A masterpiece, a refrigerator magnet, a phone case… Opera: How Hokusai’s “Great Wave” reached the stage | classical music

HeyBerra has inspired many of the greatest artists of the 20th century to create extraordinary collections. Oskar Kokoschka designed The Magic Flute for Salzburg and the Ballo in Maschera for Florence. Salvador Dali produced the controversial Salome for London. David Hockney’s designs for Glyndebourne’s Rake’s Progress so miraculously complement Stravinsky’s sound world that they are still in use 50 years after their creation. Marc Chagall’s ceiling frescoes at the Opera Garnier in Paris and the murals at the New York Met attest to the intimate relationship between opera and painting.

However, very few operas feature visual artists. Something in their painstaking work seems to resist representation in these most extravagant art forms. Only two operas about artists are regularly performed: Hindemith’s Matthies der Mahler, featuring the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. Cellini gave Berlioz a head start with his hilarious memoir about his scandalous adventures in sixteenth-century Florence.

By taking a masterpiece as a subject, the great wave of Scottish opera enters largely uncharted territory. The print that gives the new production its name is one of the most familiar images of the past 200 years, even if relatively few of those who encounter it on refrigerator magnets or phone cases realize exactly where it comes from or know much about the life of the artist who created it.

Katsushika Hokusai was born in 1760 in Edo, now known as Tokyo, which was then the largest city in the world with a population of over one million. He lived to be 88 years old at a time when few Japanese people passed the age of 60 every year. His life was eventful: he survived a lightning strike, a stroke that forced him to learn how to paint again, and a fire that destroyed his studio. His output was prolific and varied – his 30,000 or so surviving works include the paintings, sketches and illustrations that populate the Hokusai manga, a drawing guide for students, as well as woodblock prints – and he was constantly reinventing himself, using at least 30 names. He had a talent for self-publicity, attracting huge crowds by painting a giant portrait in a public square, but often faced financial difficulties.

“Under the Kanagawa Wave”—the original title of his most famous work—was one of his 36 Views of Mount Fuji, a series of woodblock prints produced around 1831, which were so successful that Hokusai later added 10 more. It’s an unforgettable image: Although our attention is naturally focused on the cascading, menacing foam beneath the wave, photographed so clearly that the boats riding it seem to move as we look, the image remains at its center. It is Mount Fuji itself, which in Hokusai’s time was considered a god.

Just as the sequence of Hokusai’s prints looks at the mountain from different viewpoints, which is unexpected, the five opera acts approach the same artist from different angles, arranged in a non-chronological sequence – the opera begins with Hokusai’s funeral. As script writer Harry Ross explains, the decision to tell Hokusai’s story in a non-linear way was made in solidarity with Hokusai’s view of the world and the culture of which he was a part: “We are teleological in the West – and this is very much an Eastern thing.”

The thread that runs through the text, which brings together scenes extremely diverse in setting, character, and drama, is Hokusai’s relationship with his daughter Aoi, also an important artist. It is the Ōi we see at the beginning, overseeing her father’s burial, and the Ōi he speaks to at the end, as the pair decide to continue artistic exploration together.

She married another artist, but divorced him, Ross recounts with obvious admiration: “He wasn’t a very good artist, and you weren’t going to run a business with someone who wasn’t going to succeed.” Instead she returned to her father’s studio. Ross and composer Dai Fujikura were fascinated by these decisions, which were very unusual at the time, and by the artists’ association. “She’s an extraordinary character – we don’t know a lot about her but we know enough,” Ross says. “The relationship between father and daughter was very special,” Fujikura notes. “We both have daughters, so it was very easy to take advantage of that.”

Fujikura grew up in Japan, but until he visited the British Museum’s Hokusai exhibition in 2017, all he knew about the artist was that he produced “The Great Wave.” It was Fujikura’s wife, having read more about him in the exhibition catalogue, who suggested the artist as the subject of an opera, and he was intrigued – “I had never written an opera set in Japan.”

