Creating A Honglou Meng for Twenty-First-Century San Francisco

Creating A Honglou Meng for Twenty-First-Century San

Francisco: Musical Confluence in Bright Sheng’s Opera, Dream of the Red Chamber (2016–2022)

Jingyi Zhang CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Volume 42, Number 2, December 2023, pp. 165-191 (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/910841

CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 42.2 (December 2023): 165–191

CREATING A HONGLOU MENG FOR TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SAN FRANCISCO: MUSICAL CONFLUENCE IN BRIGHT SHENG’S OPERA, DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER (2016–2022) JINGYI ZHANG Harvard University Bright Sheng’s opera Dream of the Red Chamber, based on the eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng, premiered at the San Francisco Opera (SF Opera) in September 2016 and, by the end of 2017, had been performed in Hong Kong, Beijing, Changsha, and Wuhan. Ticket sales and reviews were so strong that in 2022, the production was revived—a first for a piece commissioned by the SF Opera. This phenomenal success occurred despite the difficulty of condensing a 120-chapter novel that most Americans have probably never heard of into a three-hour Western opera. In San Francisco, the production had to be both accessible to newcomers to the novel and not offend die-hard fans of this famous Chinese work. After introducing the opera, I discuss how Sheng created cross-cultural music by putting Western and Chinese elements in confluence with each other, evident in his use of both Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin and Chinese folk and literati music. Regarding the latter, Sheng and his creative team further rethought the role of the musical instrument most closely associated with the literati, the qin-zither, in the story. I hope to give readers critical insight into some representative challenges and opportunities faced by the production, and provide a better basis for evaluating its accomplishments.

KEYWORDS: Dream of the Red Chamber; Honglou meng; Bright Sheng; cross-cultural music; transnational opera; genre translation; operatic migration Dream of the Red Chamber (hereafter, Dream),1 music by Chinese American composer Bright Sheng (Sheng Zongliang 盛宗亮) and libretto (in English) by Sheng and 1 I would like to express my gratitude to Professors Kate van Orden and Carolyn Abbate of Harvard University, who have seen the idea for this paper move through various stages and who helped shape it into what it is today. Heartfelt thanks are also due to Professors Margaret B. Wan and Jing Shen, past and present editors of CHINOPERL, who shepherded this paper from beginning to end, as well as the peer reviewers, especially Professor W. Anthony Sheppard of Williams College, who graciously revealed his identity, and Professor David Rolston of the University of Michigan for his immense dedication in editing and refining this paper. I am also grateful toward Professor Kathryn Lowry for offering me incisive feedback on this paper at a later stage. And thanks to Anne Rebull and Donovan Kūhiō Colleps for their diligent copyediting efforts.

Earlier versions of this project were presented at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Boston, the 22nd CHIME Meeting in Beijing, the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Bloomington, the Harvard University Music Department’s

© The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2023

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David Henry Hwang, was commissioned by and premiered at the San Francisco Opera (SF Opera) in September 2016.2 Coproduced with the Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF), the opera was presented by Sheng as “a cultural olive branch to make a gesture to China.”3 The production is the product of an internationally renowned creative team and includes both ornate costumes and elaborate but mobile scenery designed to reproduce on stage the opulence of the settings in the original novel, which gives itself five different titles in its first chapter but has been most widely known in China since its initial publication in 1791–1792 as Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the red chamber).4 After its premiere, the opera toured Hong Kong as part of the 45th HKAF (March 2017), followed by performances in Beijing, Changsha, and Wuhan (September 2017). Six years later, in June 2022, it was reprised by SF Opera, the first time the company had reprised one of its own commissions.5 Honglou meng is widely recognized as the most important Chinese novel. The first eighty chapters, those that circulated in various handwritten copies prior to the first edition, were written by Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 (1715?–1763?), with the help and commentary of a small circle of relatives and friends. We know that Cao completed around thirty chapters after chapter 80, but they did not survive intact. There is debate over whether any or how much of the extant chapters 81–120 were written

by Cao, since there are many instances in which the events contradict hints in the first eighty chapters about how the novel would develop and end. There is also the separate problem that the different versions of the eighty-chapter manuscript are Friday Lunch Talk (2019), and the Harvard University Asia Center (2022). Special thanks to Bright Sheng, who generously shared archival videos, music scores, and his thoughts about his opera.

I was unable to attend a live performance of the opera but did have access to a video of the Wuhan simulcast (2017), and the video of the SF Opera revival (2022), which was temporarily available from its website.

2 This opera has been the topic of two recent doctoral theses, one of which uses the opera as one of the main subjects and one of which focuses entirely on the opera; see Riopelle, “Contemporary American-Chinese Operas,” and Huang, “Musical Styles and Cultural Connotation,” respectively.

3 Clover, “Chinese Opera.”

4 The novel circulated only in manuscript form for decades under the title Shitou ji 石頭記 (The story of the stone; also conceivably translated as The story on the stone), which was the title used by the most acclaimed full English translation by David Hawkes and John Minford in five volumes (Penguin, 1973–1986). My comments about “the novel,” unless otherwise specified, will be about the 120-chapter version since this version was the most widely read in the period between the first publication at the end of the eighteenth century and the rediscovery of the early manuscripts in the twentieth century. There was a period in the late 1980s, when the thirty-six-episode 1987 TV miniseries was filmed, when the content of the last forty chapters was basically rejected and what was thought to have been Cao’s original plan for the ending was stressed; more recently, a more tolerant approach to the last forty chapters (as seen in the fifty-episode 2010 TV miniseries) has dominated.

5 Bright Sheng, in an email communication (November 1, 2022), told me that the strict rules on attendance because of the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the 2022 reprise from selling out. A Chinese article announcing that the third performance would be livestreamed and available for forty-eight hours said that although none of the music was cut for the revival, the running time was shortened by about ten minutes. See The Paper, “Geju Honglou meng.” This piece and others concerning the two productions have been helpfully archived in the online textbook that Ann Waltner compiled for her massive open online course on the novel, Dream of the Red Chamber: Afterlives (2016), https://open.lib.umn.edu/redchamber/ (see the two appendices). It is generally agreed that the 2022 production was more successful, mostly due to stronger singing by the new cast members.

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both in a great state of flux and disunified in tone.6 Problems in the textual transmission notwithstanding, the novel is commonly referred to as a veritable encyclopedia of late imperial Chinese culture. Fans of the novel who favor one heroine over the other have been known to get into fierce arguments that almost come to blows,7 and the novel is the subject of a whole field of study known in Chinese as Hongxue 紅學 (the study of Honglou meng; referred to as “Redology” in English).8 Adapting such a prized novel for Western opera9 was a formidable task and required a talented creative team to pull it off. The composer and co-librettist Sheng is the holder of a distinguished professorship in composition named after Leonard Bernstein, one of his teachers, and his many honors include winning a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2001. Hwang is an extremely active playwright, perhaps best known for his M. Butterfly (1988 premiere). The director Stan Lai (Lai Shengchuan 赖聲川) and production designer Tim Yip (Ye Jintian 葉錦添) are equally accomplished.10 As stipulated in the contract, all eight of the lead actors and the qin 琴11 performer were Asians in both mountings of the opera (most of the leads have been Chinese, followed in number by Koreans).12 Dream of the Red Chamber is actually the second Western opera adaptation of a Chinese story commissioned in this century by the SF Opera. The first was The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2008), with music by Stewart Wallace and a libretto by Amy Tan, adapted from her novel of the same name.13 SF Opera 6 The first eighty chapters occasionally appear to recycle material from an earlier collection of cautionary short stories by Cao with the title Fengyue baojian 風月寶鑒 (Precious mirror for the romantic). For an excellent comparison of the collection with both those of the eighty chapters that did not draw on this material and the final forty chapters, see Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, pp. 152–256.

7 For an example of such a spat, see Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, p. 218 (on why the second female lead of the novel, Xue Baochai, was often seen as duplicitous and hypocritical by readers, see pp. 216–24).

8 For introductory material in English, see Schonebaum and Lu, Approaches to Teaching.

9 The novel (or at least parts of it) has been adapted for an astounding number of genres, but never before, it seems, for Western opera.

10 Sheng was born in China and has been living in the States since 1982. Tony Award-winner Hwang was born and lives in the United States. Stan Lai was born in the United States to Taiwanese parents and has lived primarily in Taiwan since 1966, but received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Academy Award-winner Tim Yip was born in Hong Kong but maintains a studio in Beijing. His work includes the artistic design of the fifty-episode 2010 television adaptation of Dream of the Red Chamber (that series did not succeed in winning more public favor than the thirty-six-episode 1987 TV adaptation of the novel).

11 The importance of this instrument in the production will be addressed below.

12 Ever since the furor over the choice to have the male lead in Miss Saigon played by a Caucasian actor in 1990, Hwang has been a leader in advocating for Asian actors in Asian roles.

His 2007 play, Yellow Face, which has a main character modeled on himself, deals both with the Miss Saigon casting problem and the inadvertent casting of a non-Asian for the Asian lead character of a play. A two-part adaptation of the play has been available on YouTube since 2013. In regard to the many changes to the cast for the 2022 revival, Stan Lai said, “The world doesn’t know that there’s so many talented Asian opera singers.” See Kwok, “All-Asian Cast.”

