Anne Midgette

Dai Yugjang is happy to be in China with his family, singing his stories to the people of his homeland. (Photo: John Grigaitis, Michigan Opera Theatre.)

Chinese Tenor Retreats Home After Career In the West

Dai Yuqiang, the most famous opera singer in China, sits at a dining room table in a private home in Beijing and laughs like a small boy.

“Before Pavarotti died,” he says, “I was considered Number Four.” Another infectious laugh to defuse the force of a tenor’s ego.

Dai is a superstar in China. He gives around 200 concerts a year — “five on the last lunar new year,” he says in broken English. He’s 46, but his handsome, rubbery face can look, in photos, like a little girl’s — pouty lips, smooth skin, and oh, that mullet — or, on the cover of his debut solo recording released in 2004, like a matinee idol.

None of which reflect the voice. The voice that led impresario Tibor Rudas, the man who invented the Three Tenors, to gamble untold amounts of his own money on creating a new star. The voice that led Luciano Pavarotti to bring Dai to his home in Italy as his first and only Chinese student.

“It’s the type of sound that caused me to fall in love with opera as a young kid,” says Christopher Mattaliano, the general director of the Portland Opera in Oregon, where Dai made his US debut in “Turandot” in 2003. “It’s just a full, lyric, old-fashioned tenor sound … It’s the real thing.”

Dai went on to sing in Detroit, Covent Garden, La Scala. Now he makes appearances at Chinese concerts and on TV galas, most often singing just two selections: “O Sole Mio” and “Nessun Dorma.” And his career in the West appears to be over.

The story of Dai Yuqiang is a story about Western opera in the new China — about someone coming late to the table and ultimately creating his own rules rather than assimilating to the West.

In China, Western opera is viewed not as a cousin of China’s music theater (Peking Opera), but as a sophisticated foreign import. So, at least, announces the press release of the mammoth opera festival currently going on at Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts (through July 2) — an extravaganza of 13 works, including Western favorites like “Turandot” and “Tosca” (both with Dai) and Chinese revolutionary classics like “Daughter of the Communist Party.”

Opera is hot in China. For the last two decades, China’s cities have been building opera houses to show that they are modern. But those theaters don’t house any opera companies. The two leading companies in China — the Shanghai Opera and the Central Opera in Beijing — don’t have their own theaters; they have to rent space when they want to put on a performance. And the government subsidies for the Central Opera are so low that Yu Feng, the company’s president and artistic director, won’t reveal the amount, laughing as he says, “I don’t want the government to lose face.”

Dai’s career reflects this unsteady background. From one perspective, it’s an example of tremendous success; the tenor is China’s first homegrown opera star. From another, it’s a story of lost opportunities. And like many things in the “new” China, it was all bound up with the Beijing Olympics. In June 2001, in a not-so-subtle bid to influence the voting on the host city of the 2008 Olympics, Beijing invited the Three Tenors — Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras — to the Forbidden City.

The planning, of course, took months. Among other tasks, the Tibor Rudas Organization and its on-site liaison, a presenter named Kathy Lagonegro, set out to find a suitable orchestra. The Central Opera House, which really wanted the job, mounted a special performance for Rudas’ advance team, and when its own tenor canceled, it called at the last minute on a tenor from the opera company of the People’s Liberation Army — Dai.

The promoter’s men asked, “Where have you been hiding?” Dai says.

Dai grew up in a small town in the province of Hebei, which curls around Beijing like a collar, but lies worlds apart from it culturally. “Until I was 18, I never saw a piano,” he says. He first heard opera on the radio, and he first studied it by singing along. He was 22 years old and working as an engineer. Eventually, he got into a drama school, where he was taught to sing in a Chinese style. “The first time I sang opera was after turning 30,” he says. It was Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” — in Chinese.

China’s Western operatic training focuses on big, healthy voices. But there is still relatively little emphasis on diction or style, and there are no vocal coaches to help singers understand anything beyond mere vocal technique. Expression was to remain a problem for Dai in the West, but beauty of sound was not. Rudas’ men, hearing him, exchanged looks and told the tenor that if he gave them a CD, they would play it for Rudas himself. Dai didn’t mention that he had never made a CD. He went out and made a recording in a few hours, and brought it by their hotel the same night.