“It’s a wild ride, a wonderful life,” Fujikura says with relish. He began sharing ideas with Ross, a close collaborator since the 1990s when they met as students at Trinity College of Music. Together they created a screenplay based on an unpublished English translation of Hokusai’s first autobiography, written by Iijima Kyōshin in 1893.

Much of their work on the screenplay took place during the coronavirus lockdown, a situation that strangely mirrors the closed nature of Japanese society in Hokusai’s life. During the Edo period, the Tokugawa military government that ruled Japan imposed a policy of Sakukoliterally “closed country”. Between the early 17th century and the mid-19th century, international trade was completely prohibited, and Japan was closed to almost all foreign visitors.

In fact, the only non-Japanese character in “The Great Wave” is the German botanist and traveler Dr. Philipp Franz von Siebold, who plays the countertenor – and the “fake” voice aptly reflects how strange Siebold’s Western face was to most Japanese people at the time. Siebold brought a large bag of Prussian blue pigment (a rare commodity in Japan at the time) in exchange for some of Hokusai’s prints: an acquisition that pleased Hokusai, because it enabled him to achieve the vibrant colors he had envisioned for the Mount Fuji range.

Fujikura relished the opportunity the scene afforded to represent Hokusai’s new color in music: “People see something they’ve never seen before, something very special – it’s like the moment in Pulp Fiction where they open the attachment pack and we don’t know what it is.” He found a combination of woods to represent Hokusai’s blues: “natural harmonic trills mixed with synthetic harmonies and shimmering vibraphones played with soft beaters.”

Fujikura’s early musical training as a pianist and composer in Osaka was, unusually, entirely in Western styles; Traditional Japanese instruments formed no part of his musical upbringing: “Even my parents never heard them live.” Only in the early 2000s, at a festival in Darmstadt, did he encounter these instruments for the first time, and he had to learn about them as a Western composer would: “They have a long history, they make Bach look like a child.” To date he has composed about 40 works for Japanese instruments, including concertos for Japanese instruments what (bamboo mouth organ), koto (long plucked zither) Shamisen (three-stringed oud) and Shakuhachi.

It was the last of these—a traditional Japanese flute that produces a softer, more breathy sound than the Western version—that Fujikura included in “The Great Wave.” “I wanted to transport listeners to another world.” Fujikura explains that the noise of the player’s breath is part of the performance, and that he encouraged the player — Shozan Hasegawa, who traveled from Japan to perform — to improvise in traditional style around the distinct pitches.

the Shakuhachi It is heard in the opening bars of the opera, and appears again at the end, as director Satoshi Miyagi presents the instrument on stage: its sound he interprets as Hokusai’s, echoing in the mind of his daughter. It uses only traditional Western instruments, but is deployed in colorful, immediate colors that reflect Fujikura’s initial ambitions in composing for the film. “I can express everything with my music: the orchestra is my canvas.”

The production was a great example of cross-cultural cooperation: there was financial support from Japanese government agencies (plans are afoot to move the production in 2027 to Tokyo and Kyoto) and in Glasgow, Miyagi was joined by a team of Japanese designers and choreographers from the Kajimoto company. Although the sets and costumes do not attempt to recreate Hokusai-era Japan — “by not specifying the cultural background or time period, it allows the piece to be universal,” Miyagi explains — the Japanese influence is clear. How to present “The Great Wave” itself was a particular challenge for scenographer Junpei Keyes: “It’s an iconic piece. There will be anticipation for how it’s presented.” His interesting solution was to present it in monochrome before revealing the full color spectrum.

However, it is clear that for Ross and Fujikura, as for Miyagi, Hokusai’s story is one with a universal message. Ross finds reason for optimism among today’s artists in the resourcefulness and ability to reinvent that Hokusai has demonstrated throughout his career. “It’s quite contemporary – we have this idea of ​​the romantic artist who’s always struggling, but in the 21st century we’re more like Hokusai – we have to change to stay the same.” Fujikura agrees: “He shows strong energy, just to be an artist, a better artist. Constant creativity – that’s something I absolutely love about this person.”