13 A one-hour documentary, Journey of the Bonesetter’s Daughter (2011), directed by David Petersen, covers this production. Recent Western operas sung in English that adapt Chinese works include A Night at the Chinese Opera, music and libretto by Judith Weir (1987 premiere, Everyman Theater, Cheltenham, England), which includes in its second act a citation of Weir’s earlier work, The Consolations of Scholarship, based on Zhao-shi gu’er 趙氏孤兒 (The orphan of Zhao); and The First Emperor, music by Tan Dun 譚盾 and libretto by Ha Jin (2006 premiere,

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reputedly spent over three million dollars on the lavish 2016 production of Dream,14 and it is the first of their productions to provide bilingual supertitles.15 A piece in the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Jay Xu, director of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, saying that Dream was an “epoch-making event” that provided “a window into the classical literature and culture of China, just as Shakespeare’s works would do for the English literature and culture.”16 The same piece also says that the commission of Dream sent out “ripples through the Chinese diaspora that are even bigger than those generated by his [the director of SF Opera, David Gockley] commissioning of Tan’s novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter.”17 What is the content of Dream?18 The “Prologue” (xu 序; 11 minutes) begins with an empty stage except for an old monk seated at a table downstage stage left on the stage apron. He stands up, saying,19 “Welcome to my dream!” and the curtain rises to reveal the stage proper, filled with beggars20 whose chorus echoes strongly. Their number quotes from the famous “annotation” (jiezhu 解注) to the “Won Done Song” (“Haoliao ge” 好了歌) by the minor character Zhen Shiyin 甄士隱 (whose name is a pun on zhenshi yin 真事隱: “true events concealed”).21 Soon after the chorus begins to sing, the Monk hurries back to his desk and furiously scribbles in a book with blank pages. After the chorus disappears, the Monk muses, “Maybe if I tell my story to the world, I will finally be free.”22 He mentions the stone (which one title referred to) and the crimson pearl flower and how the former watered the latter with heavenly dew for three thousand years.23 By the time he finishes speaking, Metropolitan Opera, New York City, United States), based on a Chinese movie, Qinsong 秦頌 (The emperor’s shadow; 1996). Both are discussed in Sheppard, “Blurring the Boundaries.”

14 Qin, “An American Opera Company.”

15 Bright Sheng hired a translator to render the English libretto into Chinese, but the resulting Chinese translation rarely translates the English directly and is both more poetic and quotes more often from the novel than the English version. Music critic Mark Swed (“Tame ‘Dream’”) complained about the lack of poetry in the English libretto, something he thought was not the case with Sheng’s previous opera, The Song of Majnun (1992), which had a libretto by Andrew Porter.

16 Zinko, “SF’s hottest ticket.”

17 Ibid.

18 This summary is based on a video of the simulcast of the Wuhan performance.

19 This monk is the only character in the play (besides the silent extras) who never sings.

20 At the end of Dream, this chorus reappears briefly (it gets the “last word”), but the audience is now primed to see the beggars as survivors of the destruction of the great house at the center of the opera.

21 Since the earliest commentary on the novel, there has been much interest in hints to future developments in the novel in the performance of poetry, either by mortals who unconsciously anticipate events (as in the case of Zhen’s “annotation” in chapter 1 or the cousins’ lantern riddles in chapter 22) or supernatural beings, such as Fairy Disenchantment. Both the mortal characters who listen to the performances and first-time readers do not initially understand what the predictions mean. In the way the novel presently ends (in the 120-chapter version), Baoyu is exposed twice to crucial information, and while he does not understand what he hears at first (in his famous dream in chapter 5), his second exposure turns out to be crucial to his “enlightenment.” By the second time, he knows enough to guess many of the riddles and memorizes the rest so that he will be able to understand them later in life as he learns more. There is absolutely no interest in this foreshadowing theme of the novel, Dream.

22 A claim from a 2015 draft has been cut; it argued that every author, presumably including himself, disguises his truth.

23 The novel is vague about how long this watering went on and describes the water only as “sweet dew” (ganlu 甘露).

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the lights rise upstage on Stone and Flower, dressed in skin-colored leotards to suggest nakedness and performed by the actors who will play the male and female leads later. Members of the chorus voice the desire of the two: Flower is worried about repaying the dew she was watered with and wants to repay the Stone with the tears of a lifetime, but both wish to be born on earth so that they can realize their love.24 The Monk tries to dissuade them, saying that “On earth, your intentions will come to nothing, like a dream from which you awaken, far emptier than when you began,” but they insist. He declares that they have an illness for which he happens to have a cure, a two-sided mirror made by the “Fairy of Desire.” The Monk promises that if for three days they only look at the side that shows “reality” and not the one that shows “illusion,” they will be “cured,” and leaves them to it.25 They are horrified by “reality” (images of death projected behind them) and attracted by “illusion” (the death images swirl and resolve into the image of a mansion). While the Stone and Flower watch, stagehands come out and help them change into the clothes they will wear in the next scene. The stage darkens, and then stage lights reveal two long strips of blue material simulating rippling water toward stage right, where the female lead Daiyu26 appears in a very small boat that travels across the stage as intermittent close-ups of her are projected on the screen behind her. The prologue ends with a blackout.

It takes about two and a half minutes to set the scene for Act 1, Scene 1, which depicts what the English supertitles call “The Grand Hall” of the Rongguo branch of the Jia family.27 Members of the chorus dressed as servants bring props onstage, arranging and dusting them as they sing about the powerful Jia clan, who, they say, together with some allied families, rivals the power of the emperor. They also sing 24 In one of the manuscripts of the novel, the stone independently gets the idea of going to earth after hearing a Buddhist monk and a Daoist priest discuss the delights of life there; in all other versions, including the printed ones, the idea comes directly from the monk and priest. Both versions are narrated directly. The story of the “debt of tears” is narrated indirectly, through a conversation between the monk and priest overheard in a dream by Zhen Shiyin. Throughout the prologue, the actors playing the Stone and the Flower either do not sing or the individuality of their voices is covered up by the chorus.

25 In the novel, this mirror appears only in the story of one of the minor characters, Jia Rui. There, the mirror is given the name Fengyue baojian, the same as the title of Cao’s earlier collection.

When it is given to Jia Rui by the Daoist priest, the latter tells him to only look at the back (fanmian 反面) of the mirror, not the front (zhengmian 正面). The former shows the woman he lusts after as a skeleton, while the latter shows her beckoning to him to enter the mirror and have sex with her.

Each time he turns the mirror in his hand, he enters the front, and he eventually dies from excessive ejaculation. The earliest commentators saw this mirror and how it works as a figure for the novel itself.

26 Please note that Dream idiosyncratically divides all bisyllabic personal names in two (e.g., Daiyu is rendered as Dai Yu), a practice I will not follow in this paper.

27 A lot of the action in Act 1 takes place in this very formal ceremonial hall, as opposed to the novel, in which informal quarters are more prominent. The main hall goes under two different names: Rongxi tang 榮禧堂 (chapters 3 [on her way to visit Lady Wang, Daiyu passes through and notes details] and 105 [first Lady Wang greets her impeached husband on his return, then later, Baoyu’s father hosts guests in this hall when he is forced to greet the imperial designates come to search the mansion]) and Rongqing tang 榮慶堂 (chapter 71 [guests come to congratulate the Matriarch there on her eightieth birthday]). The Chinese supertitles for Dream use the latter name, as does the famous 1962 Yueju 越劇 film version, which ends as Baoyu leaves the altar set up for the deceased Daiyu, sees the name of the hall, looks at his jade, decides to leave the family, and strides out into the morning light, all to a buildup of stirring music and choral singing.

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about Grand Prospect Garden, a huge image of which comes together on the scrim at the back of the stage.28 Daiyu comes on stage unescorted, and her cloak is taken from her. She sings to the audience about what her mother, daughter of the matriarch of the Rongguo Jias, told her about the family and about how sickly she is and how she will have to be very circumspect as a guest in the mansion, while the chorus continues to sing about the family. The Matriarch29 arrives and immediately sings about how Daiyu looks like her mother, her favorite child, and sings, “Now I have my daughter back.” The two of them sing a duet, and it appears that Daiyu will fare well in the Mansion, but the arrival of her aunt, Baoyu’s mother, Lady Wang, changes the tone. Lady Wang looks down scornfully at Daiyu as ominous bass tones sound from the orchestra, and she sings to the audience about how Daiyu’s mother scorned her and how Daiyu reminds her of her mother. A trio that begins as a duet in which Lady Wang continues to voice her resentment and Daiyu to voice her sense of insecurity is joined by the Matriarch with comforting words for Daiyu.

Lady Wang begins to warn Daiyu about her son, Baoyu, whom she notes is late again (Baoyu’s perennial lateness is a running theme in Dream). Daiyu brightens up and sings to herself that this must be the one who was famously born with a jade in his mouth. Besides criticizing his lateness, the only negative thing Lady Wang says about Baoyu at this point is that he is “wild, unruly/ Lacking in manners,” but later she complains that he “refuses to leave the world of women,” which she blames on the Matriarch for spoiling him. Baoyu eventually enters, but distracted by something he is holding, he crosses the stage and exits without noticing Daiyu’s greeting. Before long, he comes back on stage but has to be told to greet his cousin. When he finally does look at her, he is struck still and sings, “A drop of heaven has fallen to earth in all its beauty.”30 They both feel that they have met before and cannot take their eyes off each other to the annoyance of Lady Wang, who threatens to make him move into the men’s quarters, which Baoyu emphatically rejects.31

28 In the novel, Daiyu arrives at the Rongguo Mansion in chapter 3, after her mother has died.

The garden is not built until chapter 16, when it is constructed for the visit of the Baoyu’s older sister, Jia Yuanchun, not long after she has been promoted from chief secretary to empress to imperial concubine (she is referred to as Princess Jia in Dream).

29 She is referred to as Granny Jia in Dream, but I will refer to her as the Matriarch. There is a conflict between the gender prescriptions for women that require lifelong subordination to a male (her father before marriage, her husband while he is alive, her eldest son if she outlasts her husband) and the social prescriptions for all to defer to seniority regardless of gender. The Matriarch is the only surviving member of her generation of the Rongguo branch and earns deference from all other generations on that accord. This tension is a major feature of the novel, but not of Dream.

30 This does not seem to be based on anything Baoyu says about Daiyu in the novel, but it might be echoing one of the most famous lines in Yueju 越劇 versions of this scene: 天下掉下個 林妹妹 (tianxia diaoxia ge Lin meimei Heaven has let fall a Cousin Lin).

31 At this point in the novel, Baoyu and Daiyu are only about ten years old, but two chapters later (chapter 5), he has a wet dream and then sex with his main maid in the following chapter (chapter 6). In Dream, throughout the opera, Baoyu is eighteen and Daiyu is seventeen.

