It was to be a bold voyage into uncharted waters. The indomitable Sissy Thammer, director for several decades of an adventurous youth festival in Bayreuth, Germany, had invited me to present the European premiere of The Silent Prince there during the festival — a time that happens to coincide with the annual pilgrimage to Bayreuth and the granddaddy of all epic opera cycles.
The symbolism of this can’t be underestimated. The fifteen-hour, four-evening Ring Cycle of Richard Wagner is the reigning world champion of music drama, and the Bayreuth Festival is an icon. A year ago, I announced that The Silent Prince, Mahajanaka, and Bhuridat: The Dragon Lord would now form part of an even bigger cycle — Dasjati: Ten Lives of the Buddha, a modern recreation of the central literature of Buddhism — and a work which, if finished, would be by definition the “biggest” opera of all time as it would contain ten complete works to Wagner’s four.
To perform this work in Bayreuth in a small theater while at the same time The Ring was playing in the Festspielhaus is the height of cheek. In the festival’s opening ceremony, I said, “I am like a mouse who has been asked to play in a house of cats.”
Nevertheless, our odyssey began with a surfeit of enthusiasm and good will. We had great sponsors for the trip — Thai Bev and the BMA headlining the list — and for this Thai-German co-production we had gathered a fine cast, the best young Thai instrumentalists, and a great chorus and dance ensemble.
In addition to Bayreuth, we had managed to secure bookings in Prague and Brno as well, and, just as in Germany, these would be the first performances of a Thai opera in Czechia.
I planned to catch The Ring Cycle in Bayreuth beforehand — as a member of the Friends of Bayreuth I had managed to cadge a whopping four of the € 1,100 babies without enduring a ten-year waiting list. I left Bangkok with an advance party of some students, and it augured well when Etihad upgraded me to first class. However, within 24 hours of arriving in the Wagner capital of the universe, I’d become a victim of identity theft, my phone stolen, someone hacking my ATM card and pulling money randomly out of machines, and an amazing discovery that someone had registered as a student at USC in California under my name and using my credit cards. A mysterious person was also on my facebook account, erasing my calls for help as I typed them in. I typed to “myself” — “Bring my phone back to the Bayerischer Hof Hotel” and cancelled all my cards.
The youth festival was helpful, immediately driving me to the police. I asked them for their wi-fi so I could use the “find my phone” feature to help track the phone, but was brusquely informed by the officer: “Police stations don’t have internet! Are you crazy? This is 2016, not 3000 AD!” It was then that I realized I had truly entered what Hillary Clinton calls “an alternative universe.”
Luckily, my resourceful student managed to find internet floating somewhere in the ether, and we tracked the phone to a laundry cart in the hotel — so someone had, indeed, been reading my messages to myself. My cards were all canceled by now, and let me tell you, being “penniless in Bayreuth” is as hair-raising as being “eyeless in Gaza.”
I was hoping the production of The Ring would divert my melancholy, but despite being incredibly played and sung this was one of the most egregious examples of German “Regie Theater” — including such additions as a crocodiles eating the singers and having sex, Siegfried examining a Teddy bear to see if it had a penis, and Erda performing fellatio on Wotan in a tawdry reconstruction of the Soviet-era Alexanderplatz. The director was roundly booed, but in Germany that’s considered a badge of pride.
Things became livelier when the orchestra and singers started showing up. It was a great honour — and a lot of fun — to have invited Khun Ploypailin and her family to the final episode of The Ring Cycle at the Festspielhaus followed by the opening ceremony of the youth festival. A little touch of royalty “crowned” the festivities and reminded everyone that when Their Majesties had their state visit to Germany 56 years ago, it was to Bayreuth that the German government invited them. It’s always amazing to see people react to the Festspielhaus for their first visit and when these people are so special it’s a double thrill.
Rehearsals for The Silent Prince now began in earnest. The intimacy of the theater — our stage crew had recently worked on this same show in the huge and fully-equipped Thailand Cultural Center and were now working in a much more modest venue — was a challenge, but it proved to have advantages as well. A hand-picked cast showed off how far-reaching Thai operatic talent had become and introduced an American, an Australian, and a German to the roster of leading roles, showcasing Opera Siam’s genuinely international perspective.
