Taking a musical career risk into thin air

At Santa Fe Opera, every note is a high note. This rustic tourist town is 7,000 feet above sea level; the opera’s open-air theater stands 500 feet higher in the foothills of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Backstage, oxygen tanks are provided so singers can take rejuvenating hits of the pure stuff.

“Most people get over the altitude, but some don’t,” Santa Fe Opera general director Richard Gaddes observes. “I want to put up a sign in the press room as the critics are leaving: ‘Remember the altitude.’ ”

Here amid the butterflies and desert wildflowers of the opera’s lofty campus, as lovely as it is oxygen-starved, levels of tension -- and hope -- are also elevated as the opera company prepares to present the world premiere of Chinese composer Bright Sheng’s “Madame Mao,” opening Saturday.

Colin Graham, director and librettist of the new opera, has reduced lung capacity, the unfortunate lasting effect of a heart medication, and calls the effect of the altitude “pretty devastating.” The women’s parts in “Madame Mao” range unusually high -- or, if in the lower range, contain enough impassioned screaming -- to make them all the more difficult to perform in thin air, conductor John Fiore says.

Problems with the altitude aside, presenting a new opera always comes with higher costs and higher risks than showcasing the tried-and-true. Even though the opera combines the familiar history of China’s Cultural Revolution with fictionalized events, “Madame Mao” remains an unknown quantity. The production, which employs eight dancers and elaborate costumes, has a budget of $1.5 million, half again as much as the Santa Fe Opera average.

Still, the person who is risking his musical reputation with his first full-length opera, composer Sheng, seems curiously untouched by either high altitude or high anxiety. His first name, Bright, is the English translation of his given name, Liang, but might as easily refer to his personality, sunny and naturally caffeinated.

He notes that he often doesn’t bother to eat -- and after observing him at work in the dry heat on his first day of rehearsal with the company, one begins to suspect that he runs on solar power.

Now the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Michigan (“He was my mentor; I studied with him for the last five years of his life so it means a lot to me, this title”), Sheng, born in Shanghai in 1955, lived through the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. He conceived the idea of an opera about the tragic life of Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Ching, more than 10 years ago, in 1991 -- the year she committed suicide by hanging herself in her prison cell.

“The Cultural Revolution had nothing to do with culture, or revolution,” asserts Sheng, who lived with his family away from the tumult of the major cities in a sort of self-imposed exile in Qinghai, on the Tibetan border, where he developed a lasting interest in Chinese folk music. He moved to the United States 21 years ago. “It was a power struggle between Mao and his rivals at the highest levels of the Communist Party of China. But in order for him to regain power, he had to make the whole country chaotic, paralyzed -- it was pure anarchy.”

Sheng has just landed in town, but rehearsals have been going on for a week, resulting in a sort of operatic anarchy into which the composer must now somehow fit.

He bounces into his first piano rehearsal in striped T-shirt and Tommy Hilfiger sneakers. Though sun streams through the windows, the rehearsal room feels clouded with pent-up doubts and questions that conductor Fiore and the two singers involved have accrued while working through the material before Sheng’s arrival.

It’s a tough scene: Chairman Mao, portrayed by bearded, silver-haired Alan Opie, is dying. Mezzo-soprano Robynne Redmon, as the aging Madame Mao, is at his bedside. By now, the Maos despise each other.

In “Madame Mao,” Jiang Ching is played by two singers: soprano Anna Christy as the ambitious actress Madame Mao was in her youth, and Redmon as the embittered “white-boned demon” she becomes in her later years. The two singers often appear together onstage, two sides of the same character. In this scene, however, Redmon is alone with Opie. Opie’s powerful baritone threatens to push the walls of the small room out a foot, maybe two. “The cries of the dying and the dead echo through the ruins of my life,” he sings.

Redmon is struggling with allergies. “Every day is an adventure in horrible phlegm,” she offers cheerfully. She is also caught in a minor power struggle between Sheng and Fiore, who are debating the finer points of one of her passages.

Sheng is concerned with “mood”: “You have so much color; I hear that now; I want that,” he tells Redmon, reaching out with one hand to squeeze an invisible roundness, a fruit both nonexistent and enticingly ripe. Fiore is more worried about pacing. “I tend to like to keep things going; it’s hard to keep the tension going,” he frets.

“I know. But here, you don’t need a lot of tension,” Sheng replies gently.

Later in the rehearsal, the conductor, composer and Redmon dissolve into laughter when they realize they are actually arguing about whether to call a new note they are adding to the score an F-sharp or a G-flat. Maybe they’re on the same page after all.

After lunch -- which Sheng skips to keep working -- the composer remains, well, composed under a large beach umbrella in front of an outdoor stage as he watches eager, confused chorus members trying to wield their rifles as members of Mao’s guerrilla army. He and director-librettist Graham agree that the regimented movements, which the performers seem to have borrowed from some Hollywood movie, look too American (and if one young man’s T-shirt is to be believed, this is not the People’s Republic, it’s Banana Republic). “You are not the Marines,” Graham scolds in his tart British voice. Thirsty and earnest, the army tries again.

At the end of the day, Sheng does have dinner -- accompanied by a glass of red wine that he barely touches. “Teamwork is very exciting, but it can also be very hectic,” he observes as he slides into a chair in the dining room of Santa Fe’s Inn of the Anasazi. “Opera is very difficult to do because there are so many elements. Drama and theater have to marry with music.

“This is big. This is a grand opera, and it’s my first try,” admits Sheng, whose cross-cultural compositions include two others inspired by 20th century Chinese history: “H’un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-76” and “Nanking! Nanking!,” a musical evocation of Japan’s brutal occupation of the mainland in 1937-38.