Baoyu is presented in the opera as very rebellious, along the lines of the onetime popular Chinese interpretation of him as a rebel. See Kaminski, “Toward a Maoist Dream of the Red Chamber.”

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Next, a court eunuch (referred to as an Imperial Envoy) arrives to read an imperial edict: Baoyu’s elder sister (his half-sister, Tanchun, is never mentioned in Dream) has been promoted to imperial concubine as Princess Jia, and the emperor has given her leave to visit her family.32 The costume of the eunuch is perhaps the most unusual in the whole opera in that flanges hold out the voluminous skirts of his green robe to either side so that their combined width is almost as long as he is tall.

Immediately after the eunuch is announced, the Monk enters downstage stage right and informs the audience that “For generations, the Jia clan has owed a huge amount of money : : : to the throne”33 and implies a connection between that and Yuanchun’s selection as an imperial concubine.34 The Matriarch notes that Yuanchun has become the emperor’s favorite; Lady Wang wonders if the emperor will forgive the family’s debt.

After a blackout, the lights come up for Scene 2, which begins with Daiyu alone in her quarters,35 playing the qin.36 Hearing her play, Baoyu enters and praises her skill.

There is a certain amount of banter between them at first (she chides him for entering before asking for permission and for always arriving late for family functions), but they end up on the “same page,”37 like “two stars in one constellation,” united in their love for music and poetry. The scene ends with a duet in which they pledge, “Let our hearts always remain pure,” and claim, “Together we sing/ That beauty can transform the world.” A negative comment from the eavesdropping Lady Wang follows: “I don’t like what I hear.”

When the lights come up for Scene 3, the image of the garden covers all of the scrim once more, but a horizontal gap between the fragments that compose it has appeared in the lower third.38 The Monk appears to tell the audience that some time has passed (tree leaves are falling as servants sweep them up), that Lady Wang 32 This is another example of how events separated by substantial amounts of time in the novel (here, Yuanchun’s promotion and the emperor’s decision to allow palace ladies to visit their families) occur almost simultaneously in Dream.

33 While it becomes progressively clear that the Jia clan is living beyond its means and selling assets to cover debts, those debts are not owed to the emperor. Dream is perhaps indirectly reflecting what we know about the decline of Cao Xueqin’s family.

34 The number of such appearances and comments by the Monk in the two acts has been substantially reduced between the earlier script and the Wuhan simulcast.

35 The poetic name chosen for her quarters in the garden, Xiaoxiang guan 瀟湘舘 alludes to a classical folktale explaining the origin of the spots on a mottled kind of bamboo when two consorts of the sage emperor Shun cry on them. On stage, the wall behind Daiyu is made to look like bamboo. In this scene, the complete image of the garden on the backstage scrim has been changed to a configuration in which the garden only appears on the lower half, reinforcing the idea that we are now in the garden.

36 This scene and this instrument will be discussed in more detail below.

37 In the novel, it is only very rarely and then for only short periods of time that they are “on the same page,” because they are both so worried about saying the wrong thing that they cannot express their interest in each other clearly and directly. The only real breakthrough comes when he unexpectedly sends her two of his old handkerchiefs, and instead of getting mad, she understands his intent (the handkerchiefs, on which she writes two poems as she cries from a mixture of joy and apprehension, will certainly remind the attentive reader both of the “debt of tears” and the way popular love stories feature the exchange of objective correlatives of the emotional ties between the lovers).

38 Shortly later, the gap turns into two large blue lake-like forms, and the front gate of the garden is clearly visible for the first time. Oddly enough, Baochai and her mother enter the stage through that gate.

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has invited the second female lead, Xue Baochai,39 and her mother to live in the Jia Mansion,40 and that this is part of Lady Wang’s plan. He says the Xues are “fabulously wealthy” and adds, “In those days, family fortunes could only be joined through the marriage of the male heir.” Baochai sees their entry into the Jia household as her family’s move from being “mere merchants”41 into “high society,” fulfilling her father’s “dream.” Baochai is told by Lady Wang that she “would be a good influence on” Baoyu and that her mother, Lady Wang’s sister, agrees.

Baochai herself has been thinking about marriage since she only recently sang, “a woman’s only chance for happiness is to marry well,” a sentiment immediately echoed by her mother, but it is not entirely clear how much Baochai has been informed about the plan to marry her to Baoyu.

The elder Lady Xue mentions that Baochai has a gold locket given to her by a monk who said she should marry a man with a matching jade, which prompts Lady Wang to send for Baoyu. Baoyu enters and, upon seeing Baochai’s face, sings about how her face is as “radiant as a full moon.” Baochai mentions his jade and asks Lady Wang to tell Baoyu to show it to her. When she reads the inscription, Lady Xue notes how it matches Baochai’s locket inscription, which Baoyu then pressures her to show him. Lady Wang is very pleased with the match and exits with Aunt Xue. Daiyu appears onstage and silently watches Baochai scold Baoyu for wanting to drink cold wine.42 Coming forward to talk to them, Daiyu praises Baochai’s beauty, while Baoyu praises Daiyu’s poetry. This observation prompts Baochai to note that poetry is part of the imperial examinations and to offer to Baoyu: “I could study with you, if you so desire.”43 Baoyu predictably expresses disgust at the idea of becoming an official. After an offstage family banquet, the next 39

Her age is given as nineteen.

At the beginning of the scene, the supertitles identify the location as “Pear Court Pavilion” (Chinese supertitles: Lixiang yuan 梨香院), the place the Xues live when they first join the Jias. In the novel, the Xues arrive long before the garden is constructed, and Baochai, Daiyu, and Baoyu move into the garden at the same time. In Dream, it is not clear that Baochai ever moves into the garden. In the novel, the primary reason the Xues leave home is because Baochai’s brother, Xue Pan, has committed a murder (Xue Pan is never mentioned in Dream). Baochai’s arrival, in chapter 4, is low-key: the focus is all on Xue Pan. In the time period covered by the chapter, Baochai and Baoyu must have met, but there is no description of any such meeting. It is not until the end of Baoyu’s dream in chapter 5, when Fairy Disenchantment introduces her sister Jianmei 兼美 (Two beauties combined in one), whose beauty reminds him of Baochai’s, that the reader has any inkling that meeting Baochai has had any effect on Baoyu. Their first real conversation does not happen until chapter 8, when he shows her his jade (at her request) and he gets to see her gold locket (at his request). Her maid notes that the text on the two items matches. An early comment when the novel still circulated in manuscript form claims that Baochai and Daiyu make up one entity (Dai Chai heyi 黛釵合一), and the two do manage to form a friendship in chapter 42, where the comment appears, when Baochai privately lectures Daiyu about quoting “disreputable” literature in public. This connection is the first time Daiyu overcomes her suspicion and jealousy of Baochai and Baochai overcomes her past reticence. In Dream, the relationship of the two girls is predominantly antagonistic.

41 Although in the novel the Xues’ main source of income turns out to be from the pawnshops they own, they were originally imperial purveyors; with Baochai’s father dead and her brother’s incompetence and disinterest, they are now purveyors in name only.

42 Another element borrowed from chapter 8 of the novel, where it is Baoyu’s nanny who scolds Baoyu.

43 In the novel, although Baochai constantly urges Baoyu to study and pass the exams to make his father proud, she never offers to help him study and also consistently critiques poetry writing as an idle pursuit.

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characters on stage are the Matriarch and Lady Wang. The Matriarch says Baochai “seems beautiful and kind” but then adds that it is not important that Baoyu “marry wealth,” turning her thoughts to Baoyu and Daiyu as she sings, “It is fate that brings together both friends and lovers.” The Chinese supertitles differ significantly with the idea that “the two of them” (tamenlia 他們倆) have been caused by Heaven to be “intimate and friendly” (qinmi you’ai 親密友愛) and “in accord both in speech and thought” (yanhe yishun 言和意順). I argue that the real source for the English line is something the Matriarch says much later in the novel (in chapter 29) to explain their frequent quarrels; David Hawkes calls this line a proverb, which he translates as “’Tis Fate brings foes and lo’es tegither.” The Chinese original, 不是冤家不聚頭 (bu shi yuanjia bu jutou), would be more literally translated as “if they were not karmic enemies, they would not have been brought together,” and is based on the idea that lovers torment each other because they wronged each other in previous lives. The Matriarch drives the point home with a final line about fate bringing them Daiyu.

Scene 4 treats Baoyu’s famous dream of chapter 5 of the novel, but it includes neither Fairy Disenchantment and her plan to enlighten Baoyu nor her presentation of her sister for him to sleep with. Instead of falling asleep midday amid Qin Keqing’s bedroom display of erotic mementos as in the novel, Baoyu enters his dream in his quarters in the garden. This dwelling famously confuses both his father and the old countrywoman and pseudo-relative Grannie Liu in the novel, but the details cannot be seen in the simulcast because the dream takes place at night with the lights set low. Many female figures, whose faces are visible but not yet identifiable, dance about, and the chorus sings about “earthly passions” to Baoyu’s delight. The scene moves toward a climax as two veiled figures, recognizable to the audience—but not to Baoyu—as Daiyu and Baochai, approach him. He sings, “Beautiful spirit, you seem very familiar,” but they are standing behind him as he faces away. The chorus (including Baochai and Daiyu) sings to Baoyu, “That is why I like you, you are the most lustful person in the world.” He demurs, but they sing that his lust is a “lust of the mind.” The volume of the music and the amplitude of the dancing swells (lots of leg kicking, leaps, and twirls), and in the simulcast, the stage begins to tilt up and down. Baoyu dances with Daiyu and Baochai, circles the stage, and ends downstage holding the two female leads in either hand as he is pulled back and forth between them. Chasing Daiyu around, he ends up back on his bed, where he writhes back and forth. He wakes and wonders in an “almost whispering” tone, “She arouses me. Who was she?”44 He asks if it was Baochai, whom he calls a 44

These lines use Sprechgesang (“spoken singing”), an expressionist vocal performance style that is between singing and speaking and is associated with composers of the Second Viennese School, such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. But Sheng resorts to Sprechgesang not as an extension of modernism but to express a certain realism, or hyperrealism, that consistently illuminates Baoyu’s authentic feelings toward Daiyu. Sprechgesang is a mode in Dream that never lies, so to speak, and the orchestra also drops out to heighten the drama and attention at these critical moments. Sprechgesang also occurs in the following three scenes: in Act 1, Scene 2, as Baoyu playfully banters with Daiyu after she teases him for always arriving late for family functions: “You have a tongue! I like that!”; in Act 2, Scene 3, after Lady Wang tells Baoyu that their family has lost their protection against the debt they owe, Baoyu says to himself, “I must find Daiyu!”; and in Act 2, Scene 5, after Baoyu discovers his bride to be Baochai and not Daiyu, there is a measure of “deadly silence” before he speaks in stuttering rhythm and irregular pauses, “What is this? Cousin Baochai? Where is Daiyu? This must be a dream.” The next time he speaks, it is in an

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“sensuous beauty,” or Daiyu, whom he calls “a rare flower who touches my heart.”