The first time I heard Colleen Brooks perform the scena of Prince Temiya’s mother in Act II, I was moved to tears; she had not only mastered the technical intricacies of the Asian scales and ornaments (some appearing in an opera for the first time) but had completely integrated them into her interpretation. She truly inhabited the role. Thailand’s Nadlada Thamtanakom, a soprano with the Flemish opera in Belgium, was to receive the greatest amount of kudos from the German and Czech press for her triple performance as the Queen of Heaven, the Goddess of Illusion, and the Courtesan.
When 70 people come together to produce a work of art, drama is bound to ensue and there was plenty of it. But the opera was coming together splendidly. At least one international critic had shown up in Bayreuth to cover the opening, and we had sent a mass email to Wagner societies so that those watching The Ring would realize there was another opera to see this year as well.
Some of our instrumentalists had agreed to put on some “teaser” concerts — so our young soloists all had a chance to perform Thai and German music in a “song evening” in a beautiful church — and the award-winning Shounen-Thai quartet played their signature Shostakovitch Eighth in two concerts. Another of our chamber groups put together a wild performance of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, and both events were well reviewed.
The bombshell came when the whole troupe had been in Bayreuth for about four days. We were all waiting, you see, for BMA’s payment to come through. The paperwork had been prepared very thoroughly, but with such speed that all the members of the production had to sign and provide their ID numbers on the very day they were travelling.
We have had issues with BMA in the past, but this time, it had been all been very positive. The heads of several departments had come to the meeting to figure out the most expeditious way of funding this, a historic tour in which Bangkok’s finest artists would present all that is best about our city to one of the most perceptive audiences in Europe.
Deputy Governor Amorn had given a splendid talk to his people about how critical it was for Bangkok’s image to get this right this time, and to successfully negotiate the BMA’s labyrinth of paperwork to make it happen.
So, I received a message from my sister that someone who had not attended that critical meeting in Bangkok had decided not to sign some document, and that four million baht in funding had evaporated. It was a tiny amount considering what is routinely wasted on vanity projects, and also considering that this was a matter of national prestige — the first Thai opera in continental Europe, the world’s first Buddhist opera and so much more — but it was a lot of money to us. Thai Bev, PTT, and numerous other supporters had come through already, but this final payment was critical.
Seventy of Thailand’s finest young artists were now stranded in Europe. A member of the German press had gotten wind of this (since they were down at the festival) and smelled an exciting — an international — human interest story that could have given our city, and country, a major black eye. Suddenly, I had to go from running rehearsals 6-8 hours a day and dealing with the complexities of organizing all these people and making them work within a large international festival — to also dealing with a sudden financial shortfall.
Would this be a PR disaster for Thailand’s increasing international cultural profile, or would something happen to save the day?
I was determined that Thailand’s first entry in the continental European opera would be a supernova, not a bomb. It was important that none of the young artists panic. It was equally important that I stave off a looming storm from international journalists, because instead of being a huge PR success for Thailand, there was a risk that we could be a smash hit and yet Thailand could look like a cesspool of heartless bureaucracy.
So I started calling my friends — starting with those very journalists who could have done a hatchet on on the BMA. I started with the ones who I knew really wanted this to succeed. And within a few days, a miracle was happening. The same journalist who told me there would be hell to pay went to his ATM every day for three days and drew out his daily maximum to contribute to us. The parents of one of the chorus members canvased their relatives and managed to raise 500,000 baht. Another friend deposited the same amount in our account, no questions asked. Another immediately floated a loan of more than a million baht. Plus many small gifts from people who cared deeply about the project.
Karma had come to defuse our crisis. Not, I fear, my personal karma, which is laden with earthbound attachments, but the karma that pertained to the work itself — for what work of art could come with greater positive karma that the teachings of Buddha himself? In three days, our story had changed from one of perfidy and defeat to one of heroic sacrifice and world-wide encouragement — support had come from three continents.
