Two young Chinese sopranos are making a stunning debut on the Paris opera scene, sharing the lead in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, one of opera’s most challenging and taxing female roles.
Despite growing up in a China still closed to Western influences and scarred by the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Liping (32) and He Hui (33) are emerging as two of the brightest talents to watch on the opera scene.
Both vividly remember the first time they heard sweeping renditions of Western opera, so different to the ears after being steeped since childhood in the traditional strains of the centuries-old Beijing Opera.
For both it was the music of Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi that seduced them and set them on a course that in little more than a decade has seen them sing in some of the world’s great opera houses.
“The first time I heard La Traviata … I just sat there and cried,” Zhang said. “It touched me deeply in my heart. I didn’t understand the words, and I didn’t understand what she was singing.
“But there was something in that voice which really touched me. From that moment I think I started to somehow realise what my future was going to be,” she said, readily admitting that “singing is my life, without it I don’t think I could survive”.
For He, it was Verdi’s sumptuous Aida, the tale of an Ethiopian princess captured and brought into slavery in Egypt, that enraptured her.
“It immediately opened a door on to a new world. It was so different,” said the Shanghai-based soprano.
It must have been fate. In 2000, she was awarded second prize at the Placido Domingo’s Operalia International Competition, followed two years later by first prize in the International Voci Verdiane (Verdi’s Voice).
And in 2000, at the age of 26, He sang her first professional role in the very first production of Aida in China, performed in a Shanghai football stadium with a 3 000-strong cast, including elephants and lions.
“It was very exciting for me. A few years earlier I had just been a music teacher in Xian and here I am singing for the first time on stage,” she said.
Both women have had to train hard in Chinese conservatories to achieve their success, but remain quite matter of fact about their talent, never doubting that they are destined for great things.
Zhang, originally from Wuhan, loved to sing from an early age, and would happily imitate all the roles from the Beijing Opera, which her father often whisked her off to see after school.
After completing her musical studies in China, she moved to Canada and then London. But following the birth of her son in 1999, she decided to move back to Beijing to join her husband and now spends her time commuting between opera houses around the world and the Chinese capital.
“Sometimes I do feel that I’m between two cultures squeezing me,” she said with a laugh, of her career that has taken her to London’s Convent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, among many other theatres.
“I wake up in the morning, who am I, where am I, what am I doing? But it’s really fascinating for me. It’s a totally different world.
“You see people, they speak a different language and they eat different things from you. But the notion of love that we are talking about on stage, the feelings of the human being, is the same.”
He is also getting used to living out of a suitcase since her European debut in Italy in 2002.
“It’s hard work. There are always a lot of flights, a lot of hotels. But it’s my choice and I like my job.”
In Paris at the Opera de Bastille, the two women are sharing the role of Cio-Cio San, the little Japanese who is seduced and finally abandoned by a United States officer, played here by the Italian tenor Marco Berti.
It’s a demanding and dramatic role, with Cio-Cio on stage from beginning to end, and Zhang admitted that it is one she avoided for many years, not believing she was ready.
“I said no for many years. You have to be careful how you are going to sing this role. You have to pace yourself on stage … If you are not careful, you can overuse your voice; that’s the first danger. And you can be overwhelmed by the emotion.”
But on opening night in the production by American director Bob Wilson, she proved an instant hit, drawing a long standing ovation.
He makes her debut on Monday, and while she said she does not feel nervous she said she believes Paris audiences will be quite discerning.
The two women’s diaries are already booked up well into next year, with Zhang performing next in Oslo, before planned appearances in Covent Garden and the Met in New York.
He is also excited about a forthcoming performance in January 2007 in Tel Aviv in which she will play Leonore in Verdi’s Le Trouvere.
Zhang, as well a juggling her role as international opera star, mother and wife “to a traditional Chinese man”, last year became director of the vocal department in Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music, where she originally studied.
It has given her a new mission — to hand down her knowledge of Western opera to a new generation.
“I still see something that’s not quite right in China in the whole opera field, so I would like to try to do something for them. I want to bring the concept of the Western opera to China, to share that with the public in China.
“They haven’t really realised what is the beauty of Western opera.” — AFP