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<\/p>\nTranslation result<\/p>\n
At the National Theater\u2019s Daloreum Theater, the music-drama festival \\”Seoul\\” (Orpheum Klangark Company, directed by Yu In-chon) staged a program drawn from Schubert and Brahms lieder alongside iconic opera arias. The festival presented four music-dramas: Jeong Hee-kyung\u2019s La Callas; a dramatically staged Winterreise featuring baritone Kim Jun-dong and tenor Kim Eun-guk (piano: Park Hyo-min; ensemble sopranos Jeong Hee-kyung, In Gu-seul, Han Kyung-sung; mezzo Jeong Yu-jin; tenors Kim Jae-min, Kim Eun-guk); Brahms\u2019s only song cycle Die sch\u00f6ne Magelone (soprano Han Kyung-sung; tenor Kim Jae-min; balladeer Jeon Tae-hyun; piano: Lee Eun-hye); and Arias of Dreams, a suite of signature arias and choral pieces \u2014 including the Toreador Song from Carmen and La donna \u00e8 mobile from Rigoletto \u2014 performed by a line-up that included sopranos Han Kyung-sung, Jeong Hee-kyung, In Gu-seul; mezzos Jeong Yu-jin, Yoo Hyun-joo; tenors Kim Eun-guk, Kim Jae-min; baritone Kim Jun-dong; bass Jeon Tae-hyun; pianists Kim Mia, Park Hyo-min; trumpeter Lee Hye-jin; and the Met Opera Chorus. The company reimagined lieder, arias and classical melodies as dramatic narratives on stage, and the music\u2019s melodies were staged with striking visual intensity.<\/p>\n
La Callas stood out. It borrowed documentary techniques to dramatize Maria Callas\u2019s desires, solitude, artistry and inner life, moving beyond a purely musical presentation into a sensory, theatrical narrative. The production made tangible the artistic isolation and tragic arc of the diva. Winterreise expanded Schubert\u2019s characteristic wanderlust and loneliness through the actors\u2019 emotional trajectories and movement. Die sch\u00f6ne Magelone distilled Brahms\u2019s romantic lyricism into a love narrative, producing scenes that felt at once fable-like and tenderly lyrical. These choices helped set this music-drama festival apart from more conventional offerings.<\/p>\n
Jeong Hee-kyung\u2019s La Callas (with tenor Kim Jae-min; Hidalgo played by Kang Hye-kyung; flutist Kim Young-ha; pianist Kim Mia; and the Met Opera Chorus) portrays the tragic arc of Maria Callas \u2014 the twentieth-century soprano who lived and burned brightly as a global diva until her death at 53. Rather than a standard operatic portrait, the production reads as the life of an artist staged as drama: Jeong prioritizes theatrical embodiment over pure vocal display. Her performance pays clear homage to Callas and often blurs the line between interpreter and icon. Using a chorus of phantoms, stage objects and documentary material, the work traces Callas\u2019s life across eight signature arias in roughly 70 minutes. Alternating solo and choral passages, it reconstructs the singer\u2019s interior \u2014 the anxiety, mania and melancholy that enveloped her \u2014 as a tragic operatic monodrama. This is Jeong Hee-kyung\u2019s La Callas.<\/p>\n
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\u25c7 A theatrical reworking of the opera stage \u2014 the festival\u2019s structural experiment<\/p>\n
To grasp Jeong Hee-kyung\u2019s La Callas, a bit of context on Maria Callas (1923\u20131977) helps. Callas transformed twentieth-century opera and became known for making opera profoundly theatrical \u2014 delivering arias as acted, psychological performance. Born to Greek parents and active mainly in Italy, she modernized bel canto repertoire (Bellini, Donizetti) for contemporary stages. Even as her voice roughened and cracked, those imperfections served as instruments of emotional truth. Callas didn\u2019t simply sing roles; she inhabited them, so fully that critics began to describe her as an actor-singer. For her, opera exposed a character\u2019s inner and outer life; she became the role she sang. Her portrayals in Norma, La Traviata, Tosca and Lucia di Lammermoor helped reshape expectations for opera performers, shifting attention from mere vocal virtuosity to dramatic presence.<\/p>\n
Callas\u2019s blazing career was matched by profound loneliness. As her voice declined, she experienced anxiety and delusion. The 2024 film Maria, with Angelina Jolie as Callas, focuses on the final week of the singer\u2019s life, intercutting her fraying interior world with radiant memories. Haunted by visions after drug misuse, Callas died of a heart attack. Her stormy private life \u2014 including a liaison with shipping magnate Onassis and public entanglements involving Jacqueline Kennedy \u2014 heightened her mythic status. Jeong rejects conventional operatic presentation and confronts Callas\u2019s love, loneliness, despair, fantasy and ambition through the singer\u2019s signature arias. As a mother, spouse, educator and vocalist, Jeong finds points of identification with Callas and shapes the evening into a personal monodrama, intensifying the drama with vivid visual staging.<\/p>\n
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\u25c7 The red mirror \u2014 an object reflecting desire, death and madness<\/p>\n
The set diverges from a conventional opera stage. A piano sits stage left; behind a scrim we glimpse everyday moments in Jeong Hee-kyung\u2019s life. She appears as singer, as mother, and as an artist preparing Callas\u2019s arias. Dominating the space is a single red mirror that functions as an objectified interior: it foregrounds Callas\u2019s inner life as if her signature arias still exist in the present. The mirror evokes her glamour and the crises that punctuated her life \u2014 death, desire and madness. Callas\u2019s story is a tragedy of artistic glory intersecting with personal ruin, and the red mirror frames her irrepressible passion. The object\u2019s symbolism is theatrical and visually compelling.<\/p>\n
Many productions that bill themselves as opera or music drama remain explanatory \u2014 offering context, arias or a talk-show format to help audiences follow the music. Jeong\u2019s La Callas opens differently: a reporter appears in the prologue and interviews Jeong as if for a TV news segment, documenting her preparation. Jeong then stages that process. Like Callas, who lived as an actor-singer, Jeong alternates roles: mother, soprano, artist. She dramatizes life\u2019s struggles in dialogue and gradually identifies with Callas, singing arias while embodying the diva\u2019s tragic arc.<\/p>\n
