In Berlin: Qu Xiao-song’s "The Last String"

BERLIN -- Don't ask me how to pronounce the composer Qu Xiao-song's surname. That becomes peripheral in comparison with his remarkable one-act opera "The Last String," based on a 13th- century fable, given its German premiere May3 at the Hebbel- Theater. Translated as "Die letzte Saite," the work was presented by the intrepid little Zeitgenössische (Contemporary) Oper Berlin before appreciative and unexpectedly enthusiastic audiences.

China's harsh Maoist Cultural Revolution played a pivotal role in the life of composer Qu, born 1952 in Guiyang but a naturalized American citizen.(Apparently Qu and Beijing have meanwhile let bygones be bygones: those thanked in the program included the Cultural Attaché at the Berlin Embassy of the People's Republic of China.)

At 14, when authorities closed his school, Qu turned to farm work, which by his own account had a profound impact. "They almost always sang while they worked. When the people were happy, they called their joy into the mountains so that the echoes rang out." When he returned to his hometown after four years, he joined friends to practice Haydn and Beethoven quartets, in secret.

During a 1980 excursion as a laborer into the Guangxi province, a musicalexperience involving an old man and a young girl electrified him: The oldman first murmured and then sang traditional music, when suddenly a "swelling scream emerged from the larynx of that delicate young girl – even today I get gooseflesh when I think about it. It was as if the souls of the mountains rose out of her throat. I knew then that that was the music I wanted to write."

Qu began composing works in which virtual inaudibility alternated with explosive outbursts, sometimes to the dismay of his teachers. He also combined European strings and winds with traditional Chinese instruments. This opera, premiered in Brussels in 1998 with great success, does require some Chinese instruments, both bowed and plucked, but it also manifests Occidental influences.

In the late ‘80s, Qu found himself receiving invitations from Europe and the U.S. He broadened his horizons during a decade in New York, where, of allplaces, he discovered "the power of silence in music. Anxiety seizes many people when all noises cease, but during the long pauses between two notes I feel the music floating in space, as if one touched the universe." He left New York in 1999 and returned to China, where he now teaches composition at the Shanghai Conservatory.

The story of "The Last String" concerns a blind Laohan who goes from village to village, teahouse to teahouse, earning what he can as a lute-playingstory-teller. Stoically he waits for the fulfillment of one of his teacher's stories, which gives the opera its title. The prophesy is that after playing long enough to have had the thousandth string break, Laohan, upon opening the lute, would find a slip of paper to open his blind eyes to the beauty of the world.

Some half a century and a thousand broken strings later, he finds inside his instrument a blank piece of paper.

Qu's score brings his lone singing protagonist and the 14 instrumentalists together in an ensemble entity, with the singer Gong Dong-jian declaimingt he roles of an entire cast of characters, ranging from resonant bass to falsetto. The instrumentalists also contribute vocally and percussively with various sizes and shapes of cymbals, gongs, rattles, and drums.

With great economy of means, the valiant Zeitgenössische Oper has brought this exotic work on stage with impressive effectiveness. The musicians sporadically become the village population; the conductor (Rüdiger Bohn,trained by Bernstein, Gardiner, and Celibidache, since 1996 first conductor in Lübeck, since 1997 also music director of the Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin) conducts the intricate score with complete security and occasionally speaks, in rote vernacular, for the village chairman. Generally things tend to move at a glacial pace, but tension and interest rarely flag.

Gong Dong-jian, a New York resident who in 1989 won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions and has sung at the New York City Opera as well as the Vienna State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the Cologne Opera, brings off a virtuoso solo performance bordering on the overpowering, which the audience appropriately acclaimed. Sabina Hölzer staged the work with deft simplicity, only occasionally marred by an inclination toward affectation, in Etienne Pluss's spare but apposite decor. Qu Ping, who makes a brief appearance, danced his own effective choreography. Excessively prolix supertitles abetted comprehension to a certain extent, although mounted so high as to make seeing them something of a strain.

Paul Moor

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