Still on his bed, he repeats that she aroused him, and the lights fade.

Act 1 ends with Yuanchun’s visit home in the Main Hall. A procession downstage from a different gate from the garden entrance begins with the eunuch moving to a place stage left, followed by senior women on stage right. Yuanchun’s escort, all women, precedes her through the upstage gate, and she rides in on a palanquin. Baoyu’s father’s absence is finally explained. Yuanchun describes the palace as a “golden prison,” but it soon becomes clear that she is worried about palace intrigue, the transience of her present favor, and the “burden of our survival” that she feels she must carry. She is happy to see Baoyu and pleased with the poem he writes for her (the only one with help from Daiyu alone). The poem displays Baoyu’s confidence that he and his family are safe and does not seem to be based on any poem that he writes in the novel.

Presents from the emperor arrive, and while some are surprised that Baoyu and Baochai are given exactly the same present, Lady Wang and Aunt Xue take this to mean that the emperor supports their marriage.45 This climax of Act 1 portrays all seven members of the family singing over each other while revealing their inner thoughts, which stretch from Lady Wang’s belief that the emperor is on her side to Daiyu’s concern that she will lose Baoyu.

Act 2 opens with Daiyu in a bamboo grove in the Garden, crying as she buries fallen flower petals.46 The bamboo props that partially obscure her pull back to either side while she stands alone under a spotlight in the middle of a dark stage.

Her aria is based on the famous ballad she recites in chapter 27, in which she likens her fate to that of the fallen blossoms,47 but ends rather differently with “who cares for the fallen petals?/ I wish to fly, to fly.” Baoyu, who has overheard her, comes forward, but before he can express himself, she assumes he is mocking her and implicitly accuses him of being more interested in his gold and jade bond with Baochai. She storms off but remains close enough to hear his aria about how they were meant to be together, and unseen and unheard by each other, they sing a duet that reprises their earlier duet from the qin-playing scene with the comment: “Like two stars in a constellation.” Baochai overhears their duet and comes forward to awkwardly tell Baoyu that he should ask Yuanchun to help him get an official “almost whispering” tone, “Where is Daiyu? I must find her! I must tell her,” before singing, “I did not desert her,” in a highly accented manner, while Lady Wang and others try to console him. In an “almost mad” expression, he then sings, “I must find Daiyu!” with “yu” delivered in Sprechgesang.

Baoyu’s final lines in the opera are spoken, “What of my flower? I never found her.” Sprechgesang is also used in situations that convey great urgency, as in Act 2, Scene 2, when Princess Jia knows that she has lost favor with the emperor and instructs a minor eunuch, “Quickly, take this to my family,” mirroring the rhythm and contour of natural speech. When Lady Wang sings aloud the opening of the letter, “My dear family, the end is here. When you read this I will be gone,” musical half steps are used to mimic speech with an accent on “gone,” conveying a note of finality.

Sprechgesang is also used in Dream when extremity renders singing ineffectual, as when Baoyu tragically proclaims, “Granny has stopped breathing!” and everyone gasps.

45 In the novel, the presents given out during Yuanchun’s visit are selected or at least approved by her and do not pair Baoyu and Baochai (this only happens the second time she sends presents, in chapter 28).

46 The act begins in the earlier script with the Monk proclaiming, “Welcome back to my tale!”

Instead of in a bamboo grove, Daiyu is directed to stand on “the shores of a lake” (probably the lake in which she later drowns herself).

47 The Chinese supertitles quote the ballad directly, but the English lyrics do not try hard to reproduce the literary effects that made the ballad so famous in Chinese.

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position so as to make his father feel closer to him.48 This, as to be expected, provokes an argument. Before leaving Baochai, Baoyu ends with lines that express some level of understanding of his stone and flower bond with Daiyu.49 Baochai’s reaction is to pour out her resentment at being disgraced and humiliated “once again,” but before the scene ends, she sings an anthem about how a woman’s only chance for happiness is to marry well. She claims, “When required, I am inspired to take action!”50 Scene 2 is set in two locations, Yuanchun’s quarters in the palace and the Matriarch’s chamber. Yuanchun reviews a letter to her family that she has written after realizing that she will be executed by orders of the emperor. It includes instructions about what the family must do to save themselves. She sings that she always wondered why the emperor chose and promoted her. After she sends off the letter, the eunuch from before appears and presents her with a dagger, and she is taken away as the stage goes black. When the lights come up again, we see the Matriarch on her death bed, attended by Lady Wang and Baoyu.51 The Matriarch supports the marriage between Daiyu and Baoyu, but Lady Wang says that both the emperor and Yuanchun support his match with Baochai. The Matriarch insists, Baoyu is ecstatic, and Lady Wang reluctantly agrees, but then Yuanchun’s letter is brought in. We hear the very opening of the letter and the beginning of its instructions, which break off before any detail is revealed. Lady Wang holds the letter, but it is read by a separate voice in recitative rather than singing.

The Matriarch breathes her last, funeral banners dramatically drop down from her tall bedposts, Tibetan horns blast, and Baoyu and the others quickly change into mourning clothes on stage. The banners are taken from the bed by maids. Suddenly, we see a closeup of the ghost of Yuanchun, wearing a black gauze veil over her head similar to the hunpa 魂帕 used by ghosts in Chinese opera. A chorus expresses the 48 Nothing like this occurs in the novel, but Baoyu does indeed stress that their views on becoming an official are diametrically opposed. Baochai’s views on the matter are carefully distinguished from those of Daiyu in the first eighty chapters.

49 The only time in the first eighty chapters that he shows any level of awareness of this bond occurs in chapter 36, when, after having been severely beaten by his father, he speaks out in a dream to reject the bond of gold and jade in favor of that of stone and flower. He is overheard by Baochai (who has temporarily replaced his main maid to watch over his sleep and work on an embroidery of mandarin ducks, symbolic of conjugal love). His words astound her, but there is no indication of what the bond of stone and flower means to her. Daiyu, who had been secretly watching this “domestic” scene through a window, is pulled away before she can hear Baoyu speak.

50 In the earlier script, Baochai does not express resentment but instead, when she hears Daiyu cough, goes to comfort her, offering to provide her “the best bird’s nest syrup.” While stressing that both of them have lost their fathers, she acknowledges that at least she has a mother, whom she offers to share with Daiyu. Daiyu admits that she had seen Baochai’s “kindness as only skin deep,” but appears to be won over. Baochai begins her anthem line about marrying well but checks herself in time to change the ending to “is to serve well.” In the duet that follows, the two young women mutually pledge to treat each other as sisters, but Baochai’s final words, sung solo, are “And when required, I am inspired to take action!” Most of this deleted content is based on their apparent rapprochement in chapter 42. Baochai’s presentation in the novel has always raised questions about her motives: is she so nice because that is just the way she is, or does she have ulterior plans? Since the novel gives far less access to her interiority than either Baoyu’s or Daiyu’s, readers have come to diametrically opposed opinions about her (on how fiction commentary, for a variety of reasons, focused on characters the commentators decided to present as hypocritical and duplicitous, see chapter 8 of Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction).

51 In the earlier script, there is another transitional intrusion by the Monk, who, among other things, explains that the Matriarch collapsed in the garden and the doctors offer no hope for her.

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family’s grief at the Matriarch’s death, then the two forward banner bearers lead a procession that includes the Matriarch on her deathbed (on wheels) that makes a counterclockwise circuit around the stage reminiscent of how actors depict long journeys in Chinese opera (pao yuanchang 跑圓場); the arc leaves the stage from upstage stage right.52 Yuanchun’s ghost has partially joined the procession but goes apparently unnoticed until she and Lady Wang fall out of the procession, as Lady Wang stares at her until the dim lighting on her falls to black. The Monk then appears but never speaks, and the lights dim on him as well.

The supertitles for the beginning of Scene 3 indicate the location is now “A hall in the estate.” Lady Wang summons Baoyu, and while she waits for his arrival, she sings that she is now the matriarch (a day she has both longed for and feared).

She tells him he must marry to “redirect all the bad energy”; Baoyu assumes it will be to Daiyu, but Lady Wang trumps the Matriarch’s final wish by finally revealing the “instructions” in Yuanchun’s letter, which say that his marriage to Baochai will “gain the emperor’s favor” and “carry out his wish.” Baoyu rejects it all and says he must go see Daiyu, but his mother tells him she has been moved to the other side of a lake and he is forbidden to see her.53 Oddly, he takes off his mourning robe.54 Before running off, he sings, “I shall ruin your plans,/ And foil your future.”

The supertitles for Scene 4 list the location as both “The far side of the lake” and the “Bamboo grove.” Daiyu comes on first, from upstage stage left, holding a candle that she uses to burn her handwritten poems (in the simulcast, roaring flames are projected on the screen). Baoyu enters from downstage stage right. There is no water or bamboo imagery. They each sing arias that express regret that they did not show their love more directly. They are both visible to the audience, but on the empty stage, they are separated by a dark strip representing distance between them, which prevents them from hearing each other. She sings her goodbyes to him, and he sings that the marriage to Baochai will be his death. Lady Wang comes to see Baoyu and falsely tells him that he will be married to Daiyu.

