Mackay opera in Taiwanese makes music history
Hemleb participated in two auditions for singers in January and July. He returned in September or more than two months before the opening night. This time he did a workshop with the cast for he wanted them to be familiar particularly with the cultural background of Mackay and of 19th century Taiwan.
Hemleb knew that Meglioranza, the American tenor cast in the role of the Taiwanese-speaking Bible man, did not speak Taiwanese even though he is married to a Taiwanese. Neither did the Korean tenor Choi. The locally recruited singers were not all raised speaking Taiwanese. Some were definitely more at home in Mandarin. But the opera about Mackay was in Taiwanese. A Taiwanese language teacher had to be brought in to resolve disagreements on the proper pronunciation of some words.
Missionary Mackay in real life had to learn to speak Taiwanese after his arrival in Taiwan to get close to the farmers and fishermen. He was only 27 then. In fact, he mastered the formal and deep Taiwanese which is hardly spoken today by the younger generation of Taiwanese people.
Meglioranza tried to understand every word in his singing lines to be able to emote his part properly. In fact, his first days of work with director Hemleb were spent just reading the Taiwanese lines, according to Meglioranza. The German director emphasized the need to express the meaning of the words.
During the one-week workshop, Hemleb insisted on“the theatrical aspect of the dialogue work.”He also tried to“develop something natural and theatrical.” Exercises were carried out for a while with just the text and without music.
Hemleb himself found Taiwanese to be“a language very good for singing because of the presence of many vowels.”He also deemed it“rather pleasant and easy to hear.”
As for Gordon Chin's score, Hemleb said:“It was a big inspiration for me.”He also noted that the music was full of emotions and energy. This could not be said of every piece of contemporary music, according to Hemleb.
As for conductor Chien Wen-pin, what he tried to do was to try to make musicians understand the music. He cited examples of how Chin used special effects in his opera, such as the special way of blowing the woodwind instruments and the special effect achieved through the bowing of the string instruments. He was after not just sounds but rather the special effects.
Chin said that the opera was such a long piece of music, he faced the difficult challenge of maintaining the integrity of its structure.
The music critics invited to watch the production found the staging of“The Black Bearded Bible Man”quite impressive.
Hemleb in his set design tried to address the question of the need to present so many different places in the story of Mackay. He had to show lots of people waiting to be treated in a 19th century hospital scene. But he also had to capture the intimacy of Mackay’s dying bed scene. The challenge was to do the range without the necessity of inventing a new set.
And so he made use of several stage frames, which he moved around with creativity to capture effectively the drama unfolding in different settings. Lighting design and video projections courtesy of Wang Jun-jieh all came together to help tell the story of Bible man George Leslie Mackay.
Written by Nancy T. Lu / culture.tw - Last Updated ( 06 January 2009 )
|
