Dream of the Red Chamber by Bright Sheng and David Henry Hwang
The San Francisco Opera
June 14-July 3, 2022
The 2022 Summer Season includes a revival of Dream of the Red Chamber which played to sold out audiences in the 2016 world premiere. The work then toured China and Hong Kong receiving international acclaim.
Framed by a dreamlike prologue and epilogue, Dream of the Red Chamber relates the poetry and sadness of the original Chinese tale as a lyrical 21st–century opera. The operatic retelling has an English libretto so it would be readily accessible to non-Chinese speaking audiences.
The opera is a retelling of one of China’s greatest novels. Cao Xueqin’s sprawling 18th-century classic is a saga of the decline of an aristocratic family in imperial China; Mr. Sheng reduced the book to its bare bones. The novel (over 2,400 pages in its English translation, twice as long as “War and Peace”), is re-imagined in a mere two hours and 20 minutes. Hundreds of characters have been cut, leaving just eight main figures in the final show. “You can’t win with this, no matter what you do,” Mr. Sheng said at the original rehearsals. “People will love you or hate you.”