Word: yun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...early 1967, life was finally beginning to fall into place for Yun. After eleven difficult years of studying and composing in Europe, he was now hearing his works performed and praised; commissions were starting to come in. That June however, Yun and his wife vanished from their home in West Berlin. They turned up next as prisoners facing a treason trial in their native South Korea. They had been abducted by agents of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who at the time were rounding up South Korean intellectuals and students by the dozen in Europe as alleged spies...
...plucky South Korean government is under constant threat from the Communist North, and so its fears about spies are justified. Still, Yun insisted that he had gone to East Berlin only to inquire about an old friend in North Korea. His illegal "espionage" trip had been merely to examine a 4th century tomb at Nangnang, which was to be the locale of Butterfly Widow, the second part of Dreams. Unimpressed, a Seoul tribunal sentenced him to life imprisonment; it gave his wife a three-year term, then suspended it and allowed her to return to their two teenage children...
After 24 composers-including Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen-had signed a petition on his behalf, Yun was allowed to resume composing behind bars. The Bonn government, angered by Seoul's cloak-and-dagger tactics on German soil, threatened to suspend its $25 million program of economic aid. South Korea first reduced Yun's stiff sentence to 15 years, then to ten, and last month decided to free him. He is expected to leave for Germany next month...
Giant Butterfly. A cultural hero's welcome awaits him. At the premiere of Dreams, the audience demanded 31 curtain calls. Critics raved about Yun's prodigious orchestral and vocal writing and his intuitive knack for fantasy. The first work, Dreams of Liu-tung, depicts the adventures of a frivolous student who is converted to Taoism when a magician conjures up four dreams that chillingly depict his fate. Butterfly Widow is a comedy about a high-court functionary, Chan-tse, who dreams each night that he is a beautiful giant butterfly. A philosopher tells Chan-tse that...
Despite the ingenuousness of the plots, Yun's serial music, with its Oriental overtones, is so inscrutable that the orchestra and offstage chorus required no fewer than 30 rehearsals. Yun's use of twelve-tone rows is as free as his theatrical fantasy. The singers often had to master unaccompanied vocal lines, and the orchestra itself was augmented by whips, rattles and bells. At the end, as color projections were flashed onto a transparent curtain, boulder-size clusters of tone shot from the orchestra, and twelve percussion instruments went wild with pings, thumps, roars and growling glissandi. Then...