By Liu Xuefeng

From Caijing Magazine

Some pedants prefer the term “serious music.” They think the more familiar “classical music” somehow excludes excellent modern works. Yet to call some kinds of music “serious” implies that others are unserious, which is clearly a pejorative reference to pop music. And that’s unfair.

Many works of so-called serious music today used to be categorized as pop – think Mozart and much of nineteenth century opera. Many classical music events – the New Year’s Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Waldbühne Concert, the Bregenz Opera Festival, Tanglewood, Glyndebourne – draw large and enthusiastic crowds, proving that serious music is actually popular with audiences. In the United States, for instance, as many people attend live opera performances as professional football games.

The year 2008 was a big one for classical music in China, as operas newly composed and freshly staged catered to the public taste for accessible entertainment. Famous classical music composers flung themselves into the task of creating music for the Beijing Olympics. Not surprisingly, they sometimes trespassed in the field of pop music.

As China attracts more and more worldwide attention, so too do its composers. Tan Dun’s opera The First Emperor had its global premiere at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 2008, and his Tea had its first Chinese performance at Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA). But these operas were also conceptual successes, in the sense that Tan Dun used new-media techniques and bridged cultural differences between East and West in order to make the works broadly popular. 

The year also marked the debut of the NCPA, and several of its shows are worth noting. Puccini’s Turandot, set in Beijing and incorporating traditional Chinese tunes, would have been the center’s highly appropriate first show, had it been completed on time. It played to enthusiastic crowds anyway, though the singing was uneven. Le Roi d’Ys from France and Aïda by the Cairo Opera House were both billed as prestigious productions from abroad, but singers and orchestra were far from satisfactory. Still, the extravagance and visual shock of these three operas seemed to please their first-generation audiences as well as the NCPA’s managers, who were eager to show off their new home.

The NCPA is likely to take a leading position in the performing arts market by virtue of its state-of-the-art facilities, its aggressive marketing and its importance as a crowd-pulling tourism destination. But leadership will not be easy to maintain unless the center can improve in several respects. Its ticket prices are sometimes too high for ordinary Chinese. Though the center enjoyed big crowds, some of its productions were of middling quality.

In addition, many of the more serious performances were ruined by improper audience behavior. It is essential for China to put more emphasis on aesthetic education for the new generation of music fans. Some people thought it was a pity that Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier and Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, both offered at the 2008 Beijing International Music Festival, were staged not at the NCPA but at the 17-year-old Poly Theater. I think that was a sensible decision, considering the NCPA’s crowds. There was no necessity for the opera troupes from Berlin to run the risk of boorish audience behavior.

I would like to see more international productions at the NCPA, more experimentally daring new works – and less emphasis on catering to a mass public by converting the opera stage into an entertainment park with extravagant visual effects. The NCPA should also establish its own symphony orchestra to accompany operas and ballets, as well as stage its own concerts. The orchestra can be started from scratch or upgraded from an existing one. Nowadays, most international performing centers with an opera house and a concert hall also have their own orchestra, as well as an opera production company. A facility as large as the NCPA should mount at least 10 operas a season and 50 concerts, 10 of which should be staged by its own orchestra. That could help meet the growing demand for classical music in Beijing and solidify NCPA’s reputation on the international scene.

The coming year will also see restructuring at China’s leading symphony orchestras. Many have just changed or are about to change their leaders. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, for instance, has hired the China Philharmonic Orchestra’s Yu Long as music director. Yu can now cooperate more closely with the Shanghai Opera House musical company while bringing along the resources of the Beijing International Music Festival, where he remains music director.

It is not clear who will or replace Yu at the China Philharmonic. The selection pool in China is small but rich, including Tang Muhai, Chen Zuohuang, Lv Jia and Li Xincao. Though a good music director is important for a professional symphony orchestra, the strength of the management team is also crucial.

Indeed, although China now has more symphony orchestras than France, many of them face financial difficulties. Even the mighty China National Symphony Orchestra (CNSO) needs 20 million yuan a year from the government to make ends meet. Such pressure may have led the orchestra into an interesting relationship with Wang Yi, composer of the immensely popular orchestral work Ode to China.

Wang was vice-governor of the China Development Bank and a former securities regulator who could barely read music. A 2002 visit to Tibet, he said, filled his head with melodies. So he got some music-composing software and began writing tunes on his computer. CNSO director Guan Xia heard some of them and persuaded Wang to compose a longer work. Wang gave a collection of 12 songs plus other material to real musicians to be professionally arranged, and Ode to China debuted in December 2006. It became a mainstay of the CNSO repertoire, with 8 million yuan in ticket sales over the following year.

Last June, Wang was detained by the Communist Party disciplinary arm on corruption charges. It turned out that many of those CNSO performances had been subsidized by public and private officials seeking Wang’s favor. All publicity surrounding Ode to China came to a halt. The People’s Music Publishing House scrapped a plan to release some of Wang’s songs. And embarrassed managers at the CNSO scrambled to rearrange performance schedules – and fill the financial hole cause by the loss of one of its most popular offerings.