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Despite the ingenuousness of the plots, Yun's serial music, with its Oriental overtones, is so inscrutable that the orchestra and offstage chorus required no fewer than 30 rehearsals. Yun's use of twelve-tone rows is as free as his theatrical fantasy. The singers often had to master unaccompanied vocal lines, and the orchestra itself was augmented by whips, rattles and bells. At the end, as color projections were flashed onto a transparent curtain, boulder-size clusters of tone shot from the orchestra, and twelve percussion instruments went wild with pings, thumps, roars and growling glissandi. Then the tumultuous sound dissolved as mysteriously as it had arisen. Silence. Curtain.
"In the beginning, it was hell to learn," said one of the soloists, American Soprano Maria de Francesca, "but almost overnight the meaning opened up. Later, I was scheduled to sing Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. Suddenly Strauss seemed awfully strange to me."