The next scene begins with the marriage. For the first time in this act, the image of the garden is fully visible on the backstage scrim. Baoyu realizes he has been duped 52 Notably, this is also consistent with Chinese ghost operas, where a recently deceased character exits the stage through the rumen on stage right, in a reversal of the norm for living actors.

53 There is no hint in the novel or in the comments about Cao’s preferred ending, either banishment or drowning in a lake. In the novel, she rejects Baoyu’s plan to throw the flower petals into the water in the Garden, which she says will eventually lead to them being polluted when they float outside the garden (scholars have also pointed out that all the water in the garden has its origin in the polluted world outside the garden), and persuades him that burying them is better. The novel takes great pains to have Daiyu think that Baoyu has abandoned her and to set up a situation in which Baoyu thinks he is being married to her when he is really being married to Baochai (in the novel, the very devious marriage of Baochai to Daiyu is dreamed up by Wang Xifeng, an extremely important character who is not even mentioned in Dream, and approved by the Matriarch, who turns against Daiyu on the suspicion that her illness is lovesickness). The marriage plot requires Daiyu to also be kept in the dark, but she accidentally finds out and decides to starve herself to death, which occurs at precisely the same moment that Baochai is married to Baoyu. The shock when he finds out the truth almost kills him.

54 In the following scene, Daiyu is not wearing mourning clothes but just the white robe with red trim she wore earlier. Baoyu also appears in this scene without mourning clothes, in the red robe he has been wearing from the beginning. Having neither of them wear mourning clothes does not seem to indicate any disrespect for the Matriarch, who has supported their marriage, but is probably for contrast. Baoyu’s red robe might be supposed to echo the red cassock that Baoyu famously wears in his last appearance in the novel, when he silently says goodbye to his father as a monk.

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when he removes the bride’s veil and finds Baochai. He tries to go look for Daiyu but is blocked by the entrance of imperial troops, led by the eunuch, who have come to confiscate the family’s property to pay off their debt to the emperor. Lady Wang is disabused of her faith that the marriage of the Xues and Jias will save the Jias with the realization that their new union actually facilitates seizing the wealth of both families and breaking their power. In the process of taking away the valuables, the imperial troops set fire to the mansion, which is “burned to ashes and dust.” The stage goes dark, and a spot lights up Aunt Xue, Lady Wang, and Baochai, who sing of their regrets over how their plan failed. Rags are thrown over their shoulders, and they exit.

The Monk appears once more, this time carrying a red cassock that matches his own, and repeats, “Welcome to my dream!” before the stage goes black.

The final scene also has two locations, this time they are “The Lake” and the “Monk’s room.” Baoyu enters downstage, still wearing his red robe. He expresses his regret for not heeding the Monk’s warning, whom he refers to in the second person. The Monk enters, puts the second cassock on Baoyu, and tells him, “So here we have remained./ Haunted by these dreams : : : , and the need to tell our story to the world.” He asks whether “you and I will finally be free.” The Monk begins to shave Baoyu’s head but is stopped by the latter, who asks, “What of my flower? I never found her.” The strips of blue fabric that simulated water at the beginning of the opera are pulled across the stage. Daiyu appears upstage, and while she sings lines from her ballad about the fallen blossoms, the blue fabric is gradually raised higher until it blocks her from view, simulating her drowning in the lake. The stage blackens, and when the lights shine again, we see the chorus of beggars who appeared in the Prologue.

From comments made in many venues, it is clear that Sheng saw the compression of such a long novel into three hours of Western opera as his biggest problem. He had less time than three hours would appear to give him, because his real goal seems to have been, as should be expected, to give the focal characters full range to express their emotions through song, something that characterizes both Western opera in general and the genres of Chinese opera that stress singing (changgong xi 唱工戯), like some types of Jingju 京劇 (“Peking opera”). In both, the arias that convey the most emotion are sung quite slowly, with a tremendous amount of musical ornamentation. Because of the convention of having singers repeat the same lyrics many times in the same aria in Western opera, which Sheng follows, the composer and librettists can cover even less narrative ground in the same amount of time in Chinese opera.55 55 I do not think any one-evening performance in Jingju ever tried to cover the whole story of Honglou meng, and it was never the subject of installment plays (liantai benxi 連臺本戲) that would be performed over successive evenings. The most successful Jingju Honglou meng play, Honglou er You 紅樓二尤 (The two You sisters), premiered by Xun Huisheng 荀慧生 (1900– 1968) in 1932, treats peripheral characters and their stories found in chapters that have been identified as part of Cao’s earlier Fengyue baojian project. There were attempts to cover more of the novel in a longer Chinese opera genre, chuanqi 傳奇, which flourished in the Ming and Qing dynasties and was most famously performed as Kunqu (Kun opera). Those plays have been hypothesized to last as long as twenty hours; although some chuanqi versions of the novel were influential as reading material when they were first written, they never became popular on the stage. See Shen, “Attempts to Adapt the Novel.” The Chinese opera genre that put the most effort into one-night performances of the novel was Yueju, famous in the twentieth century for having both female and male parts performed by female actors and whose main audience base was female (the 1962 film version mentioned above was a very famous rendition).

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The migration of Honglou meng across space, time, borders, and media from an eighteenth-century Chinese novel to a Western contemporary opera enables the story to gain a new life in twenty-first-century San Francisco, a cultural scene fundamentally different from the one in which it was born. Reading Sheng’s opera through the lens of cross-cultural borrowings and intermediality, I investigate how this Western adaptation connects Honglou meng to a culturally diverse audience otherwise beyond its reach while it simultaneously takes part in a very long history of collaborative creation that began over three hundred years ago.

Situating Dream of the Red Chamber within Sheng’s musical influences, Chinese literary practice, cultural history, and San Francisco’s Chinese migration history, I posit that the composer is inviting a heterogeneous set of audiences today to relate to the monumental classic in a fresh way.

The idea of creating a Western opera based on Honglou meng began with a conversation in 2001 between two friends in Minnesota, Pearl Lam Bergad, the executive director of the Chinese Heritage Foundation, and Linda Hoeschler, who had extensive experience commissioning new works.56 Financial support was raised to launch the project.57 The idea was then brought to David Gockley and Matthew Shilvock, past and present general directors of SF Opera, who were excited by the opportunity to tell new stories that would be “recognizable to an operatically underserved demographic” in the Bay Area.58 San Francisco was an obvious site for this production due to its well-resourced opera company and its high number of Chinese and Taiwanese American residents.

Gockley, who had previously commissioned The Bonesetter’s Daughter opera, approached Sheng, whom he knew from when he observed the premiere of Sheng’s opera about a famous Persian traditional love story, The Song of Majnun, as the director of the Houston Grand Opera in 1992. Sheng hesitated because of the size and difficulty of the project, but finally agreed and asked Hwang to help write the libretto. He had earlier collaborated with Hwang on The Silver River (1997), a music theater adaptation of a famous Chinese story of lovers separated by the Milky Way. On approach, Hwang had never read Honglou meng but knew enough about it to be wary; he declined at first but was eventually persuaded by Sheng.59 I do not have statistics for the ethnic makeup of the audiences for Dream in San Francisco, but a Bay Area Chinese American, Joy Wu, who attended both the 2016 premiere and the 2022 reprise of Dream, told me the audiences were “significantly more Asian” than usual and had many “very likely Chinese members.”60 Many distinguished Chinese American figures from the Bay Area attended, and the buzz in the Chinese American community was tremendously positive.61

56

Anthony, “‘Red Chamber’.”

People involved with contributing or soliciting funds included Bergad’s foundation, philanthropist Ming Li Tchou, novelist Amy Tan, Yahoo! cofounder and former CEO Jerry Yang, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco director Jay Xu, and San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Yuan Yuan Tan (Lawrence, “San Francisco Social Diary”).

58 Smith, “‘Red Chamber’.”

59 For more detail, see Sheng, Hwang, and Waltner, “Building the Dream.”

60 Private Twitter conversation with Joy Wu on December 10, 2022.

61 Lawrence, “San Francisco Social Diary.”

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CONFLUENCE OF CHINESE FOLK AND LITERATI MUSIC IN DREAM Recent treatments of Chinese content in Western opera such as Sheng’s Dream and Tan Dun’s The First Emperor (2006)62 blend Western and Chinese musical elements to achieve what Chou Wen-chung 周文中 (Zhou Wenzhong, 1923–2019), teacher of both men, described as a confluence of the two. Chou once wrote, Let us not speak of influence but confluence. Let the different traditions intermingle to bring forth a new mainstream that will integrate all musical concepts and practices into a vast expanse of musical currents. But let us also make sure that each individual culture will preserve its own uniqueness, its own poetry.63 Chou’s earnest plea is directed at his own bi-cultural students who had just acquired a second culture after moving from China to the United States at the time.

Chou hopes that his students can benefit from a confluence of many cultures, while at the same time, be rooted in a deep understanding of the history and tradition of each.

To date, scholarly attention to the connections between Sheng and Bartók has focused on their uses of folk music, a form of rural music characterized by its anonymous source, oral transmission, and close association with the nation.64 Sheng himself has written on this aspect of Bartók, prefacing his main remarks by saying in regard to Western music, “From the earliest known composed music, : : : nearly every important composer has been greatly influenced by the folk music of their time.”65 Sheng does not add that folk music and folk song have had an equally important influence on music (and poetry) in both premodern and modern China. Sheng’s real focus, however, is what is distinctive about Bartók: In his music we hear “unrefined,” “raw” peasant songs alongside the “high art” classical music, a coexistent quality obvious even in his most lyrical passages. We thus realize that folk music is as beautiful and exciting as “art” music. One does not borrow from the other.

