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.