| The story of the chamber opera Wu Kong -- Encounter White Bone comes from Journey to the West, a Chinese classical novel by Wu Cheng'en (1501--82). The composer herself constructed the libretto, basing it on her interpretation of the story from a modern point of view. Drawing on a Buddhist context, the essential idea of the newly interpreted story is to evoke self-recognition and an understanding of life as a journey. The story raises an awareness of the possibility of faith and fate serving as ruling factors in one's life. Furthermore, it raises the question of whether or not they should function in this way. This serious philosophical subject matter is revealed through various approaches, including sarcastic irony, allusion, contrast, hyperbole, comedy, and tragedy. These methods are juxtaposed and combined in order to present conflicts and relationships among the various characters in the opera and to depict their individual inner worlds. Furthermore, influenced by the Chinese culture of symbolism and drama, finer points of the narrative are often presented in a non-literal manner and many hidden metaphors are imbedded in both the libretto and the music. An example of this method is the three monks' spring song in the first scene of act II, which implies three different types of yearning for women through contrasting singing styles and instrumental accompaniments.;Honoring the Western operatic tradition, Wu Kong -- Encounter White Bone consists of an instrumental prelude and interludes, monologue, ensembles, arias, and recitatives, all of which are integrated into six scenes in two acts. The defining characteristics of this opera are: 1) it is sung in Chinese, and 2) the composer plays with the intonations, (multiple) meanings, and pronouncing timbres of Chinese words at several levels, in order to shape the melodic contours and the characters, and to build up the work's overall musical-dramatic structure. Instead of following the operatic convention in which the recitative is based on a narrow intervallic range, recitative in this opera has a wide intervallic range drawn from the intonation of spoken Chinese. |