In Sheng’s music, including his Western operas and works of musical theater, he incorporates many references and quotes from Chinese folk music (including folk music from non-Han sources that became popular in China, perhaps reflective of 62

Already mentioned in a footnote above.

Chou, “Asian and Western Music,” p. 66; also cited in Sheppard, “Blurring the Boundaries,” pp. 304–05.

64 Pegg, “Folk Music.”

65 See Sheng, “Bartók, the Chinese Composer.” This piece is available on Sheng’s personal website, where it is copyrighted to 1997. A Chinese version, with the less provocative title “Batuoke yu Zhongguo xiandai yinyue” 巴托克與現代中國音樂 (Bartók and modern Chinese music), appeared in 1998 (in Yinyue yishu 音樂藝術 [Musical arts] (1988) 4: 35–36) and has a note about where the English version was published. The Chinese text seems only to indicate that it was a yearly publication by the musical society of the East Asian section of the Smithsonian. The 2020 CV on Sheng’s website, however, identifies the publisher as the “Freerer [Freer] Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.”

63

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his long stay in Northwest China in the province of Qinghai). A cynical analyst might dismiss these usages as no more than an attempt to give a “Chinese” flavor to his music, but I show in the following that such a dismissal would overlook a nuanced artistic decision.

In this section, I will contrast one example each of the use of Chinese folk and literati music in Dream. In the opera, obvious Chinese musical references are used very sparsely but strategically, particularly in two scenes: the wedding of Baoyu and Baochai in the Grand Hall (Act 2, Scene 5), and Baoyu and Daiyu’s private meeting in her residence in the garden (Act 1, Scene 2). Both instances constitute very dramatic and important moments in the narrative, and the uses of Chinese musical material in them are both complicated and representative of the “confluence” of Chinese and Western musical elements. The first involves a folk tune, and the second is the elite musical instrument, the qin 琴.

As we will see, in neither instance is Sheng only concerned with giving a “Chinese” flavor to the music of Dream, and of course he completely avoids overused and stereotypical musical motifs, such as the pentatonic scale or “impressionist colors” used by French composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, who are interested only in exoticism and lack the solid grounding in many genres of Chinese music that Sheng possesses. Nor are the examples presented in this section simple quotations or allusions of pre-existing musical materials. As we shall see, Sheng is concerned with the original significance of the Chinese music in these two scenes, which changes with how he uses them in his opera.

The wedding scene opens with processional music that orchestrates the arrival first of members of the family, including Baoyu, then finally Baochai’s palanquin, borne in by servants. When Baochai steps out, her face is obscured by a traditional bridal veil that keeps Baoyu from realizing she is not the promised Daiyu. The processional music makes use of a folk tune, “Zizhu diao” 紫竹調 (Purple Bamboo Melody), traced by some as far back as the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BC). It is an instrumental piece in genres such as Jiangnan sizhu 江南絲竹 (Silk [stringed] and bamboo [flute] music of Jiangnan)66 and sung with lyrics in genres such as Huju 滬劇 (Shanghai opera) and pop songs, which tend to focus on love themes. Contemporary renditions of “Zizhu diao” are often significantly expanded from the basic melody, creating new versions of the same tune.67 Sheng draws on the Jiangsu minge 江苏名歌 (Jiangsu folk song) version but adds melodic ornamentations of his own. Sheng’s placement of this tune in the wedding is as far removed from its ordinary connotations as Baoyu’s expectations are from his bride.

The wedding scene begins in a grandiose manner as the Jia family assembles for the great event. The scene opens with percussion music commonly played during special occasions like weddings, funerals, and birthdays. However, an ominous feeling intrudes with the addition of non-percussion instruments, with jarring, dissonant 66 Defined as “a musical genre in which silk-stringed and bamboo wind instruments are of primary importance and which is played in the musical style of the Jiangnan area” (Witzleben, “‘Silk and Bamboo’,” p. 58). Similar in tone and feel are the purely instrumental versions performed on the guzheng (for examples online, see Lu, “Guzheng zizhu diao,” and Chen, “Guzheng zizhudiao Purple Bamboo Melody”).

67 Pop renditions famously include Feng Feifei’s 鳳飛飛 version, in which she sings of making a vertical flute (xiao 簫) from a bamboo stalk and giving it to a baby to play. See Feng, “Fengfeifei zizhu diao.”

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clashes of minor second intervals (also known as chromaticisms). Similar tensions color the ensuing rendition of “Zizhu diao,” giving it a modernist touch. These disconcerting elements during what should be a joyous event both reflect the recent death of the Matriarch and anticipate the pain we know Baoyu will feel when he realizes he has been duped.

While “Zizhu diao” occurs in a raucous (renao 熱鬧) setting, the second example begins with a solo played for an audience of one: the player. (Baoyu is later revealed to be eavesdropping.) The qin scene begins not with percussion instruments but with a chamber music instrument solo played by Daiyu one night in the Garden when she thinks she is all alone.68 The qin is a difficult and very quiet instrument with a long history and unrivaled cultural importance in elite history. Bell Yung asserts that this instrument is most closely associated with China’s literati class, referring to social elites who occupy positions of power in intellectual, political, and economic domains.69 The paradigmatic example of good playing and good listening presents the player as able to convey important facets of both his or her surroundings and personal feelings to the listener without the use of words or gestures beyond what the fingers do to the qin.

The legend of Yu Boya and Zhong Ziqi that teaches this mode of musical appreciation is the source of the idea that a true friend is a zhiyin 知音 (one who knows “the tone”),70 one who knows what you are thinking and feeling solely from the notes played on your qin; in later Chinese culture, the use of this term came to refer to intimate friends without a musical context. According to the popular tale, Yu Boya is traveling home by boat from his official post when he stops and plays his qin. Zhong Ziqi, on land, happens to overhear the music and shows Boya71 his appreciation of qin music. When Boya thinks about towering mountains and flowing water as he plays, Ziqi knows exactly what he is thinking. The newly found friends part, but not without a promise from Boya that he will return to visit Ziqi. By the time he fulfills that promise, Ziqi has died, and Boya has lost his zhiyin. Believing he would never find such a zhiyin again, Boya smashed his qin.

In Dream, although Baoyu has only just met Daiyu, they feel a common bond (presented as an echo or dim realization of their bond as Stone and Flower) that is only strengthened and filled out in the following qin scene. We do not know how much of her qin solo or her first aria Baoyu heard, but before the atmosphere 68 In the novel, of course, members of the family are constantly attended by servants, even the “poor orphaned sojourning relative” Daiyu, and the rare occasions when they are left truly alone are marked as unusual. As for Daiyu’s playing of the qin in Dream, it is only a few brief notes that she is allowed to play before flute accompaniment kicks in, and the actor playing Daiyu does not play any of the qin notes but only mimes the action. The notes are produced by a virtuoso player of the instrument off stage, and the player is credited in the program notes.

69 See Yung, “An Audience of One,” pp. 508–09.

70 A critic might point out how hierarchical the story is: the active person who plays the qin is Yu, an official, while Zhong is a poor local. Zhong’s own worries appear to be trivial, and he only knows how to listen (there is no explanation in any version of why he is such a good listener beyond the idea that he is a scholar) and not how to play the qin. In both Dream and the novel, only Daiyu plays the qin (in the scene under discussion, she stops playing after her first aria, and he takes her place behind the qin but only caresses it in a fairly erotic fashion without apparently playing a note).

Their status does not map onto the hierarchy in the Yu Boya story (Daiyu is a poor orphan, and Baoyu is the presumed heir of a great family).

71 It is not until the Ming Dynasty that the surnames of the two men are stressed, so I will not be referring to them by their surnames only.

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changes with Lady Wang’s entrance at the end of the scene, Baoyu likens the two of them to “two rivers bound for one ocean,” and she replies, “Like two stars in one constellation.”

In the novel, in the first and only time Baoyu and Daiyu discuss the qin (in chapter 86), which contributes many elements to the qin-playing scene in Dream, he is not intrigued by hearing Daiyu play but instead by the strange characters in the qin tablature she is reading. In the traditional notation of qin music, not only is the pitch of each note indicated but also how it is produced (an example of qin tablature is enclosed in fig. 1). In the novel, Baoyu is presented not as Daiyu’s zhiyin but as the “ox” in the proverbial saying duiniu tanqin 對牛彈琴 (playing the qin to an ox), a reference to failed and misguided attempts at communication.

The qin music that Daiyu performs in Dream is based on a well-known qin song (qin’ge 琴歌) called “Qiufeng ci” 秋風詞 (Autumn wind lyrics), in which a poem of the same name by the famous poet Li Bai 李白 (701–762) has been arranged for the qin. It is a very popular qin song centering on the yearning of a woman for her longdeparted lover. None of the original lyrics are sung by Daiyu, nor is the name of the song mentioned. In addition, the content of the poem can only fit Daiyu’s narrative situation if we posit that she has more memory or a clearer understanding of the stone and flower bond between her and Baoyu than the vague recollection that Sheng has had her express (which already goes beyond her access to her past incarnation in the novel). And even then, the qin music is not quoted directly.

As depicted in the musical example72 in fig. 1, this version of “Qiufeng ci” in Dream (also the most commonly played version today) belongs to the Mei’an Qinpai 梅庵琴派 (Mei’an Qin School), first published in the 1931 Mei’an Qinpu 梅庵琴谱 (Mei’an Qin Melodies).73 In fig. 2,74 I have included the Western transcription of the qin melody, and fig. 375 clearly illustrates Sheng’s direct quotation of the melody from m. 2 to m. 12, which corresponds to m. 1 to m. 13 of fig. 2. Sheng uses the same tonal center of G and preserves its melodic contour, though slight modifications are made, such as the constant oscillations between triple and duple meters and his use of additional ornamentations as seen in the acciaccaturas (i.e., thirtysecond notes played as rapidly as possible before the ensuing main note) and mordents (i.e., a note played with a single rapid alternation with the note above or below). M. 13 to m. 14 depart slightly from the original (m. 8 to m. 9 in fig. 2), though its melodic contour remains largely similar. M. 15 rejoins with Sheng’s added ornamentation, which corresponds to m. 12 to m. 13 of fig. 2.

