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Impresario invites people to get hooked on opera

Published: 20 Nov. 2009, 21:25

Park Sae-won

Park Sae-won, 62, the director of the Seoul Metropolitan Opera, is putting on the final shows of his three-year project aimed at bringing opera to the public. The project is called the “Verdi Big Five Series.” It began in 2007, and has attracted over 48,000 viewers thus far. It will come to a close this weekend with performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Forza Del Destino.”

This is a proud moment for Park, as he has tried to make opera more accessible to the general public since becoming the director of the Seoul Metropolitan Opera in 2006.

“No matter how good the show, if the people don’t get it, then what’s the point?” Park said. “Many people think that they actually need to study to understand opera but I have put my efforts into making it easy for anyone to understand opera 100 percent.”

To facilitate understanding about the operas he produces, Park uses visual effects and captions for individual screens. Before every performance, a summary of the piece is shown along with comments from specialists and scholars. Also, during the transition time between acts, brief explanations about each act are provided.

“Learning about the arts does not happen in a day,” Park said. “But Koreans think it’s shameful to be ignorant about culture and some pretend that they are very knowledgeable. It’s only natural for artists to match the level of Koreans who are generally not familiar with this field.”

Although Park has drawn criticism from professionals who say that his efforts have decreased the artistic quality of the opera, Park refutes this, saying that the public needs to be given a chance to enjoy the beauty of opera.

Park’s efforts to bring opera to the public are different from previous attempts to do the same. He mobilized his crew and moved outside of fancy performance halls to present his work in community centers and school auditoriums in an attempt to reach a broader cross section of the public.

“We had to use hand microphones and children would be running around the stage,” he said. “Some people clapped when they weren’t supposed to and some would talk loudly in the midst of the performance, but I think the more people come see us, the better it is.”

In the midst of all this, there seems to be some sense of irony to Park’s project; the Verdi Big Five Series uses the original librettos for the works rather than using easier and more contemporary versions.

Park once responded to this by saying, “During the last 30 years, there have been efforts made in Europe to make the public more familiar with opera by creating modern interpretations, but instead of accomplishing that goal, audience numbers decreased.”

He continued, “Therefore, the emphasis on the originals is coming back, and an example of that would be our classic version of ‘La Traviata’ becoming a huge hit in Italy last December.”

Park’s efforts to remove the barriers between opera and the public will continue with his plan to organize small-scale performances for children.

“I’ve only had grand performances that are performed in the Grand Theater of the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts; I want to move the productions to the smaller Sejong M Theater so the whole family, including children, will be able to enjoy it.”

The final performance of “La Forza Del Destino” will be held tomorrow at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.

By Lee Ji-young [[email protected]]