The Emperor’s New Libretto
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Fans who relished the Chinese novelist Ha Jin’s “Waiting” (1999) and “War Trash” (2004), both of which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, may be surprised to see his name listed as co-author of the libretto for Tan Dun’s much ballyhooed opera “The First Emperor,” which will have its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on December 21. Mr. Jin, who has already announced in interviews that his first opera libretto will also be his last, seems the most surprised at all. Yet this writer’s remarkable trajectory suggests that for him, the implausible is merely something waiting to happen.
Jin Xuefei — Ha Jin is a pen name — was born in the northeastern Chinese province Liaoning in 1956, and came to America in 1985 to get a Ph.D. in comparative poetics at Brandeis. Before then, Mr. Jin was a teenage member of the Red Army during the Cultural Revolution. He has recalled that his first writings of any kind were propagandistic essays on Communism required of all recruits. Not by coincidence, Mr. Jin abandoned Chinese as a literary language after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, writing all his works directly in English, and eventually becoming an American citizen.
Mr. Jin has published two poetry collections, and his strong grip on metaphor and plain but effective diction makes the libretto of “The First Emperor” more nuanced than it might otherwise be. A chorus of slaves sings about the brutal labor involved the construction of the Great Wall of China: “Lord of Heaven/ how long is this wall? / — Longer than a hundred wars.” They are brutalized by a murderous warlord, the Emperor Qin, who unified China in 221 B.C.E. by ruthlessly slaughtering his enemies, and famously built an army of terra-cotta soldiers to guard his tomb for eternity. In a revealing interview in the Chinese newspaper the Bund, Mr. Jin admits that the real-life emperor was “a tyrant. His crimes outweighed his contributions. But in our opera, he’s merely a character.”
In his own work, Mr. Jin is acutely conscious of the victims of tyranny. In “The Dead Soldier’s Talk,” a poignant poem he published in the Paris Review in 1986, Mr. Jin speaks in the voice of a young Chinese soldier who drowned saving a plaster statue of Chairman Mao in 1969. Such real-life examples of the human cost of glorifying tyranny spark Mr. Jin’s creativity, often with the underlying theme of the Communist Party’s feet of clay and heart of plaster. In the title story of his 2001 collection “The Bridegroom,” Mr. Jin recounts the fate of a homosexual man who is arrested at a gay club in the fictional — but all too plausible — city of Muji, China, and is sentenced to electroshock therapy as a “cure.” In “Waiting,” which is based on a true story, Chinese societal rules oblige a doctor to wait 18 years to be freed from an arranged marriage so that he can wed the woman he really loves. Recounted in a compelling tone of numbly wry irony, the novel was followed by the even more powerful “War Trash.” Narrated by Yu Yuan, anold Chinese officer, “War Trash” goes into painful detail about the harsh conditions in a prison camp during the Korean War; there are also moments of humor, as when the old soldier confesses that he was inspired to have his tattoos removed after watching a “Simpsons” episode in which Bart, “the mischievous boy,” get his own erased.
Mr. Jin, like his protagonist Yuan, is ready to learn from Bart Simpson; unfortunately, his colleague Mr. Dun seems more beholden to allpowerful tyrants. Plácido Domingo informed Opera News about his title role in the new opera: “You always try to look for positive things in the character. Apparently the Emperor Qin was an ambitious, almost cruel person… I try to make something positive of him, and I think Tan Dun in a way has made the part positive.” Mr. Domingo adds that Emperor Qin as set to music is a “bit softer than the real one was. The character in the opera comes off a little better than he was, you know. Tan Dun has given him a kind of romanticism.”
Mr. Dun also composed the undeniably romantic soundtrack music for the film “Hero” (2002), directed by Zhang Yimou, who is also stage director for “The First Emperor” at the Met. “Hero” idealizes Emperor Qin as well, as a controversial, misunderstood character. As a matter of historical fact, Qin massacred entire villages and had scholars who objected to him buried alive. “Almost cruel,” indeed. China’s greatest modern tyrant, Mao Zedong, saw himself as a new version of Emperor Qin. By defeating Chiang Kai-Sheik, Mao also unified China, and he saluted Emperor Qin’s suppression of Confucianism as a prefiguration of the Communist Party.
The film “The Emperor’s Shadow” (1996), in its original screenplay form by the Chinese actor and writer Wei Lu, is cited as one of two official sources for “The First Emperor” libretto. Like “Hero,” this film glorifies a great and powerful China ruled by a mighty leader. Another ode to unified China, “The Emperor’s Shadow” tells of the ruler’s idealistic and unyielding quest to make his former boyhood friend, now a composer, write a national anthem to glorify his reign.
Mr. Jin’s own literary work is patently unswayed by such images of heroes and glory. Indeed, the life story of the other accredited source for his libretto would seem more typical of his fiction than the Emperor Qin; the historian Sima Qian, who lived in the second century B.C.E., offended the reigning Emperor Wu, and was sentenced to castration, a fate intended to drive the writer to suicide; instead, Sima Qian accepted the punishment and kept on writing. The maimed, yet persistent, artist is present in “The First Emperor.” The invalid composer Jianli breaks a hunger strike when he is fed mouth-tomouth by the Emperor’s daughter. As if underlining the obsessive orality inherent in the art of opera itself, Jianli mutilates himself at the end of “The First Emperor.” He bites off his tongue in the hopes of bleeding to death, a kind of buccal suicide and symbolic castration in one fell swoop.
Yet despite its libretto’s artfully dramatic use of metaphor, “The First Emperor” is, like any opera, basically about the music. In many interviews Mr. Dun has likened his standard gimmicky return to village instruments and “natural” sounds like water and stones to the work of folklore-obsessed Western composers such as Bartók and Stravinsky. In truth, he is closer to Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum” (1942), when the tyrant ordered the use of peasant art forms as the only permissible vocabulary for music, books, or painting. In such echoes of past — and current — Chinese government tyranny, whether conscious or not, Mr. Dun has produced a work profoundly foreign to the literary message of his co-librettist.
Mr. Ivry is author of biographies of Ravel, Poulenc, and Rimbaud, and the poetry collection “Paradise for the Portuguese Queen.”