University Opera Theatre stages 'Dream of the Red Chamber'

The Chinese Heritage Foundation of Minneapolis/St. Paul and the San Francisco Opera commissioned the work, based on an 18th-century Chinese novel.

By Rob Hubbard Star Tribune

November 19, 2024 — 6:30am

It was an idea launched at lunch.

Early this century, Pearl Bergad, a retired University of Minnesota research biologist, was having lunch with Linda Hoeschler, then executive director of the American Composers Forum. Hoeschler said that she had minored in Chinese at college, and the two soon realized they shared a fondness for one of Chinese literature's epic 18th-century novels, Cao Xueqin's "Dream of the Red Chamber," an expansive story on the rise and fall of a family.

"We both said, 'Wouldn't it be fantastic to turn this novel with 3,000 characters into a grand opera?'" Bergad said recently. "Since it was published two centuries ago, it's been produced in all art forms in China. Plays, Peking opera, Cantonese opera. The one treatment it's never received is Western-style grand opera."

Bergad brought the idea of commissioning such an opera to the Minneapolis-based Chinese Heritage Foundation, which is devoted to the celebration of Chinese culture.

"Why don't we use a heart-wrenching story with a universal theme?" Bergad argued. "Of people caught in a big web of wealth and tradition and restrictions. And seeing what a 21st-century eye would see in this story. And how it could relate to the current generation of young people."

With the help of San Francisco Opera, the foundation commissioned composer Bright Sheng and librettist David Henry Hwang to write "Dream of the Red Chamber," which premiered at that company's home venue in 2016, toured China and was revived in 2022.

Now the opera is coming to the area where the idea was conceived, as the University of Minnesota's University Opera Theatre is presenting a version reorchestrated for a smaller ensemble, with the San Francisco Opera's expansive set scaled down to fit within Ted Mann Concert Hall. The production, sung in English, will be presented Thursday through Sunday.

It was Kevin Smith — who was preparing to retire from his leadership post at Minnesota Opera — who connected Bergad and the Chinese Heritage Foundation with the San Francisco Opera's general director, David Gockley. And it was Gockley who suggested the China-born, now U.S.-based Sheng as composer.

"When David Gockley first approached me about adapting this as an opera, my first instinct was, 'Oh, no, this is impossible to do,'" Sheng said in a 2016 San Francisco Opera promotional video. "Immediately, I thought of David Hwang."

"And I said no," Hwang said. "Because how can you do that? It's 50 major characters, 600 characters altogether. Six volumes. How do you make it into a two- or two-and-a-half-hour opera?"

Sheng said he replied, "Look, someone's got to do this. And I think you and I could do this really well."

And the resounding response of audiences and critics suggests they were right. It helped that they brought in a brilliant designer in Tim Yip, who won an Oscar for art direction for the 2000 film, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and whose "New Orientalist" style shaped a 2023 Minneapolis Institute of Art exhibit, "Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes."

Yip returned to the Twin Cities in February to help University Opera Theatre director David Walsh adapt his design to Ted Mann. Similarly, Sheng agreed to Walsh's idea of paring the story down to its central love triangle. The production is also using the same choreographer as San Francisco's production, Zhongmei Li.

The performers are all China-born graduate students in the University of Minnesota School of Music who studied the novel "Dream of the Red Chamber" in school in China.

"Even with this scaled-down version, it's by far the biggest and most difficult thing that I've ever attempted here by far," said Walsh, who's been director of University Opera Theatre for 22 years. "But it's a fantastic story, a terrific opera."