ESSAYS | The Korean Diaspora (Opera Magazine)
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| Opera Magazine, October 2019 |
In March alone this year, three Korean names stood out in the principal casts of three different productions at the Vienna Staatsoper. The renowned bass Kwangchul Youn sang Fiesco in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, alongside Plácido Domingo in the title role. Yonghoon Lee, who has come under the spotlight during his stints at the Met, was Turiddu in Cavalleria rusticana. And Jongmin Park (32), winner of the 2011 International Tchaikovsky Competition when he was only 24, took the title role in Le nozze di Figaro.
Germany and Italy are regular destinations for promising Korean singers seeking to gain stage experience. In the past, Italy was the preferred of the two, given its perceived status as the birthplace of opera. Sumi Jo, one of Korea’s earliest singers to win success in Europe, began her international career in Italy. Yet recent vicissitudes in the southern European country’s political and economic fortunes, especially to the detriment of its theatre culture, has meant the shifting of preferences to Germany. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to encounter Korean singers throughout German opera-house ensembles. Typically, these singers arrive in Germany having gained music degrees in Korea, aiming first for further training and then to gain experience in local companies. Some seek further opportunities by entering international competitions; many remain contracted to their local opera houses.
Koreans often excel in international competitions. If Seong-Jin Cho, the winner of the 2015 International Chopin Piano Competition, is a good example of a Korean musician excelling in instrumental categories, achievements in vocal categories are not far behind. This year, for example, the baritone Kihoon Kim took second place in the male vocal category of the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Beyond the 19th-century repertoire of Wagner and Verdi, singers including Sunhae Im are making their names in early music.
The noticeable number of Korean singers working in Europe is often considered surprising, given that Korea is a small peninsula nation geographically, culturally and linguistically remote from Europe. How did opera, a mainstay of Western culture, become an object of such affection and attention in Korea?
It was in the early 20th century, during the Japanese occupation, that formal education in Western classical music first entered the Korean curriculum. In the mid 19th century Japan had been the first Asian country to open its ports to the West, and the continuous influx of Western culture into Japan eventually found its way to Korea too. This was an interesting time for Korean culture. Korean traditions coexisted with those of the West in everyday life—for example, Korean traditional clothing could be seen worn alongside Western evening shirts. With independence from the Japanese in 1945 came a period of military rule by the United States, and there was a new wave of popularity in classical music and opera, especially among military personnel, doctors and arts enthusiasts. Nevertheless, full opera productions were still unheard of in Korea at this time.
The roots of the first Western opera production in Korea can be traced back to the efforts of the medically-trained tenor Inseon Lee. Captivated by Western opera at a time when no actual performances were available in his home country, Lee found his way to Italy in 1931, where he was trained in the bel canto tradition. Seven years later he returned, and a series of acclaimed solo recitals led him to become recognized as one of Asia’s greatest tenors. Following Korea’s independence from Japan, Lee founded the International Opera Company, which he partially funded himself. The company’s staging of Verdi’s La traviata on 16 January 1948, with Lee himself as Alfredo, was the first official Western opera production in Korea. The occasion was met by a delighted response from audience and press alike, with the latter reflecting the excitement of encountering an art form previously accessible only through recordings.
Singing and dancing are essential to the Korean character. That noraebang, where people pay to sing along to their music of choice—the Korean equivalent of karaoke—is one of the most popular pastimes is no surprise. Then there is the unique appeal of opera as a conglomeration of song and theatre. In the early days, some singers and music enthusiasts sold property, even their houses, to raise money to put on productions.
Today there are around 100 opera companies in Korea, of which 20 put on productions regularly. Many of these can be seen performing at the annual Korea Opera Festival, held each spring at the Seoul Arts Center. Alongside repertoire classics by Verdi and Puccini, the festival also includes premieres and original works by Korean composers. This year’s programme, for instance, included two original works based on Korean historical texts, one of them a popular eighth-century poem-song shiga that outlines the sadness and ultimate forgiveness of a woman waiting for her husband on a moonlit night. Accessibility is also an agenda; the festival’s production of Così fan tutte had all the recitatives in Korean. The likes of La traviata, Rigoletto, Carmen, La Bohème, Madama Butterfly and Die Zauberflöte usually sell out.