Daiyu begins her performance with an improvisatory, extemporaneous feel before the familiar tune sets in.76 The interweaving of scenery and the female lead’s emotions is poignantly expressed in this scene. We see Daiyu alone in her 72

The musical example for this paper is available as supplemental material on CHINOPERL’s Project MUSE page: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/5/journal/771.

73 Earlier surviving versions of this melody include the 1709 rendition “Qiufeng qu” 秋风曲 (Autumn wind melody) in Yifengyuan Qinpu 一峰园琴谱 (Yifengyuan melodies), followed by the 1840 version (as “Qiufeng ci”) published in Huaiyin Shuwu Qinpu 槐荫书屋琴谱 (Huaiyin bookstore melodies), which uses a closely related tune but different tuning.

74 The musical example for this paper is available as supplemental material on CHINOPERL’s Project MUSE page: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/5/journal/771.

75 The musical example for this paper is available as supplemental material on CHINOPERL’s Project MUSE page: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/5/journal/771.

76 A good performance of this version of “Qiufeng ci” can be found in Gong, “Gongyi Guqin.”

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bamboo-adorned chamber, playing a sorrowful tune, with leaves and petals falling from the trees every now and then. Moments of Daiyu staring far ahead in the distance as she plays the qin evoke a lovesick woman deep in her own thoughts, and here in particular, love is voiced through the tune. The stirring literalization that the autumn scenery reveals of the protagonist’s (i.e., Daiyu’s) longing for her lover demonstrates the epitome of yijing 意境, in which “the natural landscape [stands in as] a reflection of the poetical mind of the universe.”77 This qin performance chiefly suggests the important role of poetry and music in the social and intellectual lives of these characters and emphasizes Daiyu’s growing love for Baoyu.

Halfway through “Qiufeng ci,” as fragments of the qin song are taken up by the clarinet playing tranquilly in the background, Chinese instrumental music is intimately interwoven with Western aria—aptly demonstrating musical “confluence” at play. Rather than present both elements alongside each other, Sheng interweaves qin music into the aria seamlessly by continuing with the same tempo and tonal center from before and using fragments of “Qiufeng ci” as accompaniment.

Sheng’s musical procedure further draws on the fluid and wide-ranging performance practice conventionally associated with “Qiufeng ci,” which can be performed by the qin either as a solo or as an accompaniment to singing (though it is rarely sung with the lyrics today). Some performances are even known to combine both instrumental and vocal renditions in one setting, with the melody repeated several times and the performer alternating between playing and singing. Clearly, Sheng’s musical “confluence” also demonstrates his intimate familiarity with the qin’ge 琴歌 performance tradition.

Baoyu’s sudden entrance surprises Daiyu, who engages in lively banter with him before their duet, as shown below. As if the instrumental presentation is unable to contain their fierce mutual love for each other, only the merging of instrumental sound and human voice can fully capture the intensity of their affections. In this moment, the line between art and life breaks down. The limits of literary expression are transcended to convey “the many faces of desire.”78 But beyond that, the performance captures a critical means of generating desire in the novel—imitation and role-playing. As Kathryn Lowry notes, characters gain an awareness of their affections precisely when they “surrender to a fantasy set forth in a song or in a play.”79 Here, Daiyu and Baoyu realize their mutual love when they give in to the mimetic play of desire during the qin performance. As depicted in the libretto below,80 by making audible their mutual love for each other, their passionate duet acts out their feelings for each other: 77

Zong and De Meyer, “The Birth of Artistic Conception,” p. 374.

Lowry, “Imitative Reading,” p. 336.

79 In her book, Kathryn Lowry discusses the important role of “imitation and imitative reading” in late-Ming popular songs and Dream of the Red Chamber in “open[ing] up a window onto the self” and providing “a new understanding of the many facets of desire and human consciousness.” This notion is grounded in instances in which a person “acts like” (zuo 作) or recognizes how things or people “act” (zuo) in a particular way when they surrender to desire or show desire for one another. She provides the example of how Baoyu and Daiyu realize their “mutual affinity” for each other through reading and quoting from The Story of the Western Chamber and Peony Pavilion. Ibid., pp. 354, 336, 337.

80 As mentioned in an earlier footnote, a Chinese translator was hired to translate Hwang’s libretto into Chinese supertitles for the performance. The Chinese translation here is the same as that which appeared in the performance. See Anthony, “‘Red Chamber’.”

78

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BAOYU: I found this flower, planted by the wall; A lovely blossom whose leaves are wilting.

Sweet flower, you make this a beautiful place.

Let me sprinkle morning dew on your soft petals.

墙角花一株 弄姿叶已零 吐艳满园香 愿为朝露润花心

DAIYU: The flower which grows alongside a wall Finds its life wherever it may.

One drop of dew, one ray of sun, Is abundance, a feast, a cause to blossom,

墙角花一株 盼生为情缘 天降晨露水 一刹朝阳谢上天

BAOYU: Even my father, who disdains me, Praises my verses.

But, cousin, in truth, Yours are much better.

Never have I heard a voice to rise alongside my own.

Like two rivers bound for one ocean.

就算管教我的严父 都称赞我所做的诗句 林妹妹 你比我更胜一筹 我从来都没听过 竟有这样悠扬起伏的声音来伴我 两河奔流通大海

DAIYU AND BAOYU: Like two stars in one constellation.

Let our hearts always remain pure.

Let us build a world not on riches, But on music.

Like two stars in one constellation.

Like two rivers bound for one ocean.

Together we will prove that beauty can transform.

Oh, together we can transform the world.

两颗星星扑天上 让我俩纯洁无暇 抛弃奢靡世俗 一同缔造和韵世界 两颗星星扑天上 两河奔流通大海 让我们永保真善美 以此改变世界

The duet references the flower–stone imagery in the mythical frame from earlier and reveals a parallel structure belonging to Chinese poetic convention. They are not only singing a love duet but also composing poems together, a popular literary activity among intellectuals of the day. This double-layered intermedial reference gains greater force as Baoyu sings of his discovery of a wilting flower growing by the wall, a clear nod to Daiyu, who adopts this metaphor with an unconscious evocation of her previous incarnation as she sings of how this wilting flower has “f[ound] its life” in “[o]ne drop of dew, one ray of sun.” Baoyu continues expressing his profound admiration for Daiyu’s poetic gift before the duo sings together of their shared desire to “build the world not on riches, but on music.” Their common love for music takes on cosmic dimensions (in references to a “constellation” and the “ocean”), which attests to the transformative power music has on their love for each other.

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THE CONFLUENCE OF WESTERN MUSIC IN DREAM: SHENG’S USE OF BÉLA BARTÓK’S THE MIRACULOUS MANDARIN In this section, I examine how Sheng brings elements from a piece by Béla Bartók to flow together with his own voice in a climactic scene, Act 1, Scene 4: Baoyu’s dream.

Sheng’s use of Bartók’s own music, as opposed to material from folk songs81, has not been written about in any detail to date, and his use in this scene in Dream is especially worth examining. Before the premiere, Sheng himself acknowledged his use of a work by Bartók in a “wild dance passage.” Sheng describes the piece in question as Bartók’s “concert suite,” The Miraculous Mandarin.82 The first version of that piece (1919) was for solo piano, but a final version completed in 1922 and published in 1925 was fully orchestrated. It was originally conceived as a pantomime ballet, but the audience at its 1926 premiere in Cologne was so outraged by the sexual content of the acting/dancing that thereafter it was more commonly performed as a concert piece.83 Menyhért Lengyel published a scenario for The Miraculous Mandarin in a journal in 1917.84 There are many stories about how Bartók ended up setting the scenario to music, but Ferenc Bónis argues that it was a friend of Bartók’s who, in 1918, was the go-between for the two men.85 Lengyel labeled the published scenario a “pantomime grotesque”—and the grotesque was a theme that appealed to Bartók.86 Here is a 1919 summary written by Bartók: Just listen, how beautiful the story is. In an ‘Apache’87 den three thugs force a beautiful young girl to seduce men and to lure them into the den, where they will be robbed. The first turns out to be poor, the second likewise, but the third one is a Chinese. The catch is good, the girl entertains him with her

81 Previously, Sheng drew on folk melodies in writing The Song of Majnun (1992) and Madame Mao (2003). In Majnun, the composer used Tibetan folk tunes as its main melodic materials, and in Mao, he employed two prominent folk tunes as the sole basis of the composition, namely the Kazakh-origin song “In a Faraway Land,” which was made popular in China, and the famous ode to Mao, “The East is Red.” In Sheng’s music theater piece The Silver River (1997) written in collaboration with Hwang, he interwove ancient Chinese legend with the sounds of Chinese opera, and the Chinese instrument, pipa.

82 Lee, “A Study,” p. 53.

83 While at the time of writing (June 17, 2023), many orchestral versions can be found on YouTube, there are only two versions with dancers (Google “Miraculous Mandarin - YouTube” and “Bartok Daniel Kawka ONPL Le Mandarin Merveilleux - YouTube”). A short trailer for another version is also available (Béjart Ballet Lausanne - Le Mandarin merveilleux - YouTube), as is a trailer for something of the same title but otherwise mysterious, with nine boxes stacked up tic-tac-toe style, each with very sexy content (The Miraculous Mandarin Trailer - YouTube).

For stage productions from 1926–1991, see Percival, “Bartók’s Ballets.” For a review of the premiere, see Vinton, “The Case of The Miraculous Mandarin,” p. 13.

84 A translation from the original Hungarian to English is available (Farkas, “‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ Translation”).

85 Bónis, “‘The Miraculous Mandarin’,” p. 82.

86 See Brown, Bartók and the Grotesque.

87 This term does not appear in Lengyel’s scenario nor in the stage directions in the scores of The Miraculous Mandarin, but it was used more than once by Bartók. His use of the term with regard to the story has been taken as proof that the unnamed city in Bartók’s piece is Paris (Lebon, “Béla Bartók’s ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’,” pp. 232–33).

