“Once we boiled it down to that love triangle, it felt like it had the elements of a conventional opera.” “The thing that made it an opera is that there are very high emotions at the core of it,” says Hwang. There is also a spiritual, metaphysical layer to the story, wherein the main characters in love are reincarnations of a stone and flower having existed in a spiritual realm before coming to Earth to learn what it means to be mortal. Dream of the Red Chamber captures a time of transition as one of the world’s oldest cultures, Imperial China, is about to end. The love story is just one aspect of a more richly braided tale, one that deals with socio-political aspects of the fall of a great family, what Hwang dubs the “ House of Cards story”. I would be adapting something that would be under such a microscope from so many people who know it incredibly well, who revere it, it just seemed there were lots of opportunities to fail.” “It was daunting on so many levels with too many characters – over 400 in the novel – to be boiled down. “I initially didn’t want to do this,” says David Henry Hwang, the celebrated American playwright who co-wrote the opera libretto with the composer Bright Sheng. Can this American opera attract a new audience to this timeless Chinese classic? But now the book has been adapted into a lavish new opera, which has its world premiere at San Francisco Opera on 10 September, with six performances in all. And yet in the west, the novel remains virtually unknown (as Michael Wood commented in these pages earlier this year). In world terms the novel is said to rank alongside such masterpieces as Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Dream of the Red Chamber is considered to be China’s greatest novel – an 18th-century epic by Cao Xueqin that runs to 2,500 pages in translation – so much so that an entire field of literary study in China known as “redology” is devoted to that novel alone.
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