 The reader unfamiliar with opera may therefore wonder why French opera would be any weirder than Italian or German opera, but from a technical viewpoint, it is. French opera has been different since opera's 17th-century beginnings, when composers like Lully and Rameau, in the lavish court spectacles of Versailles, infused the newly invented art form from Italy with a particularly French, dance-driven coloration. Outsiders may feel that ballets are arbitrarily inserted into operas to give the singers a break, but the second-act ballet that is compulsory in a formal French opera is always a structural turning point and essential to the opera's inner logic.

 French is a tough language to sing for two reasons: one is that the rules for singing operatically in French are quite different from how you learned to pronounce it in school, rolling your r's and enunciating all your silent e's. The second reason is that, while school kids are often taught to stress the final syllable of French words, this is a wild oversimplification of how the music of the French language operates. From a conductor's viewpoint, it means that the rhythms of sung operatic French are not easily grasped. The words float. The musical language is always shifting, evanescent.

 It therefore took the Bangkok Opera nine years to decide to finally do a French opera. And the choice of "Thaïs" might be considered eccentric by most. After all, this opera, though it contains one of the most famous "pop excerpts" in the world (the Meditation), is almost never performed in its entirety. From the beginning, we've been asked "Why not 'Faust' or 'Carmen'?", but the choice of "Thaïs" really speaks directly to what kind of opera company this is. 

 Dropping my lucrative career in LA to come back to Thailand to start an opera company was a huge risk. Setting "Aïda" in the Siamese-Burmese Wars of the Ayutthaya period was a risk. Tackling the Ring cycle from an Asian viewpoint was a risk. Our problems, in miniature, are the problems that the biggest opera companies in the world have: operating on a deficit, juggling artists with delicate sensibilities, but here in Bangkok it often seems that we take the tightrope to new heights. Therefore doing "Thaïs" was a natural for us. First, everyone knows "the tune", yet our production Thaïs seems according to our research to have been the Asian premiere of "famous but obscure" opera. By choosing this opera, therefore, we automatically made history … first French opera produced by a Thai company, first Massenet opera in Southeast Asia, first production of "Thaïs" in all of Asia.

 The only commercially available DVD of "Thaïs", from La Fenice in Venice, omits the ballet, and therefore Bangkok Opera's forthcoming video of this opera will in fact be the only uncut version available in the world — more history.

 By choosing this opera, we were able to attract an amazing creative team. Designer Saroj and lighting designer Supatra are already two of Thailand's most imaginative artists, and we joined their flair with fiendishly talented director and choreographer Darren Royston, who teaches at RADA in London. And it took little persuasion to get Nancy Yuen to learn the role of Thaïs, which fits her voice like a glove. It is after all the role of a lifetime, and one which few sopranos ever get offered.

 Meanwhile, the chorus had been preparing for about three months. The Bangkok Opera Chorus, also known as the Orpheus Choir of Bangkok, has had its ups and downs, but they were galvanised by the arrival of Royston, a charismatic director who knew how to find each chorus member's individuality and play to his strengths, an important skill when you are mixing world-class soloists with a chorus whose members are doing their job for sheer love of opera. The result was the most complex texture of movement the Bangkok Opera's ever been able to produce.

 Because the opera stars always arrive at the end of the process, with only a few weeks to go, insanity always rules. But this year, with the impending closure of the Thailand Cultural Centre for 10 months, things have been quite cramped; our originally five-day booking was arbitrarily reduced to two, meaning that there was no actual dress rehearsal. On the opening night, curtains descended in mid-aria, a trap door failed to deliver a dream sequence, and other horrific things happened, yet the spirit of the opera survived so well that one reviewer called Nancy Yuen "one of the few sopranos in the world who have been able to pull off the role with aplomb".

 The second night was almost perfect. One wishes the reviewers had come then instead, but that's how it always goes. 

 Cracking the nut that is French opera has opened the door for much spectacle in the future, because what we call "grand opera" is in fact a French sub-genre of opera, and is perhaps the most spectacular form of all. What shall we have next? Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots", in which virtually the entire cast is massacred in the last act?  Berlioz's "Les Troyens", which packs the entire aftermath of the Trojan War into a five-hour extravaganza? Many monumental works may yet have their Asian premiere right here in Bangkok, the world's newest operatic hub.