“Who’s this? Pavarotti?” Rudas supposed ly said when he heard the demo.

“I think Tibor began to brew his great plan,” Lagonegro says. “Pretty soon Pavarotti time will be over; he will be missed; Dai has this great God-given voice … With training, he can offer a piece of comfort when Pavarotti is gone.”

Rudas’ plan for Dai had all of the showbiz glitz of a Three Tenors extravaganza: a stadium production of “Turandot” to tour the arenas of the United States. When the Three Tenors concert was over, he started aggressively marketing his new “Turandot.” He also fixed Dai’s teeth, summoned coaches to work with him, lined up a studio recording and sent him to Pesaro for six weeks to work with Pavarotti, who had heard Dai in Beijing and been equally impressed.

“Luciano always needed to be assisted to get up,” Dai says through a translator. “But when I sang, Pavarotti stood up, and,” — he mimes clapping his hands over his head.

The stadium “Turandot” foundered, perhaps because people weren’t buying tickets to a “Turandot” with singers they didn’t know. But Tibor found a label to release Dai’s album and got him some opera engagements, starting with Portland.

“My assumption,” Portland Opera’s Mattaliano says, “was that he was in store for a very major career.”

Dai had everything a young singer could hope for, starting with the undivided attention of Rudas, who by this time had no other clients and attended every one of his protege’s premieres. But Dai had also been thrust into an alien world, able to navigate only with the help of Lagonegro, who became a translator, companion and babysitter when he was on the road.

“It was a very strange relationship,” Lagonegro says now, describing weeks in rented apartments, watching Chinese soap operas on DVD between rehearsals. “He doesn’t have much interest in learning to speak English … Because he really doesn’t want to learn, he pretty much recites 300 pages of Italian not knowing what they mean, and looking at the conductor making sure every rhythm is the right one, at the same time he has to remember where he’s supposed to stand, his expression.” Stage business, like bantering with his fellow Bohemians in Italian, was a challenge — not to mention kissing his co-star in “Tosca.”

In China, meanwhile, Dai’s dream had already come true. Rudas’ “discovery” of him brought a wave of media attention. “He became a really big, big star,” Lagonegro says. “Then when he goes to the States or the Royal Opera House  … people still consider him an entry-level tenor.”

And the money in China is easy. “I fly there and sing one song or two songs,” Dai says, “next morning home, and make more money than one month singing opera.” He doesn’t even actually have to sing. The vast majority of concerts in China are prerecorded — “karaoke,” Dai says — to the point that presenters have trouble dealing with a singer’s request to sing live.

Acting like a celebrity did Dai no favors at major opera houses. At Covent Garden, he had such trouble taking rehearsals seriously that the house finally released him from a “La Boheme” contract. The tenor also ran into problems preparing for a La Scala “Aida.” Realistically, Dai, a relative unknown in Italy, could only hope to be the second-cast tenor, but as he saw it, he was a victim of prejudice. “If I had a Western face, I would not be criticized so much,” he says.

Many factors led to the demise of Dai’s career in the West. There was a heart condition; he was advised to cut down on travel. There was a bout of flu. There were, larger than anything else, the Olympic Games. “The Olympics, for China, were not just a game,” says Lagonegro, who by this time had become the chief officer of the creative team for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Since Dai has never left his day job as a member of the People’s Liberation Army opera company, his foreign trips were complicated by his military status. In 2008, when China wanted all of its celebrities on hand for the Olympics, Lagonegro wasn’t sure he would get permission to travel at all. The upshot was that Dai cancelled all 2008 engagements in the West. And contact with Rudas, by now in his 90s, broke off.

Today, Dai lives happily with his wife, Liu Yan, and family. Lagonegro says Dai is “one of the very rare Chinese famous people who doesn’t have any scandals” in his private life. His 12-year-old daughter has appeared with him as the Shepherd in “Tosca.” He has a few students; one is the tenor Yingxi Zhang, an alum of the Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz program. Another is in the young artists’ program at Covent Garden.

Lagonegro says: “Through the few years, he probably discovered what he really wanted to do with his life. I think in his mind he doesn’t need to be an international star.”

At 46, Dai is in a tenor’s vocal prime. Complimented on his CD, he wrinkles his nose, saying he sounds “much better now.”

 

The Washington Post

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