A scene from San Francisco Opera's Dream of the Red Chamber.

One of China’s greatest classical novels—Dream of the Red Chamber has been adapted hundreds of times for film and television. For the first time however, an English-language opera version has been created, thanks to the efforts of Chinese American artists.

The second-largest opera company in North America, the San Francisco Opera, held six performances between Sept. 10 and 29. This new operatic adaptation of Dream of the Red Chamber was highly successful and has been praised as a strong example of how Chinese stories can be made relatable to foreign audiences.

The over-400 characters of the original tale have been whittled down to just seven members in the two-act opera, which ran for two hours and 20 minutes.

The opera revolves around the mythological Stone and Flower, who come down to earth from heaven. Bao Yu is the incarnation of the ancient divine stone, and Dai Yu is the crimson pearl flower, who is also Bao Yu’s beautiful cousin and soul mate. The pair fall in love, but Bao Yu’s mother orders him to marry another cousin, named Bao Chai. Bao Yu is defiant. The climax of the opera comes when the bride is switched: Instead of his love Dai Yu, Bao Yu lifts the veil to discover Bao Chai. Dai Yu drowns herself in a lake, and Bao Yu decides to become a monk.

The tale has many parallels to Romeo and Juliet—a tale that provides a window through which Western audiences can interpret Dream of the Red Chamber.

One obvious reason for the play’s success is the dream-team, including MacArthur Award-winning composer Bright Sheng, Oscar-winner art director Tim Yip, famous director Stan Lai and Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. They are all world-renowned artistic figures with Chinese backgrounds.

Sheng, for example, is a composer known for his skillful synthesis of traditional Chinese and Western musical styles. Even before he took on this task, the Shanghai-born artist had already read the book several times and was already what he called a “dilettante Redologist,” a nickname for the literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to studying the novel.

Given the many interpretations of the classic novel, the team, after long conversations, decided to render the opera into a simple love triangle, ignoring the political elements, including the rise and fall of the clans and other issues. This was because an opera should boil down the material to one major element, Sheng said.

The next step was adopting music to tell the story. Sheng said that they chose the neo-classical approach to write the opera and made use of musical instruments of Chinese Peking Opera like gongs, together with qin (or guqin), an ancient plucked zither consisting of a narrow box strung with seven silk strings, to express the delicate emotions of Dai Yu. Because Western opera is based on creating music to attract audiences, they cut half of the poem “Burial Flowers” by Dai Yu and used rhythm to convey the player’s unique inner feelings.

As costume and set director, Yip sought to create a dreamlike effect with the sets. He used handmade costumes with a single dominant color to highlight the characters and used translucent materials to show scenes involving illusions.

Like the star-studded Asian production crew, the creative team consists of seven key performers who are all of an Asian background. They are all top performers in this field. The Shanghai-born Chinese tenor Yijie Shi, who plays Bao Yu, has won several international vocal competitions, and South Korean soprano Pureum Jo, who plays Dai Yu, is a Houston Grand Opera studio artist.

Xiao Xiayong, cultural consul at the Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco, speaks highly of the opera and praises Shi’s excellent performance. He said that the San Francisco Opera has paid great attention to the opera, which conducted the marketing and promotion work long before the opera’s premiere as well as organized six lectures and seminars for the production.