Ming Tsao
Mudan ting – Ein Gespenst geht um in China
(Mudan ting – A spectre is haunting China)
An opera in two acts based on the Chinese ghost story The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu (1598), and its 1937 German translation Die Rückkehr der Seele (The Return of the Soul) by Vincenz Hundhausen. This is an opera where various magic spells to reverse time – reversible poems and star maps, anagrams, puzzle and mensuration canons, retrograde musical structures, irrational time-measures, serial incantations and polytemporal constellations – are brought to bear on traumatic events that are fundamentally irreversible.
30 September 2027 (Premiere)
2 October 2027
3 October 2027
Nationaltheater Mannheim
OPAL, Oper am Luisenpark
Theodor-Heuss-Anlage 10
Mannheim, Germany
Mei Lanfang’s hand gestures in the role of Du Liniang from Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion. In 1937, Mei Lanfang refused to continue playing the role of Du Liniang in protest against the “Nanjing Massacre.”
Seven geometric catastrophes used to structure the irreversible flow of time in the music of Mudan ting – Ein Gespenst geht um in China. (Sérend Hipe, LES 7 PILIERS DU PLATTISME: Seven mainstays of plattism; Laboratoire de l’IFPEA, 2022)
The character Du Liniang from Vincenz Hundhausen’sThe Return of the Soul (1937), the German translation
of The Peony Pavilion.
Du Liniang paints a self-portrait before she dies and will
later be reborn as a soldier in the Red Army during the
Long March.
“Comfort Women” from Nanjing during the 1937 “Rape of Nanjing”.
Set Design – Anna Kirsch
Costumes – Charlotte Werkmeister
Video – Lukas Eicher
Sound Design – Thomas Schuler
Dramaturgs – Cordula Demattio and Eszter Orbán
Du Bao (bass) – Renatus Mészár
Liu Mengmei (tenor) – Raphael Wittmer
Li Quan (speaker) –
Li Quans Frau (speaker) –
Ensemble MusikFabrik
NTM-Orchester
Schola Heidelberg
ChorWerkRuhr
Camilla Bork (Professor of Musicology, Freie Universität)
Ute Holl (Professor of Media Studies, Universität Basel)
Patrick Primavesi (Professor of Theater Studies, Universität Leipzig)
Hans Thill (Translator and poet)