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dance, the Mandarin’s desire is aroused, his love flares up, but the girl recoils from him.—The thugs attack the Mandarin, rob him, smother him with pillows, stab him with a sword, all in vain, because the Mandarin continues watching the girl with eyes full of love and yearning.—Relying on her feminine ingenuity, the girl complies with the Mandarin’s wish, whereupon he drops dead.88 Bartók’s music reflects a combination of techniques employed in his piano music, chamber work, and orchestral works, particularly in the pervasive atonality and chromatic scales dominating the thugs’ music and the girl’s dances, as well as ostinatos (i.e., recurring melodic and rhythmic figures) that are used to generate great excitement in the music. Musical characterizations of the mandarin also draw on a pentatonic theme, and the exotic “chase” rhythms in the climactic moments of the pantomime evoke Stravinsky’s primitivist idiom.

Using the edited version of the solo piano score originally preserved only in manuscript (published in 2000) as a reference,89 Bartók included many outrageous details, particularly when the third decoy game begins. In the stage directions, the girl is described as “horrified” by “a frightfully weird figure” seen in the street from the thugs’ den, and she “flees terrified” when the figure (it is the mandarin of the title) enters the den (17–18). Forced by the thugs, she performs a “wildly erotic dance” that climaxes with her collapsing in his lap and him trembling in feverish excitement (19–26). She shudders and finally tears herself away from him, setting up a wild chase. He stumbles, the chase resumes, he catches her, and then the thugs seize all his valuables (26–33). They try smothering him and running him through with a rusty sword, but nothing can break his longing gaze at the girl (34–40). Hung from the lamp, he still does not die but begins to glow “with a bluish green light” as his eyes are fixed on the girl, so they take him down (41–43). The girl decides she must deal with the mandarin herself and does so by offering herself to him; his longing is thus fulfilled, his wounds begin to bleed, and he dies “after a short agony” (43–46).

It is more probable that Sheng was unaware of the ballet and, conceiving of the work as primarily orchestral, referred to it that way, despite the fact that the score contains stage directions. In his article on Bartók, Sheng does not mention the racist aspects of The Miraculous Mandarin, which would probably not occur to anyone concerned with only the music and not the title or plot, but in the program notes for his “String Quartet No. 5,” which was also influenced by this piece and named “Miraculous” (2007), Sheng wrote, On the one hand, I do not agree with Bartok’s almost-racist interpretation of what he saw as a “miraculous Mandarin.” On the other hand, I marvel at Bartok’s composition with its swift change of images and constant varying of the tempi—in many sections, which add up to more than two-thirds of the work, almost every measure is in a different tempo. While writing this

88 89

Translation from Bónis, “‘The Miraculous Mandarin’,” p. 87.

Page numbers are given parenthetically.

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piece, I asked myself if I could achieve more or less the same “miraculous” effect without imitating Bartok’s devices.90 Bartók has been singularly important to modern Chinese music composers in general, not just Sheng.91 Both his creativity and respect for folk music was a very important reason for the attention given by these composers. At a time when these post-Cultural Revolution Chinese composers were struggling to come up with a distinctive musical language after years of artistic suppression under the Cultural Revolution, Bartók became the composer they all sought to emulate in their own works. In Sheng’s “Bartók, the Chinese Composer,” he wrote this about the importance of Bartók’s use of Hungarian folk music: This is nationalism in its truest sense. It is why Bartók’s music has such strong resonance in the music of some Chinese composers like myself. It is the spirit of his approach to composition and the essence of his deep understanding of both the folk and classical tradition that I find meaningful. This goes beyond the immediately apparent similarities—such as the pentatonic scale—shared by Hungarian and Chinese folk traditions : : : . As in Bartók’s time and place, the tradition of folk music is fading away quickly in China and its real value and beauty are largely unknown and underappreciated both inside and outside China’s boundaries. Bartók might be out of fashion. But especially in a time [when] the world is getting smaller by the second, we may benefit greatly from his approach to music. A true musical fusion can only happen at its deepest level when both elements retain their original qualities, and when the composer possesses the most profound understanding and knowledge of both cultures.92 In Baoyu’s erotic dream sequence, Sheng alludes to Bartók’s highly stylized musical idiom in The Miraculous Mandarin but transforms it into a new setting altogether. The version of Baoyu’s dream in the novel has been characterized as “the greatest wet dream in world literature”;93 Fairy Disenchantment entrusts her sister with Baoyu’s initiation to sex in order to awaken him from illusion, but the dream actually leads Baoyu to his first real sexual encounter when his maid notices him ejaculate and they have sex. Baoyu in the novel is a “slow learner.” In Dream, however, Sheng emphasizes the emotional intensity of Baoyu’s first feelings of lust, effectively imbuing his character with great nuance and depth.

90 This version of the program note is still available at http://www.brightsheng.com/ programnotes/Stringquartet5.html, but the present form of Sheng’s website does not have a “Program Notes” category. What can now be found for the piece, under “Chamber/Vocal/Solo” in the “Works” section, is a version of the program notes without the quoted passage (http:// brightsheng.com/works/chamber/stringquartet5.html). Since the premiere of the piece (2007), in the Fall Semester of 2022, Sheng was forced to step back from teaching after showing in class a video of Laurence Olivier performing as Othello in blackface. See Duong, “Following blackface incident,” and Weykamp, “Nearly 700 UMich faculty.”

91 Wong, “Bartók’s Influence.” After the Cultural Revolution, Sheng belonged to the first generation of Chinese musicians to return to the Shanghai Conservatory in 1978, along with Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long, where he was first introduced to—and struck by—the rawness in Bartók’s music.

92 Sheng, “Bartók, the Chinese Composer,” pp. 2–3.

93 Levy, Ideal and Actual, p. 4.

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In Dream, at night (not daytime, as in the novel), Baoyu drifts into an erotic dream in which he encounters many beautiful female spirits who seem intent on seducing him and to whom he is attracted. The nocturnal shade of purple descends upon the stage as Baoyu, dressed in a glowing red robe, is surrounded by these alluring spirits.

Recurring ostinatos dominate, accompanied by rapid shifts in tempi. The music stylistically alludes to Bartók’s main motif in The Miraculous Mandarin, which is characterized by repeated articulations of a rapidly ascending and descending scale, producing a dissonant, uncanny effect that fits the erotic excess of the dream. As the dream progresses, Baoyu interacts with increasing numbers of female spirits as the musical motif gains intensity through acceleration of pace and an increase in volume, suggesting that Baoyu is about to give in to his lust. Soon after, he starts frolicking merrily with the female spirits, at times pursuing them, at times initiating physical intimacies with them.

Baoyu’s euphoric aria is accompanied by repeated tritones (also called the devil’s interval for its jarring dissonance), which is a prominent feature in The Miraculous Mandarin. Often avoided by other composers, the tritones that Sheng uses invoke the raw emotions involved. Baoyu sings, “What a delightful place! If only I could remain here, far away from the pressure of the world.” The purple glow that enveloped the stage at the beginning of the scene transforms into a fiery red, and earthy brass sounds progressively dominate the orchestral soundworld. As the female spirits declare him lustful and break into dance, Baoyu joins in, pursuing this or that female spirit, while a primitive pulse echoes the music that drives the ending of The Miraculous Mandarin. The girl throws herself into the title character’s lap as he experiences an intense thrill and bleeds to death, but the conflicted Baoyu of Dream is a very different character than either the Mandarin or the girl.

Putting Bartók’s soundworld in confluence with Sheng’s compositional idiom in the dream within Dream successfully highlights some of the conflicts that Baoyu feels and the significance of eroticism in both the opera and the original novel.

At the same time, Sheng pays tribute to an influential composer whose musical language has shaped the compositional style of an entire generation of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese composers.

HONGLOU MENG AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SAN FRANCISCO Sheng’s opera transformed Honglou meng into a distinctive cross-cultural work that resonated with the culturally diverse audience of twenty-first-century San Francisco.

To arrive at that goal, Sheng created a musical “confluence” of Western and Chinese music along the outlines laid out by his teacher, Chou Wen-chung. Sheng’s allusion to and use of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, a pantomime ballet with deeply racist overtones that has become primarily influential as an orchestral piece, exemplifies Sheng’s celebration of a European composer whose distinctive approach to composition has significantly shaped the musical language of Chinese composers of his generation. The erotic elements of Bartók’s music are used to help highlight the important role lust plays in the formation of Baoyu’s character. Sheng’s nuanced integration of Chinese folk and literati music in Dream further demonstrates his intimate familiarity with Chinese music and instruments, their cultural connotations, and performance practices. He effectively employs these references for subversive purposes in the bridal swap scene and for underscoring the romanticism in an aria

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sung by Daiyu that culminates in a passionate duet with Baoyu, affirming their mutual love for each other. These cross-cultural strategies that Sheng employs generate a powerful musical “confluence” that fosters greater accessibility to the opera for the heterogeneous Bay Area operagoers at the same time as it evokes deep resonances with Chinese audiences who share a common memory of the beloved novel and understanding of the culture that informed it.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR Jingyi Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Harvard University. Her dissertation project, “The Hypermobility Turn: Opera of The Future, The Future of Opera,” presents hypermobility as a critical framework for examining decolonizing practices in contemporary operas. Previously, Jingyi held a B.M. and M.M. in musicology and piano performance at Oberlin Conservatory and Indiana University. Her current book project under contract with Routledge, entitled New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera: The Practitioners’ Perspectives, reflects her ongoing interest in crossing boundary lines between the artistic and the scholarly in contemporary opera studies. Jingyi’s research and writing has been supported by the Holmes/ D’Accone fellowship in opera studies from the American Musicological Society, the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music, and various Harvard fellowships. Among other awards, Jingyi has received the West Virginia University Press Award (2019) and the Deane L. Root Award (2022) from the American Musicological Society Allegheny Chapter.

Correspondence to: Jingyi Zhang, 5 Cowperthwaite Street, Apt. 601, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: jingyizhang@g.harvard.edu.