I was at that glittering opening night of The First Emperor as a movie-critic. The title role is sung by Placido Domingo, who in the 80s displayed his celebrated tenor in movie versions of Cavallieri Rusticana, Pagliacci, La Traviata and Otello, all directed by Franco Zeffirelli. But I was mainly interested in the Chinese connection. I wanted to see hear, really what Tan Dun, the gifted composer who had won an Oscar for his scoring of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, would do with his epic subject. I also was eager to see the production, since it was to be staged by Zhang Yimou, director of many sublime Chinese dramas, including Hero, the worldwide martial arts hit for which Tan Dun had supplied the music. Further, the costumes are by Emi Wada, who worked with Zhang on Hero and House of Flying Daggers. And even further, the opera is based on a 1996 Chinese movie, The Emperor's Shadow.
Need a further further? This movie-tinged opera is playing today on more than 100 movie screens in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan. At 1:30 p.m. New York time, the Met's matinee will be beamed by satellite live to theaters equipped to present high-definition downloads, with HD sound. Introducing the event from the Met staircase will be Zhang Ziyi, the Crouching Tiger star who was discovered by Zhang Yimou. Come on, all you opera lovers who read my movvie reviews (and the one or two movie lovers), give it a try. Drop everything, jump in the car, and read the rest of this review when you come home.
The Met, under the direction of Peter Gelb, seems to have gone movie-mad this season. Movie-director mad, anyway. Zeffirelli, the opera and film visionary, has four productions on the season's schedule: La Boheme, Tosca, La Traviata and Turandot. Julie Taymor best known for her Lion King on Broadway but also director of the films Titus, Frida and the forthcoming Beatles pastiche Across the Universe has condensed her zazzy Zauberflote, which premiered at the Met in 2004, into a 100min., kid-friendly Magic Flute. And Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, Cold Mountain, the current Breaking and Entering) did a rapturously received Madama Butterfly this fall. Gelb has also hired Broadway directors Jack O'Brien, of Hairspray fame, and Bartlett Sher, who did The Light in the Piazza, to stage operas for him.
THE EMPEROR'S WALL
Like Hairspray and Piazza, and a hundred others I could name, The First Emperor is a remake of a movie for the musical stage. So let's talk first about The Emperor's Shadow. It dramatizes an episode in the legend of the warlord who united the disparate Chinese tribes in 310 B.C. and ordered the erection of what would become the Great Wall. (Zhang told another fable of the first Emperor in Hero.) His name has a dozen transliterations, but we'll settle for the Met's spelling, Qin Shi Huangdi and, from now on, call him the warlord.
The Emperor's Shadow covers some 30 years in the lives of two boys: a sturdy kid who will become the Emperor and his sensitive friend who will become the musician Gao Jianli think Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces. Both are suckled by Jianli's mother and raised as brothers. When they're 10, they're separated for pursue their different and colliding destinies. In maturity, the warlord (played with a bull-headed majesty by Jiang Wen, China's leading movie actor) hears than Jianli (Ge You, a stalwart of several Zhang Yimou films) is enslaved by a rival clan; he sends one of his lieutenants to defeat the clan and return with Jianli. He needs a theme song, and desperately wants the musician to compose an anthem for him. But Jianli is a stubborn sort, not easily bossed by his childhood friend; and he complicates things by having a liaison with the warlord's strong-willed, crippled daughter Yueyang (Xu Qing), who had been promised to the lieutenant. Think any number of Victorian melodramas.
The script, by Lu Wei, who also worked on Zhang's To Live and Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, nicely arranges the vectors of comradeship and competition, power and conscience. Zhou Xiaowen's direction is on the stolid side, but his coaxes his lead actors into giving superb performances, full of the intelligent fury the material demands. This is a movie headed for tragedy (the warlord orders Jianli blinded by the fumes of horse urine!), and by the end two of the three are dead. The lieutenant, driven mad with jealousy on hearing of Yueyang's affair with Jianli, murders and mutilates her. Shadow nearly becomes a Sino splatter movie when a courtier tells the warlord of the murder: "He cut her head off. Then her feet, her hands and her breasts. Finally, he cut out her vagina."