Jeong\u2019s acting avoids melodramatic excess. Rather than fragmenting emotions into theatrical flourishes, she stages ordinary moments and candid confessions in conversational speech, which makes her transformation feel authentic. As she crosses between her present and Callas\u2019s past, the audience witnesses an artist becoming another artist. The production visualizes this process more than it reproduces a historical portrait; the scenes are structured like a monodrama centered on Jeong.<\/p>\n
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The evening opens with a filmed documentary on Callas\u2019s life, and Jeong\u2019s first aria is Bellini\u2019s Casta Diva from Norma \u2014 a signature piece for Callas. Through it, Jeong conveys Norma\u2019s sacred dignity and conflicted interior: the priestess\u2019s sublimity, and the private fear and love that unsettle her. Where some interpreters let melody alone carry an aria\u2019s emotion, Jeong acts the aria in a manner that calls Callas to mind, and the staging amplifies these moments into striking dramatic images. Beginning with Casta Diva, Jeong\u2019s monodramatic stage summons the mythic diva; the red mirror underscores the sense that Callas has become an operatic archetype whose tragic fate the production foreshadows.<\/p>\n
Verdi\u2019s La Traviata follows, mapped onto Callas\u2019s world of love and desire. Libiamo ne’ lieti calici signals a glittering apex; Si ridesta in ciel l’aurora reveals the creeping hollowness in Callas\u2019s life; E strano\u2026 Ah fors’\u00e8 lui exposes Violetta\u2019s trembling heart; and Lunge da lei intensifies the conflict between love and reality. As Verdi\u2019s arias unfold, they expand into a narrative of Callas\u2019s humanity, and Jeong\u2019s phrasing frames them as chapters in a life.<\/p>\n
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\u25c7 The multilayered theatrical aesthetics of La Callas<\/p>\n
What distinguishes the production are the devices used to render arias as layered theatrical narratives. Solo arias are reframed with ensembles and choruses staged as theatrical presences. The chorus functions at times as condensed phantoms of Callas\u2019s interior, a divided self, an observing gaze, or the characters within the arias. The production uses the entire stage, moving the chorus offstage to watch Jeong as Callas, or inserting it into the musical line to form choral textures. At moments the chorus watches with cynical detachment, at others it appears divine, intervening in the drama; at times it offers a collective longing to remember her. These choral interventions operate like a tragic chorus and are a primary structural device in Jeong\u2019s monodrama. Midway through the piece, the production traces Jeong\u2019s gradual becoming-Callas by introducing Hidalgo \u2014 presented here as Callas\u2019s teacher and played by Kang Hye-kyung \u2014 who functions as a bridge into Callas\u2019s anxious interior.<\/p>\n
Puccini\u2019s Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore from Tosca unfolds like a confession that could be Callas\u2019s own: the melody concentrates the wounds of a life that, despite its pain, never entirely lost its capacity for love. As the red mirror suggests, the aria confronts the audience with the unquenchable passion of a woman who consumed herself in art and love. Addio del passato follows and frames the late-life solitude and internal fragmentation that preceded Callas\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
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The program\u2019s emotional apex comes in Donizetti\u2019s Il dolce suono\u2026 from Lucia di Lammermoor. The mad scene stages Lucia\u2019s descent into madness and overlays it with Callas\u2019s own disintegration. As the second half builds, the scene intensifies into a visualized tragedy: illusion and reality collide, and the music drifts between vision and memory. The red mirror endlessly reflects a fragmented self, amplifying Callas\u2019s despair.<\/p>\n
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The audience witnesses the tragic soul of a woman who burned herself out in love and art. The finale fuses operatic madness with human loneliness; Jeong\u2019s physical performance reaches its peak as her white dress, soaked in blood, makes the passage toward death painfully visible, signaling the close of Callas\u2019s fierce life. The onstage chorus acts as witnesses \u2014 less agents of pity than participants in a collective desire to remember. In that gaze, the human Maria fades while the operatic myth endures, like the red mirror. The production realizes its dramatic, tragic vision by structuring the opera in theatrical terms, and the monodramatic quality that emerges feels like a distinct genre.<\/p>\n
Above all, the festival did more than perform lieder and opera arias as sound. It reinterpreted them as dramatic scenes that fuse movement, musical selection and narrative into a unified music-drama form. That experimental framing meaningfully altered the conventional music-drama format. Familiar lieder and opera melodies were placed in dramatic contexts, allowing audiences to follow a story while encountering classical lyric feeling. The stage resembled theater as much as concert hall, and the result was emotionally affecting \u2014 especially in the closing sequence.<\/p>\n
Kim Geon-pyo, professor, Department of Drama & Film, Daekyung University (theater critic)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The music theater festival in Seoul features works by Schubert and Brahms, showcasing songs and opera arias.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/cdn-union.tenbizt.com\/contents\/crawler-dev\/thumbnail\/2026\/05\/CP-2023-0263\/thumb-674213bf-b95a-4b25-81bf-7c4bcaa888cd.jpg","footnotes":""},"categories":[278101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"yoast_head":"\n