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A flurry of firsts surrounded Thursday night's world premiere of Tan Dun's "The First Emperor."
It was a Metropolitan Opera first for great tenor Placido Domingo to create a role there; the first time, since 1940, that a composer conducted his own opera on its podium - and the first time Mandarin Chinese had been sung there (just the prologue - the opera's in English).
It was not, however, the first time that a new opera at the Met proved something of a disappointment.
Tan, who composed the music for the Oscar-winning "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," is trying to offer a synthesis of Eastern and Western music: Puccini on the one ear; the gongs, bells and whistles of Peking Opera on the other.
It's a brave try - especially in its moment of eerie, moody lyricism - but the twain never quite . . . mingle.
The story is the kind of broad-canvassed stuff for which the word "epic" could have been invented. And it may have a symbolic relevance for Chinese of a certain age, perhaps recalling the time of Chairman Mao and after.
It tells of the ruthless ruler Qin Shi Huang, of the third-century B.C., who united by force China's seven warring states, unified language, currency and measurements, built roads and started the Great Wall. There was also a downside.
The libretto, on which Tan was joined by Chinese novelist Ha Jin is based on history, legend and a 10-year-old screenplay.
The story concerns the Emperor (Domingo), his daughter Yueyang (Elizabeth Futral); her suitor, head of the Emperor's army, General Wang (Hao Jiang Tian); and a composer, Gao Jianli (Paul Groves), the Emperor's boyhood friend who, though they were raised like brothers, is now a victim of the Emperor's tyranny, his village destroyed, his mother killed.
The Emperor insists that one way to unite his new nation is to provide it with a national anthem - a job he forces on the ailing Jianli. But Yueyang falls in love with the stricken composer and . . . well, you know the ways of opera. It's all a bloody mess.
So is the libretto. The English is not only mundane, but it doesn't seem to trip felicitously off the tongue.
When you have the lovers in a lyric duet having to get their voices around phrases like "the grass will dip and sway revealing herds of cattle and goats," you suspect that the command of English here is less than poetic.
The action of the opera is essentially static and, with Fan Yue's permanent, if versatile, setting of ropes and steps - the stage is one vast staircase with a kind of shelf in front - you often get the sense that it's a staged cantata, despite the gorgeous costuming of Emi Wada and the stealthily clever lighting of Duane Schuler.
The direction by distinguished Chinese film director Zhang Yimou - who once staged a thrilling ballet for the Shanghai Ballet based on his "Raise the Red Lantern" - here, in his leaden use of the chorus, seems Hollywood almost to the synchronized point of Busby Berkley.
For all this, the performances - some, like the music, placed in an agreeable limbo between the stylizations of Peking Opera and late-19th-century operatic romanticism - were superb.
Futral was enchanting as the doomed heroine, and Groves, with a light but incisive tenor, made a fine composer hero.
But it was Domingo's opera. Perhaps, with its vocal range tending toward his lower register, it flattered his voice, but he sounded rich, radiant and incomparably Domingo. And he acted as if he'd been given a Boris Godunov of a role - commanding all he surveyed.
THE FIRST EMPERORMetropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000. Performances through Jan. 25.
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