About five years ago, I posted my reaction to having heard Tan Dun's opera
*Marco Polo to this list.  I could no longer retrieve it from the Website
archives and thought it might be of interest again, especially for those
who don't recall it.  I've edited it slightly.

Listening at that time to the Sony recording of Tan Dun's *Marco Polo*, I
was overwhelmed w/ aural euphoria.

The composer, who also conducted, was born in Hunan, China in 1957, paid
his dues during the cultural revolution planting rice for two years, worked
as an arranger and (as the liner notes say) "fiddle-player" in a Beijing
opera troupe and at nineteen, upon hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for
the first time, began to dream of becoming a composer.  He was admitted to
the Central Conservatory in Beijing a year later and received a fellowship
at Columbia University in NYC in 1986, where he completed a doctoral
program in musical composition.  The liner notes also attribute to him a
*Ghost Opera* for the Kronos Quartet, which I know I've heard, but cannot
now retrieve from my uncatalogued CD's.  I don't recall being that
impressed by it.

Maybe it was the mood I happened to be in; maybe because I was playing
*Marco Polo* on better equipment (our living room equipment and not on my
CD-ROM drive), maybe my receptivity has changed, or maybe *Marco Polo* is
just a more memorable work, but listening to it was almost an epiphany.

Don't try too hard to understand the plot or the libretto.  The text, by
Paul Griffiths, who is apparently a well-known, translater, critic, writer,
and editor (who's been on the New Grove's editorial team) sounded to me
like some Dadaist writing from the 20's.  This was obviously not a tale
told by an idiot as, although it seemed to signify nothing, it wasn't full
of sound or fury.  The work is described as "*An Opera* within an opera",
although why is not clear.  There are certainly no nested stages a la
Pagliacci.  The composer explains it in the liner notes as "two operas
occurring simultaneously....[one] developed on Eastern opera vocal and
instrumental traditions....[the other], on Western opera traditions
blending and layering different musical styles, colors, and languages,
using both Eastern and Western instruments." I wouldn't call either
"within" the other.  Oriental and Occidental seemed to flow into each other
in Moebius fashion and the effect was electrifying.Marco and Polo are two
characters Polo, a dramatic tenor, sung by Thomas Young is the memory of
Marco, sung by Alexandra Montano, a mezzo.  She and Kublai Khan, sung by
Dong-Jian Gong, a bass, are the only "real people" in the opera; the rest
are supernatural beings or memory.  Aside from Polo, they are Water, sung
by Susan Botti, soprano, Shadow-1 (Rustichello & Li Po), sung by Shi-Zheng
Chen, a Beijing Opera Singer, Shadow-2 (Sheherazada & Mahler & Queen), sung
by Nina Warren, a dramatic soprano, and Shadow-3 (Dante & Shakespeare),
sung by Stephen Bryant, Baritone.  Tan Dun conducts the Netherlands Radio
Kamerorkest w/ Ya Dong, Pipa, Wolfram Winkel, Tabla, and Al Gromer Khan,
Sitar, and Daniel Reuss leads the Capella Amsterdam.  We know who's Mahler
because he sings "Wenn nur ein Traum das Leben ist...." And we know Li Po
because he sings perhaps the only Chinese passage (maybe even the one from
which the Mahler text had been translated) and from the allusion to
uncertainty whether he was awake and had dreamt he was a butterfly or was
indeed a butterfly currently dreaming he was Li Po.  We know Shakespeare
because he sings "we are such stuff as dreams are made on".  And I assume
the lines sung by Dante are from his writings as well.  But if any of this
has anything to do w/ Marco Polo's voyages from Venice to China, I failed
to pick it up.  Indeed, if the text had any discernible meaning at all, I
failed to pick that up as well.

But what the opera *did* accomplish was a totally ravishing and
incandescent blending and presentation of what I assume are Eastern
and contemporary Western musical styles.  (Perhaps this was supposed to
symbolize some joining of Eastern and Western cultures that Marco Polo was
believed to have accomplished.  If so, I think the symbolism illusory as
I don't believe Marco Polo accomplished any such thing.) I've attended
Chinese operas and tried to appreciate them as a courtesy to my wife's
relatives and it has never sounded so exquisite to me as the ventures into
Eastern music that I heard last night.  What had in past performances
sounded to me like purely mechanical voice-cracking falsetto glissandos,
devoid of real feeling, here came out as superbly controled emotion-charged
warbles of musical beauty.  These episodes were worked in w/ corresponding
episodes of music in contemporary style which I thought were equally
exquisite.  Not once while I was listening did my mind start to wander,
wondering why the composer had chosen those notes as peculiarly appropriate
at the point in question instead of some others.  Nothing seemed out of
place and...the truer test, nothing seemed trite or predictable.

The liner notes seemed somewhat cryptic about the composer's musical life.
If hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the first time at age 19 after a
two-year stint at forced labor was actually his first exposure to Western
music, after which he won admission to the Central Conservatory, followed
in short order by completion of doctoral program in composition on a
fellowship at Columbia, I'd think his achievements could fairly be
described as genial.

Walter Meyer