Hearing the Call Of the West, and Hanging It Up

BEIJING -- Dai Yuqiang, the most famous opera singer in China, sits at the dining room table at a friend's home here and laughs like a small boy.

"Before Pavarotti died," he says, "I was considered Number Four." Another infectious laugh, to defuse the force of a tenor's ego.

Dai, 46, is a superstar in China. He gives around 200 concerts a year -- "five on the last lunar new year," he says in broken English. His handsome, rubbery face can look, in photos, like a little girl's -- pouty lips, smooth skin, and oh, that mullet -- or, on the cover of his debut solo recording released in 2004, like a matinee idol.

None of which reflects the voice. The voice that led impresario Tibor Rudas, the man who invented the Three Tenors, to gamble untold amounts of his own money on creating a new star. The voice that led Luciano Pavarotti to bring Dai to his home in Pesaro, Italy, as his first and only Chinese student.

"It's the type of sound that caused me to fall in love with opera as a young kid," says Christopher Mattaliano, the general director of the Portland Opera in Oregon, where Dai made his American debut in "Turandot" in 2003. "It's just a full, lyric, old-fashioned tenor sound. . . . It's the real thing."

Dai went on to sing in Detroit, Covent Garden, La Scala. Now he mainly makes appearances at Chinese concerts and on TV galas, most often singing just two selections: "O sole mio" and "Nessun dorma." And his career in the West appears to be over.

The story of Dai Yuqiang is a story about Western opera in the new China -- about someone coming late to the table and ultimately creating his own rules rather than assimilating to the West.

In China, Western opera is viewed not as a cousin of China's music theater (traditional Peking Opera), but as a sophisticated foreign import. So, at least, announces the press release of the mammoth opera festival currently going on at Beijing's National Center for the Performing Arts (through July 2) -- an extravaganza of 13 works, including Western favorites like "Turandot" and "Tosca" (both with Dai) and Chinese revolutionary classics like "Daughter of the Communist Party."

Opera seems to be hot in China. For the last two decades, China's cities have been building opera houses to show that they are modern, cosmopolitan centers. But those theaters don't house any opera companies. The two leading companies in China -- the Shanghai Opera and the Central Opera in Beijing don't have their own theaters; they have to rent space when they want to put on a performance. And the government subsidies for the Central Opera are so low that Yu Feng, the company's president and artistic director, won't reveal the amount, laughing as he says, "I don't want the government to lose face."

Dai's career reflects this unsteady background. From one perspective, it's an example of tremendous success; the tenor is China's first homegrown opera star. From another, it's a story of lost opportunities. And like many things in the "new" China, it was all bound up with the Beijing Olympics.

In June 2001, in a not-so-subtle bid to influence the voting on the host city of the 2008 Olympics, Beijing hosted the Three Tenors -- Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras -- to the Forbidden City. This was probably facilitated by the fact that China's then-president, Jian Zemin, was crazy about Western classical music. He even threw a private party for the singers after the show, at which they danced and, yes, sang opera together.

The planning, of course, took months. Among other tasks, the Tibor Rudas organization and its on-site liaison, a presenter named Kathy Lagonegro, set out to find a suitable orchestra. The Central Opera House, which really wanted its orchestra to get the job, mounted a special performance for Rudas's advance team, and when its own tenor canceled, it called at the last minute on a tenor from the opera company of the the People's Liberation Army -- Dai.