Vietnamese opera has a provenance similarly ancient to Chinese, but it's even harder to find examples of the former to watch than it is the latter. Fortunately, I stumbled upon this, with English subs and all. Nice. I should note that it's called either The Poet Queen or The Queen of Nom, depending on whether you go by the title of the video or the one that appears on-screen.
It's about a real person, Hồ Xuân Hương, an important proto-feminist poet whom I must admit I'd never heard of 'til now. But hey, neither had you! Let's be fair here. And HOLY CRUD, that diacritical over the first 'o!' Although now that I look at it, it seems to be just combined accents grave and circumflex. Is that what it is? I dunno. Anyway, the opera loosely covers her life: first, she's a teenager, and her chauvinist dad wants her to not mess with poetry and only study "the Four Feminine Virtues" (I'm a little freaked out at the idea of looking it up and seeing what said "virtues" are exactly) and then become some dude's concubine (although nothing ever comes of this idea). Then, she's hanging out with her (male) friends who are more or less accepting of her but also slightly weirded out at a woman not being "feminine" enough. Then, we move some years into the future: having buried her parents and two husbands, she's working as an innkeeper. She has a long conversation with another poet, Chieu Ho (also a real guy apparently, though you can't easily find information about him online--but here's a relevant poem), and they seem to be in love but then he leaves and she's heartbroken and I realized, boy, there's obviously some serious subtext here that I just flat-out missed. Anyway, then years later, some children are playing, and Chieu Ho (I think it's the same guy) asks them, hey, what happened to that old woman who used to sit here? And they tell him that she died. And that is about that.
Well, the story is a bit difficult. It's uneventful, and from my perspective, there's little drama. I feel like to really understand these cultures which don't seem to have any link to one's own, it's gonna be necessary to do more than interface with a few primary texts: probably gotta learn the language, absorb the culture--a long-term project, for sure.
But how about the music? I was wondering before I watched this: is this going to be very similar to Chinese opera? And to the extent that it is, is that just because of cultural osmosis, or is it because tonal languages would tend to naturally develop similar artistic forms? Well, it turns out--based on a very small sample size, it is necessary to emphasize--they're sort of similar, but not identical, even to my untrained ear. There's a lot of spoken dialogue here, but none of the sing-speaking that takes the place of recitative in Chinese opera. One thing this means is that there's none of that particular kind of female sing-speaking that I can't help but find inappropriately hilarious. And you don't have the same--what do I even call it?--flourishes of sound that Chinese opera singers use. On the whole, I'd say this is actually rather more accessible for a foreigner, and I did kind of enjoy it--though I can't deny it did become a bit monotonous at a certain point. One of the youtube commenters declares that "this is the most beautiful piece of art that i ever seen before." I'm happy for anyone who is able to have a transcendent experience like that, but I'm afraid my own reaction is a little more muted. Still thrilled to have been able to look through a window to a new kind of art, however. Wouldn't mind reading some of Hồ Xuân Hương's poetry, either.
No comments:
Post a Comment