Kaohsiung hosts the World Games in July, a huge gathering featuring sports not included in the Olympics. And just in time for the arrival of the world’s sports journalists and camera crews, Taiwan’s second city has completed its vast new World Games Stadium, which is capable of seating 40,000 and boasts 8,844 solar panels.
The Opening Ceremony of the games (on July 16) will be much like an Olympic opening ceremony. But the Inaugural Concert that opens the stadium on Wednesday will be an all-classical affair. It features the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera Choir and Taiwan’s National Experimental Chorus (國立實驗合唱團) performing Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth symphonies and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which ends with the firing of guns.
But why should an ultra-modern, eco-friendly building, constructed in Asia, celebrate its inauguration with acoustic music written 200 years ago in distant Europe? Why not a massive pop concert with some of the region’s top bands? Or, if classical music is to be favored, why not something contemporary featuring living composers, including Taiwan’s composers?
There are arguments on both sides, of course. This, I imagine, might be the case for the prosecution: In Asia, classical music is often associated with status. Well-heeled audiences arrive in large cars and pay handsomely to watch famous names. Classical music represents affluence, and it’s not surprising that Kaohsiung’s city fathers should pick it to open their extremely expensive new building.
They’ve predictably opted for tried and tested items with a guaranteed social cachet. Beethoven seems about right — his Ninth Symphony, after all, ends with a massive, if strident, vocal number with four roaring soloists and a chorus that can be as big as you want. (It’s routinely performed in Taipei’s Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (國父紀念館) with seven hundred or eight hundred singers).
In addition, because foreign things are often thought in Taiwan to be better than their local equivalents, no one will be surprised to see an American orchestra and a European chorus. Both will have been flown in and housed at immense cost, but then conspicuous consumption, especially in these difficult times, is very much the name of the game.
Finally, why choose labor-intensive old-style acoustic music when it will have to be electronically amplified (using those solar panels) to fill such a vast space anyway?
So, what is the case for the defense?
Essentially, that this aging foreign music has world standing. The last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the celebrated (if sometimes decried) Ode to Joy, is, after all, the EU’s transnational anthem, and was also closely associated with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. In that context it was a hymn to liberty too, and Kaohsiung may also be making a veiled point in selecting it.
Then there is the consideration that Taiwan is preeminent in Asia in all aspects of classical music performance. But, this being the case, why not employ all Taiwanese musicians? This is an argument that will be kept carefully hidden by the defense attorneys.
So, let the party begin. It would certainly have been a more riotous one with other kinds of music. But it will be a great day for Taiwan anyway, and the less musically inclined, plus those for whom Beethoven and Tchaikovsky would never have been first choice, will simply have to sit back and endure.
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