At last, recognition for a musical patriot

The quality and quantity of Kuo Chih-yuan's (郭芝苑) works could have ranked him among the top composers in 20th century Taiwan. However, Kuo remained obscure nearly until his 81st birthday when he won a Lifetime Contribution Golden Melody award last year in a cultural and political climate keen on honoring everything Taiwanese. His family in Yuanli Township (苑裡), the small, quiet town on the border between Miaoli and Taichung where Kuo resides, have since campaigned to rename the street where Kuo lives after the patriotic Taiwanese composer.

As a tribute to the old master, the CKS Cultural Center is holding a Kuo Chih-yuan Music Festival (郭芝苑樂展) tonight at the National Concert Hall. At the performance, the National Symphony Orchestra, soprano Hsu Huei-Cheng (林惠珍) and tenor Huo Lei (火磊) will perform Great Taipei March (大台北進行曲), Overture to Taiwanese Festivals (台灣吉慶序曲) and numbers from the operetta Hsu Hsian and Lady Bai (許仙與白娘娘). The last, completed in 1984, was the first opera written by a Taiwanese composer. It's one of Kuo's two operas, the other being another folk-legend-themed Cowherd and the Weaving Maid (牛郎織女).

The work that took nine years to finish started as a commission from an artist in Europe for an opera adoption of the Chinese folk tail White Snake in 1975. As no one in the country had worked on operas before, the process was all trial and error. Both Kuo and his poet friend Chan Yi-chuan (詹益川), who worked on the libretto, found the intricate plot twists and many scenes of duels employing supernatural powers extremely difficult to put on stage as an opera. As the two worked feverishly on the formidable task, the woman who commissioned the work disappeared, leaving the two feeling tricked and almost putting an end to the project.

"Chan said to me, `Never mind that she fooled us. This is an opportunity to work on an opera. We don't have to be afraid, since no one in the country knows how to [compose an opera]. What matters is that we've started on the work, and there probably will never be a Chinese opera if we don't do it,'" Kuo wrote in Music Digest magazine in 1985, about how the two carried on with the project despite the difficulties.

Kuo mingled Chinese flavor and Western compositional techniques in the five-act opera. To allow the pioneering opera as many performance opportunities as possible, Kuo intentionally made both the vocal and orchestral scores highly accessible. "If a great opera remains unperformed, it's useless. We have to perform the works well and often so that there will be famous Chinese operas," Kuo wrote.

Still, the groundbreaking opera remained untapped until 1999, when Shih Chien University's Department of Music staged it for the first time in Taipei on a limited budget. The critical response was mixed. "As this was the first opera of its kind in Taiwan, no one had any idea about suitable stage settings and other technical details. The vocalists had no experience in this genre either. But I am thankful the opera was staged at all, otherwise it would still be unknown today," Kuo said over tea with the press in his traditional one-storey red-brick house in Yuanli, where he lives with his two sons.

"It's especially difficult to find vocalists for the opera because most vocalists are not willing to spend time memorizing the complete vocal score of an opera which they would probably never have to perform again. This is not a world-famous opera like Madam Butterfly," Kuo said.