Chinese Semele

I told my Baccalaureate Latin class, as we were reading Ovid’s Diana and Actaeon, that the evening before I had been to see an opera in Brussels performed by Chinese and international singers, directed by a Chinese artist, conducted by a Frenchman, of an opera in English by a German composer based in England, based on a version in Latin by Ovid of a Greek myth. This extraordinary production has been taking place at La Monnaie/De Munt, the Brussels opera house throughout the month of September. The contemporary artist Zhang Huan has been the overall inspiration for the show, making his directorial debut in opera. He is best known as a performance and installation artist and has an exhibition on in London at the same time featuring a pig (don’t ask for more details). The root of this production of Handel’s Semele is a Buddhist temple taken down and reconstructed by Zhang Huan, first in his Shanghai studio, and then transported to Brussels for the performances (above middle). Behind this temple there is a long and tragic story, which is shown to the audience in a video during the overture, concerning the couple who were living in this abandoned temple for a time before Zhang Huan came to ask to remove it. It is a tale of love, jealousy, murder, arrest and violent death when the husband is convicted of killing one of his wife’s lovers and executed. Though not exact, the parallels to the story of Semele appear to be what attracted Zhang Huan to the project of directing his first opera. He fills the show with many elements of his art: the temple itself used as a set; sumptuous costumes (above middle) from both Chinese and European cultures; a group of musicians from Mongolia playing and singing traditional music; his trademark ash paintings (above top); and finally the wife of the temple couple herself bringing the drama to its conclusion. This whole creation was intrinsic to the performance and Zhang’s interventions in the opera (including cutting the last scene) cannot be separated from the whole experience. One of his sculptures has been placed outside the opera house (above bottom) and the audience have to walk through it, smelling the incense (which provides the ash for the paintings) as they enter. Then in the interval Aruhan and her Mongolian musicians perform their version of Semele outside under the legs of this sculpture. The opera critics in the newspapers I have seen seem to have been baffled by all this, and have concentrated on the things they feel comfortable with: the singing and the superb orchestral playing of Les Talens Lyriques under Christophe Rousset. However, what they have failed to indicate is that this is one of the most thought-provoking current opera productions, combining visual, musical, cinematic and dramatic effects in such way as to achieve a total artistic experience; and it does this without the predictable “shocking” tactics too often employed by European opera directors. At the very end, one of the ash paintings of a woman (Semele or the temple wife?) is shown on a screen in front of the stage. We see water trickle down over it, as slowly the image is washed away and Semele is dead and the show is over.

This is really a Classics blog and I haven’t gone into detail about Ovid yet, but the main thing to take away from this seems to be that Greek myth is so deeply ingrained in European culture that we take it for granted. Of course, a story about overwhelming passion that ends in violent death has to be Greek, and the sensational narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the means by which we have absorbed such tales into our archetypal consciousness. But how can this be the case for Chinese culture? When this production transfers to Shanghai will the cultural commentators there be asking: who is this writer Ovid? What does he have to offer us? Will there be translations of the Metamorphoses in bookshops in Beijing and Shanghai? How can European classicists respond to that? Zhang Huan has shown how such a cross-over between cultures can work and enrich both of them.