“And anything could go wrong; any part of the puzzle goes wrong and the whole thing doesn’t quite work,” Sheng continues. “My first composition teacher was Hugo Weisgall; he used to say: ‘If the lighting goes wrong, it’s the composer’s fault.’ ” Then Sheng grins widely. “On the other hand, if everything is great, the composer takes all the credit.”

It started with ‘The Silver River’

A rising star who received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation fellowship -- the coveted “genius award” -- in 2001, Sheng came to the attention of Santa Fe Opera with “The Silver River,” a music theater piece based on an ancient Chinese folk tale with libretto by Los Angeles playwright David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly,” “Flower Drum Song”). The piece was first performed at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, then expanded for presentation at the Spoleto Festival and elsewhere.

“ ‘Silver River’ has everything from a classical Chinese opera singer to a Western-style baritone to a pipa player, the Chinese flute, who has no lines but expresses herself through her instrument,” Hwang said by telephone. “He let each style exist in its own world, and yet at the same time he managed to do it in a way that made the listener feel that each was very much a part of a unified musical world. That is the sort of paradox, and great feat, of what he is able to do.”

Despite their good-natured quibbles in rehearsal, conductor Fiore is equally admiring of Sheng’s eclectic work. “His style is, I would say, somewhat angular, and very rhythmically based,” Fiore says. “He is not way out there -- it doesn’t sound experimental, it sounds very well-structured and very well-planned. In this opera, he also put in some romantic music. It’s a nice contrast.”

For Sheng, the blending of East and West is not deliberate but natural. “I am eating Western food and I am speaking to you in English, but I am Chinese,” he says. “My English has a Chinese accent, I make grammatical mistakes. One hundred percent of me is Chinese, but 100% of me is Western, because I have spent 20 years of my life embedded in Western musical tradition. When I was writing, I wasn’t thinking, ‘What was Chinese? What was Western?’ I was thinking, ‘What was exciting?’ If I was sitting as an audience member, would I like it?

“Am I a Chinese composer, an American composer, a Chinese American composer, an American Chinese composer? Every place I go, people call me differently. But I think the world is getting smaller, and if my life could have any function to bridge the gap, I would be happy.”

Sheng believes that the life of Madame Mao is the natural stuff of grand opera. “Our attempt with the opera is to show how she became a monster, a murderer, a very ugly person -- she was just an innocent as a young girl,” he says. “Her life had all the right ingredients. She was a theater actress. There was murder, deceit, betrayal, politics, everything larger than life. I don’t think I like her, but in opera I have to get into the mind of the character or else the audience will not be able to.”

In an interview conducted by e-mail to conserve his energy for high-altitude rehearsals, librettist Graham expressed some frustration but ultimately satisfaction in the process of working with Sheng. “When Bright asked me to write a libretto about Madame Mao, my first instinct was to say no -- political operas are gray, emotionally, and have a very short shelf-life,” Graham wrote. “But Bright, whose family suffered so much in the so-called Cultural Revolution, has found it in himself to provide sympathy for this sad and misguided woman. It’s that sympathy that prevents this opera from being that dreaded word: gray.

“Changes are coming very late in the process; a lot of these changes stem from mis-stresses in the setting of the text.... Too often he doesn’t appreciate the nuance of inflection in English -- any more than I do in Chinese! -- which drives the singers crazy,” Graham continued. “[But] it is an amazing opera, the orchestration is dazzling, and I feel it’s bound to attract people to it, particularly a younger and theatergoing audience.”

Ironically, Sheng must credit his life in music to Madame Mao, who needed a ready pool of artists for her propaganda shows. Chinese youths, he explains, were assigned to the countryside to be “reeducated” as farmers -- that is, unless they showed talent in the performing arts.

“My piano lessons saved me from being a farmer,” Sheng says. “My parents never wanted me to be a musician, but because of Madame Mao there was no other choice.

“In a way, it was very bad, because I was interrupted from the normal pace of education, but I ask myself, would I be as happy if I were doing something else? My father is a doctor. Would I be happy being a doctor? You don’t have the same kind of fun.”

“Madame Mao” has no scheduled performances beyond four at Santa Fe Opera, but the company’s Gaddes sees a bright future for the piece, which is expected to sell out all four performances.

“I don’t have a crystal ball. My instinct tells me that my colleagues who would be likely to give this opera its second presentation will want to wait and see,” Gaddes says. “But I think that it will have a life, in the way that ‘Dead Man Walking,’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and ‘Nixon in China’ have had. And that’s why we do it.”

For his part, Sheng cherishes a hope that someday “Madame Mao” will make its way to his homeland, which he admits to having some misgivings about forsaking in 1982.

“When I left China, there was an overwhelming feeling that China was hopeless. But it has changed, and I feel a little guilty because I wasn’t there to be part of the change,” he says.

“I hope China will be open enough to take this piece. It’s really an artwork, not a political work. We wanted it to be a compelling drama, so we changed a lot of history.”

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Selected Sheng

“H’un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-1976”; “The Stream Flows”; “Three Chinese Love Songs”; “My Song”; Gerard Schwarz/New York Chamber Symphony (New World)

“Arias and Barcarolles” (orchestration by Leonard Bernstein); Gerard Schwarz/Seattle Symphony (Delos)

“Two Folksongs From Qinghai”; John Oliver/John Oliver Chorale and Orchestra (Koch)

“The Song of Majnun”; Ward Holmquist/Houston Grand Opera (Delos)

“Concertino”; Music Society of Lincoln Center (Delos)

“Seven Tunes Heard in China”; Yo-Yo Ma, cello (Sony Classical)

“China Dreams: Postcards”; “Flute Moon”; Shiu Lan/Singapore Symphony Orchestra (BIS)

“String Quartets 3-4”; “Four Movements”; “Three Songs” (BIS)