Word: emperor
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...happened to glance into a crowded elevator in the lobby of New York's Metropolitan Opera last month at the world premiere of The First Emperor. Before the doors closed I had just a second to register the familiar face and stocky figure of Henry Kissinger. Why should I be surprised? It was only natural that the men who, as President Nixon's Secretary of State, had opened relations between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China should be in attendance at Lincoln Center for the Met's first-ever opera by a Chinese composer-conductor...
...that glittering opening night of The First Emperor as a movie-critic. The title role is sung by Placido Domingo, who in the 80s displayed his celebrated tenor in movie versions of Cavallieri Rusticana, Pagliacci, La Traviata and Otello, all directed by Franco Zeffirelli. But I was mainly interested in the Chinese connection. I wanted to see ? hear, really ? what Tan Dun, the gifted composer who had won an Oscar for his scoring of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, would do with his epic subject. I also was eager to see the production, since it was to be staged by Zhang...
...EMPEROR'S WALL...
...Like Hairspray and Piazza, and a hundred others I could name, The First Emperor is a remake of a movie for the musical stage. So let's talk first about The Emperor's Shadow. It dramatizes an episode in the legend of the warlord who united the disparate Chinese tribes in 310 B.C. and ordered the erection of what would become the Great Wall. (Zhang told another fable of the first Emperor in Hero.) His name has a dozen transliterations, but we'll settle for the Met's spelling, Qin Shi Huangdi ? and, from now on, call him the warlord...
Standing before Mukesh Mehta’s household adornments (in Montana, mind you, on the cusp of 2006), I gesture to the telltale gold-fringed palanquin and the turbaned figure of the emperor. I note how he is enveloped by a halo. A Mughal durbar, I tell Mukesh. Maybe Jahangir. Perhaps Akbar. But certainly not Aurangzeb—he didn’t go for this artsy-fartsy stuff...