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Stewart Wallace, The Bonesetter's Daughter: Libretto by Amy Tan after her novel. Soloists, orchestra of San Francisco Opera, Steven Sloane, conductor, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. 13.9.2008 (HS)

Hao Jiang Tian (Chang the Coffinmaker) and Qian Yi (Precious Auntie)

Composer Stewart Wallace and novelist Amy Tan worked for four years to create an opera based on Tan's novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter. Saturday night it grabbed the stage with a highly emotional story, colorful staging that included Chinese acrobats, dancers and musicians, a cast that supplemented standard opera singers with one from Chinese opera and another from the Chinese pop world, and some ravishing music by Stewart Wallace that drew from all those sources.

Perhaps the most amazing thing is that they made it all work with very few missteps. Future productions, and there should definitely be some, might want to cut back on some of the artsy film projections and aerial acrobatics. Or maybe not. They certainly added to the sense of otherworldliness, of being in between two cultures. This theme pervades this book, and much of Tan's writing, including her most famous work, The Joy Luck Club. But for the much-anticipated world premiere, it was simply dazzling.

Musically, Wallace created a score that pulses with rhythmic life even when it seems to be in stasis, using percussion some of the time but often it's the thrust of the orchestral elements. The company's orchestra made it sound luminous. He and Tan made several trips to China for research, and while he asserts that he used no actual Chinese music (no appropriation of famous Chinese melodies à la Puccini in Turandot), it feels like it, a tribute for his ear and composing ability. He seems to have consciously avoided using the cliché of music that relies a pentatonic scale, and it all feels fresh and vibrant.

Zheng Cao (Ruth Young Kamen) and Ning Liang (LuLing Liu Young)

Wallace, whose music was last heard here when San Francisco Opera premiered his other San Francisco-based opera, Harvey Milk, is not afraid to use the conventions of opera, however. There is a mad scene, a fiery curse scene, and a Chinese wedding ceremony. Characters respond to emotional moments with arias and duets, but the music carefully transitions out to avoid stopping for applause. The bad guy, Chang the coffin maker, introduces himself with a malevolent bass aria like a 21st-century cross between Dulcamara and Scarpia.

The opera opens with two Chinese musicians positioned in the Grand Tier playing suona, trumpet-like reed instruments. They later reappear on stage, leading moments that emphasize Chinese parts of the story. After some aerial acrobatics, the three main characters appear in a fog, telling an elliptical version of the story. The phrase, "These are the things I know" recurs, and the whole scene reprises just before the final scene. This is a nice stroke. Having seen the whole story play out, we hear the words and music in a whole new context.

We don't know in this prologue, for example, that the three characters represent three generations of women: LuLing, who left China for San Francisco, her mother, known only as "Precious Auntie," who killed herself in the old country, and her American-born daughter Ruth, who has married an American Jewish man with two children. The extra resonance from the return of the opening words and music is one of the opera's highlights.

This music here and throughout echoes the clash and melding of cultures that is inherent in the story. Mezzo sopranos Zheng Cao, who plays Ruth, and Ning Liang, as the present-day LuLing, have sung key roles at major opera houses, including the Met, La Scala and San Francisco. Precious Auntie, being a character entirely of China, is sung by Qian Yi, a star of the Chinese opera. Wallace brilliantly incorporates the swoops and gestures of Chinese opera into the English language. Elsewhere the melodies move as in western opera.

Zuo Jicheng (Suona Player), Wu Tong (Priest, Suona Player)
Li Zhonghua (Percussionist)

There's something else I like about Wallace's music. The melodies set the words clearly. You can understand every phrase because they move slowly enough and the orchestral elements never block them. And his melodies go somewhere. Not for him what seems to be the fashion of modern opera to write melodic fragments that evaporate instead of landing somewhere.

The story begins in a Chinese restaurant. The waiters are acrobats suspended in midair. It is LuLing's birthday and Ruth has arranged a banquet. We learn that Ruth is a ghost writer who is working on a book by one of the attorneys in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Agitated by an unwelcome gift, the mother starts to babble about having been at the murder scene, and collapses with a stroke. Unconsolable and alone, Ruth sings of how her mother disciplined her as a child and contemplates suicide. A ghost who has been floating through the scene puts a Chinese cloak on Ruth and ushers her to the China of her mother's young adulthood.

In scene 2 we meet Chang the coffin maker (bass Hao Jing Tian, who was the general in the Met's The First Emperor last season), who upsells his coffins by telling everyone that cheap ones let the ghosts out to haunt the survivors. At the ink factory where he sells his surplus wood, he leers at LuLing, a young slave girl. In a lovely stroke, she is played by Cao, who was Ruth in scene 1. Qian, who was the ghost, is working alongside her, and Chang boasts that he has had his way with her. She has also raised LuLing, whom she is said to have found as a baby. Chang decides he want to take LuLing as his fourth concubine. The wedding ceremony brings in Chinese music and pageantry, and a vengeance aria from Precious Auntie, who immolates herself, burns down the house and promises to haunt Chang.

Act II opens with LuLing homeless in Hong Kong harbour, writing letters for the wives of men who have gone ahead to America. Chang appears, having stalked LuLing, intent on raping her. The emotional moment triggers a trio of the older LuLing in her hospital room, Precious Auntie in her limbo and the young LuLing. Precious Auntie breaks through her ghosthood to confront Chang and extra his confessions: he murdered her father, raped her, and was about to rape his own daughter. They reprise the prologue, which leads to the final scene; in a moment of lucidity, LuLing and Ruth find reconciliation in a lovely duet, and the music ends with extraordinary delicacy as LuLing dies and reunites with the ghost of Precious Auntie.

The staging relies on abstract settings, a moving back wall that can reveal projected moving images and extends a walkway high above the stage where Precious Auntie can deliver her curse. Director Chen Shi-Zheng, best known for bis staging of the Chinese opera Peony Pavilion, has created two hours 40 minutes of beautifully controlled movement and, despite the stories within stories that move through time and space, keeps it all lucid.

Qian, the Chinese opera star, and Wu Tong, a conservatory-trained Chinese pop singer who plays the suona and portrays a Taoist priest, singing in a clear, high voice, wear head microphones and are amplified to balance the opera singers in rest of the cast. The sound is unobtrusively done. In smaller roles, baritone James Maddalena does well as the clueless American husband, Artie, and a team of Chinese percussionists provides plenty of musical color.

But the stars are Cao, as Ruth, and Liang, as her mother. Cao's music skews toward the high end of the mezzo range, Liang's to the lower end, and they sing with extraordinary richness and plangency. They also look the parts. The other vocal star is Tian, as Chang, his sound alternately rock solid and dangerously sinuous.

Conductor Steven Sloane, who conducted the world premiere of Grendel at Los Angeles Opera last year and Le Nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden, elicited some gorgeous playing from the orchestra and kept everything in balance. The chorus, in its few crowd scenes, sang well in something resembling medieval polyphony.

It's a strange and wondrous mix of sounds and sights, but the emotional core packs the biggest punch, especially in the final half hour.

Harvey Steiman

Pictures © Terrence McCarthy

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