OperaHK's Das Land des Lächelns by Franz Lehar
Das Land des Lächelns by Franz Lehar' style='height: 300px'>Opera should not always be taken too literally. Franz Lehár’s The Land of Smiles—which identifies China as a country where true feelings must be hidden behind a smiling mask—is a case in point.
Das Land des Lächelns, as it is titled in German, is the story of a doomed love affair between the Viennese Countess Lisa and the Chinese Prince Sou-Chong. They meet in Vienna, have a flirtation and when Sou-Chong is abruptly called back to Peking, she goes with him, not heeding the warnings about the incompatibility of East and West. Love doesn’t conquer all, for Sou-Chong is required, according to a tradition I must admit I was previously unaware of, to marry four other wives. He states this will be a mere formality, but Lisa isn’t buying it.
The Land of Smiles takes place 1912, when something rather important was happening in China; there is not a whiff of this in the operetta. Lehár’s China is an exotic place of yellow jackets and mandarins that floats somewhere out of time.
When Lisa decides to leave, Sou-Chong prevents her. “Ich bin dein Herr!” he declaims. “I am your master!”
“Herr?” asks the evidently liberated Lisa (The Land of Smiles dates from 1929) and with this question, the love between them is blown out. In an exchange that is astonishingly nasty, Sou-Chong—quoting Confucius—says that in China, she belongs to him. Lisa retorts that she now sees him as he really is.
Lehar’s China is of course one largely of the imagination, but perhaps conforming to contemporary European views of the exotic and inscrutable East. What are Asian audiences to make of this?
In OperaHK’s recent—and somewhat rare—production of The Land of Smiles, Sabina Cvilak’s Lisa exuded the frustration, exasperation and incomprehension of the trailing spouse, the expat wife, flailing in a foreign culture while the husband focuses on his career. Increasingly bored and homesick, she feels threatened by local women.
And the conflict between East and West is not so much between Lisa and Sou-Chong as within Sou-Chong himself, a struggle between a restrictive, tradition-bound past and a more individualistic, Western-inspired future: it is a struggle which, while not always manifested in romantic love, is one that many Chinese of the past century would recognize. Sou-Chong fails to reconcile the two.
This is musical theatre’s strength: the music allows audiences to reinterpret the emotions independent of any deficiencies in the plot.
{img1}
The elegant soprano Sabina Cvilak was apparently—so went a pre-performance announcement—somewhat under the weather; if so, this was barely noticeable. If she was holding herself back vocally, it was made up in interpretation: her Lisa is a credible character despite the less-than-entirely-credible situation.
The surprise of the evening was young Korean tenor Won Whi Choi, singing Sou-Chong. Choi has a big voice with a tone that makes one sit up at the first note. He has good diction was good and, aside from one bobble, admirable control. The operetta’s star-vehicle, “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz”, was delivered with aplomb.
The Land of Smiles incorporates a variety of styles—not always seamlessly—from waltzes to duets that seem to anticipate Broadway and declamatory singing that would seem to echo Richard Strauss. The tone ranges from romantic to dramatic to comedic, the last left largely to the secondary leads of Count Gustav, Lisa’s jilted Viennese suitor and Princess Mi, Sou-Chong’s sister, who falls for Gustav when he shows up in Peking to check up on Lisa; Gustav might or might not have fallen for Mi in turn. Soprano Sandy Leung and tenor James Price’s Mi and Gustav were focused more on humor than emotion, but both sang pleasantly; the duet “Meine liebe, deine liebe” was appropriately perky.
Operetta’s structure of musical set-pieces interspersed between dialogue permits adjustment for particular audiences. One particularly adept adaptation occurred during the flirtacious tea duet in first act. Lisa ladles in the sugar, a European horror which Sou-Chong gallantly ignores before discretely pouring a fresh cup.
Lehar’s attribution of blame and virtue is ambiguous: Sou-chong resorts briefly to bullying, but his love is deeper than Lisa’s; while she displays a level of feminism that is not unreasonable under the circumstances and might even be admirable, she is the one who hadn’t thought the situation through. Prince Gustav forgets his erstwhile love for Lisa as soon as he meets Mi, whom he then abandons to spirit Lisa back to Vienna.
The Land of Smiles is often called “bittersweet”, unusual for operettas which are generally supposed to end happily. But it is in fact far more bitter than sweet; unlike more dramatic operas, no one is poisoned, stabbed or jumps off a parapet, but in some ways the finale—as Sou-Chong sings Liebes Schwesterlein to his sister Mi, as each see only loneliness stretching out in front of them—is all the more tragic for that. It strikes me as fundamentally pessimistic, not so much about a fundamental incompatibility between East and West, for the work is full of the unrealized potential of East-West relationships, but rather about the inability of individuals to reach beyond themselves.