Composer weaves Chinese musical heritage into prequel to Wagner opera

Wagner's opera Lohengrin begins with a swan pulling a boat across a lake in a magical forest where a child has gone missing, while in the outside world his sister is standing trial for his suspected murder. But what happens before that? Before that awful court case in the corrupt kingdom of Brabant?

That's a question the Berlin resident but Filipino-Chinese composer Jeffrey Ching had always wondered about, vaguely, at the back of his mind.

So when the Hong Kong Arts Festival decided to bring a full production of Lohengrin to town this year, they gave the Harvard-educated Ching the chance to find out. "Since my last project with the Arts Festival in 2012, Tisa [Ho, the executive director] and I were looking for a subject for a new chamber opera, something with fantastical elements. When she settled on Lohengrin, we thought why not find out what happened before the opera begins," Ching says in a phone interview from Berlin where he lives with his opera singer wife and two young children.

He found medieval fairy stories and romances from all over Europe, and started reading. Each is slightly different, and Ching has chosen "his" version partly pragmatically - he has seven musicians and four singers for this concert version, titled Before Brabant, premiering in Hong Kong on Tuesday, so he has to keep it simple. And partly he has selected it for the most compelling libretto.

"I used a source from 1512 by Robert Copland, The Knight of the Swan. I updated the text but did not modernise it. Actually I left some odd words in. 'Sclaunder' is such a good word - it means halfway between scandal and slander, a shameful catastrophe," Ching says.

Which is exactly what is threatened at the beginning of the story where a king returns from the Crusades to find that his beautiful queen appears to have given birth to seven puppies.

The animals had been swapped by the king's mother, wanting her daughter-in-law to be executed for witchcraft. In fact the old queen needn't have bothered: the babies were wildly enchanted anyway. There were seven of them, for starters, and they were born with silver chains around their neck, which when removed would turn them into swans (of course nobody knew that yet).

The babies are taken into the forest (in good fairy-tale tradition) to be killed. And in equally good fairy-tale tradition, the huntsman tasked with this crime hides the babies, where a hermit finds them. Sixteen years later the huntsman comes back. He is overjoyed and takes the chains from six of them to bring back to the king as proof … but when the six boys then turn into swans the frightened huntsman runs off, dropping five of the chains but still holding the sixth.