Buoyed up by the love and support of our friends around the world, I was ready to give the news to the cast and crew. I said to them, “Let’s not worry about the fact that we may face a firestorm when we return. Let’s really show the Europeans that we have something new, something exciting to say — that we are a new trailblazer in a field that was born in Europe, but now belongs equally to Asia.”
I think that the reviews speak more eloquently than any of us could. There were two performances of The Silent Prince in Bayreuth. The first night, the audience was small and didn’t quite know what to expect. But by the end there came a thunderous and protracted standing ovation. The second night, the Zentrum was crammed, in part because that night was a break in the Wagner at the main house, so many Wagnerians were able to come.
The Nordbayerischer Kurier said, “the composer truly knows his craft. This is a joyful and technically very accomplished syncretism. The stylistic collage conflates highly coloristic and saturated melodic lines with simple rhythms in the manner of the refined musical worlds of Franz Schreker (Vienna 1920), Leonard Bernstein and Steven Sondheim … Western tonalities are overlaid with Southeast Asian melodies. But rather than creating a confused chaos of sound, Sucharitkul has fashioned an exciting score in which - and this is what is so modern about it - East and West are united in harmony yet with their differences clearly audible —partaking fully in the spirit of this festival. A massive round of applause for both an opera that is both scenically alien — yet musically accessible — whose music soars high and even as its ethics plumb depths of profundity.”
To be compared to both Schreker and Bernstein in a single sentence was personally very exciting for me. For decades repressed because of the Nazis, Schreker was once second only to Richard Strauss in Europe, but now he is coming back again, and connoisseurs know his work as an operatic treasure trove yet to be unleashed on the modern world.
Though Bayreuth is a center of Wagnerian pilgrimage, our next stop, Prague, has even more operatic history. Prague is the city that received Mozart’s music and made it into a triumph after Vienna’s lukewarm response. Prague has thus been synonymous with intellectual and cultural progressivism for three centuries. Hidden from view during the Soviet era, Prague is now exciting and sophisticated and it’s a place where cab drivers and busboys can speak the language of music, philosophy and art. Our kids felt liberated in this town, which welcomed them with open arms.
With the main theatres all closed because of the August holidays, the first Thai opera in Czechia opened in a theater-cum-jazz bar in downtown Prague with wild art deco wall sculptures. It turned out to be a wonderful venue in which the audience could really get up close with the singers and see every nuance, and in which every color of the orchestra was pinpointed and vibrant. It turned out there were more lights and effects available, so Ryan Attig, our genius Thai-American lighting expert, was able to work more magic. Another long standing ovation.
The very next day, there was a review in Opera Plus, Czechia’s leading classical music magazine. The reviewer captured my exact intent when he said of the production: “based on traditional Southeast Asian aesthetics, but subtly adapted to the comprehensibility of a western audience.”
We ended our tour in the small university town of Brno. I say “small town” but Brno has four theaters that can show opera, including the new 3,000 seat Janáček Opera House, and is the hometown of Moravia’s national composer, Leoš Janáček, of whom one could say that he is the most significant new operatic force to be unleashed in the second half of the twentieth century. Czechia is part of the operatic world map because of Brno.
And in Brno, in the Divadlo na Orli, the theater run by the local conservatory, we actually got to perform for the first time in a venue designed for opera. It was tiny — the theater seats fewer than 200 people — but it had every technical tool that an opera company needs (except size). Our team was in heaven. Lights, bars, catwalks, the pit, everything was up to the most modern possible specs. It was a memorable final performance.
Brno was important for us because we feel that the coming “major regional opera” — symbolized by the Ten Lives of the Buddha project if I only live to complete it — is going to center on Thailand. Opera from Thailand isn’t just some interesting sideshow. In the words of Opera Plus, “By no means was this just an ethnographical curiosity of an evening, but a completely professional display of contemporary Thai culture in a fusion with European operatic structure.”
Thousands of miles from our point of origin, we had come home, because our home is the world.