When I interview visiting musicians from outside Korea, they often ask me how the country produces so many excellent voices and such well-prepared orchestras. Many of them assume it must be down to Korea’s education system. That is true to some extent, but subtleties abound. In Korea, it is common for children to be exposed to a culture of stringent competition from a young age, in every field. There exist strict hierarchies among universities, and because of the belief that one’s position within the hierarchy has crucial consequences in one’s life, people are motivated to reach the top. For this reason Korean students, certainly more than their Western counterparts, are drilled into a culture of being fed knowledge that they absorb uncritically, and of being constantly tested on it. Given the absolute importance attached to the virtue of diligence and the motto ‘practice makes perfect’, music-making, which depends so much on practice, is accordingly of high quality.
In Korea, most students with musical interests advance into higher education by entering music departments within larger university bodies, from which it is possible to major in vocal studies. This stands in contrast to institutes specializing in music, such as conservatories. Each year’s crop of graduates includes a vast number of students trained in vocal techniques, aural skills, harmony, music history, and Italian, German, French and/or English diction. The sheer number of competing candidates means that many then seek opportunities abroad. In fact, many consider it essential to be immersed and trained in cultures with rich opera histories, since extra-musical elements such as acting, language execution and historically embedded traditions, cannot reliably be acquired purely through the Korean system.
Prior to entering university, many of these students will have passed through secondary schools that specialize in the arts. But even for those who do not enter specialized education, music is mandatory starting from primary school. Children are taught about the major Western composers, from Bach and Handel to Britten, and are tested on recognizing excerpts and on singing and/or instrumental performance at the end of each term. Even though recent political trends have led to a decrease in emphasis on music in the curriculum, most Koreans, as a consequence of such education, are familiar with vocal works including famous arias and Schubert Lieder.
These practices may present Korea as a potent operatic nation on paper, but the reality is that the number of active opera-goers is still tiny given that the nation has a population of around 50 million. Those involved in productions prepare for months, with rehearsals lasting four to five weeks, yet a production receives on average only four to five performances. There are no opera houses in Korea—at least, not in the European sense of a venue committed solely to lyric theatre. Concert halls with orchestra pits and presentable acoustics do exist; but what is lacking is a theatre with exclusively contracted singers, a pit orchestra, ballet, chorus and repertoire system. Korea’s largest operating opera company, the Korea National Opera, stages most of its performances on the opera stage of the Seoul Arts Center. This venue has a capacity of around 2,000, so four performances at maximum capacity would play to no more than 8,000 people. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the active opera-going population of Korea is not much more than 10,000.
This was something the German musicologist and critic Stephan Mösch pointed to after he came to Seoul in May for the Korea National Opera’s production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, the opera’s first staging in Korea. ‘Why’, he wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ‘do only three performances take place when Seoul has a population of 10 million?’. A similar fate awaited the first Korean staging of Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in July. I worked as dramaturg on both productions, and hence witnessed first-hand the pains that went into each—all for a handful of performances.
Not everything in Korean opera happens in Seoul. Two hours by train from the capital, with a population of 2.5 million, the city of Daegu is this autumn hosting the 17th successive annual Daegu International Opera Festival. With high-quality productions and management, the festival regularly houses productions from Germany and Austria in particular, and facilitates collaborations involving the Daegu Opera House. September saw the first Korean performance of La rondine, presented by the Deutsche Oper Berlin and directed by Rolando Villazón.
There is little doubt that Korea is a country that produces a great number of individual vocal talents. While improvements in both vocal education and the theatre system promise further invigoration of the country’s operatic culture, when or how that will happen remains to be seen.
We are grateful for the additional input of Young-Jin Hur in the preparation of this article.
Yongsook Lee
Translation, etc.: Young-Jin Hur
[The article appears in the October 2019 issue of Opera Magazine]