Chamber opera based on Yasunari Kawabata novel Beauty and Sadness is admirably concise
- Challenge in adapting Nobel laureate’s story of a writer’s reunion with a much younger woman he had an affair with many years ago is what book leaves unsaid
- Carolyn Choa’s opera reduces writer to a non-speaking role and gives the meatiest roles to the woman and her protégée
Years have gone by without much attention being paid to Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel laureate, who died in 1972, but a new musical work and a series of films in Hong Kong are shining a light on the author.
Beauty and Sadness, a chamber opera by composer Elena Langer and librettist David Pountney based on Kawabata’s last published novel, had its world premiere on Friday at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
On Sunday, Masahiro Shinoda’s 1965 film With Beauty and Sorrow (based on the same novel) was by sheer coincidence playing across the street at the Hong Kong Arts Centre as part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s Cine Fan programme, which features a retrospective of films based on the writer’s works.
One might blame the calendar, since 2019 marks the 120th anniversary of Kawabata’s birth, making it something of a centenary in Chinese numerology. But as the opera’s director and choreographer, Carolyn Choa, has pointed out, her plans to bring Kawabata’s 1964 novel to the stage go back nearly a decade.
Beauty and Sadness, about the reunion of a writer with a much younger woman he had an affair with many years ago, is a domestic drama on two fronts. On the writer’s side is his disgruntled wife and their son; on the woman’s side, her protégée and companion, who jealously seeks revenge on the writer and his family. Much of Kawabata’s narrative unfolds through what is left unsaid, which in operatic terms leaves large gaps for the music to fill.
Choa’s production, and the cast and creative team, are a reflection of the director’s background – born in Hong Kong, she is based in London. At every turn is something Hong Kong audiences would find fresh yet familiar.
Choa adorns a Western musical score with Japanese elements, as she did when she used bunraku puppets in the Madame Butterfly she co-directed with her late husband, Anthony Minghella – a production seen on stage at the 2012 Guangzhou Arts Festival and on screen in the Metropolitan Opera’s HD series.
Musicians on stage play shakuhachi flute and taiko drum, while a Western chamber orchestra under conductor Gergely Madaras plays in the pit. Dancers imitate the black-clad kurogo stagehands from kabuki theatre. Geishas serve as a Greek chorus.
Visually, Tim Yip’s minimalist set smoothly delineates the writer’s home, the woman’s home and a malleable outdoor space. Paper screens separating the living spaces double as projection screens.
At one point, recycling a motif from Yip’s design for Bright Sheng’s opera Dream of the Red Chamber in 2017 at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Japanese characters crumble and blow away in the wind, echoing Kawabata’s remark that truth is “the discarding of words”.
Langer’s score attends to the space between words, often paying more attention to atmosphere than to the text itself. The writer, played by the stage actor Anson Lam, has no vocal lines at all, his musical presence represented solely in orchestral terms.
Of the singers, soprano Pureum Jo (last seen in Hong Kong as Dai Yu in Dream of the Red Chamber), as the woman, spends equal time driving the story and reacting to events. Soprano Etta Fung portrays her young protégée, who veers between manipulative charm and thinly disguised rage. In contrast, Yanyu Guo (another Red Chamber veteran), as the writer’s long- suffering wife, and countertenor Siman Chung, as his easily manipulated son, seem dramatically underdeveloped.
Given Kawabata’s own narrative style, the concision of Beauty and Sadness is to be applauded. But at 75 minutes, it is one of the few operas that could stand being longer.
The production continues until April 12.
Beauty and Sadness, Lyric Theatre, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Reviewed: April 5, 2019
