The second opera to come out of Singapore, FENCES by JOHN SHARPLEY and ROBERT YEO, will be unveiled this weekend with two performances at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, produced by OPERA VIVA SINGAPORE and conducted by DARRELL ANG. This marks a watershed moment in Singapore musical history, which is little or no history in the conception and creation of original opera. The story is a familiar one, star-crossed lovers separated by race, religion and in the context of 1965 Singapore and Malaysia, nationality. Will love overcome bigotry and politics? Unlike Romeo and Juliet, we have been promised a happy ending, but everything in between is fair game.
A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT YEO
Librettist of the Singapore opera FENCES
Produced by OPERA VIVA SINGAPORE
18 and 19 August 2012,
Lee Foundation Theatre,
Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts
7.30 pm
The story of Fences of
the Heart, to use the original name of the opera, came from Singapore’s “Mr
Opera” Leow Siak Fah who was himself born in Malaysia and had become a
Singaporean. How did you get involved as the librettist of Fences?
It was in 2004 that Siak Fah got
me and composer John Sharpley together to ask if we could write an opera. He
gave us the idea, the story of Steven Lee and Nora Ibrahim, and asked if we
were comfortable with it and we both said “Yes”. Next, I asked John which came first, the
libretto or the music, and he said the former. That answer sealed it, and I
started to think about the story and the necessary research.
Like everybody (old enough) remembers the exact day, the
exact moment they learnt that President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963,
could you remember exactly what you were doing on 9 August 1965, and how you
felt at that time?
On 9 August 1965, two colleagues
and I, three Chinese schoolteachers from St Andrew's Secondary School had
driven up to Kuala Lumpur in the morning en
route to the east coast of Malaya for a holiday. We spent the night in the
federal capital and the next morning, we went to visit a friend of mine who
managed a bookshop within sight of Pudu Prison. I bantered with him about
KL-Singapore relationship which had become fractious, and then he asked,
anxiously, “You mean you don't know?” Then he pulled out a copy of the New Straits Times, and the front page
headline read, “Singapore is Out.” That was the moment we know that Singapore
had separated from Malaysia. All three of us returned home, aborting our
planned vacation.
The story of Fences
has to do with differences (racial, cultural, socio-economic), separation
(physical, emotional, real or imagined), reconciliation and rationalisation.
How did you craft your libretto to encompass all these complex and highly
contentious issues?
I think my experience writing
poems and plays helped a great deal. Though the story, with its Romeo and Juliet parallel appeared
clichéd, it sounded real to me. Anyway, I had always wanted to write about the
years when Singapore was part of Malaysia and here was an opportunity to write
about very traumatic events which suddenly created a new nation. So, in addition
to being “caught” in the turmoil, which provided the raw experience, I
researched by listening to operas, reading libretti, books and articles. Among the operas I watched were Bizet’s Carmen and Benjamin Britten’s The
Turn of the Screw. One book, in
particular, was very useful - A Moment Of
Anguish by Albert Lau.
I figured, in a foolhardy way,
that as I have written poems and plays, I could try my hand at writing a
libretto. I was emboldened by two examples. First, I had worked on writing the
text for a musical with Joe Peters (yet to be staged), and second, one of my
favourite poets, W.H Auden, had written libretti and worked with composers like
Benjamin Britten.
In writing Fences,
I want to be poetic and concrete. There will be no pop sentiments and
abstractions like, “I cannot live without you.” Instead, I loaded my lines with
concrete images and tough emotion. When Nora, the Malay heroine from Kuala
Lumpur first meets Steven, the Chinese boy from Singapore, she teases him with
the line, “You have waiting in your eyes,” where an abstraction like waiting is
qualified by the specific reference to Steven's eyes. When Steven condemns race
as divisive, he sings, “What is this stench called race?” The choruses are
equally uncompromising, for example the first Malaya chorus has these lines,
We must deal with
this Singapore problem
The island south
that's like a footsore.
We can't have it
infect our body
If it turns red
outside our door.
I must add that my collaboration
with John has been very process-oriented. We talked all the time he was
composing, both making many revisions, as we went along over four years of
writing. And we did it harmoniously.
Were the characters
in the opera modelled after personalities you knew or could identify with? How
did you make them come across sympathetic rather than the usual cardboard
stereotypes that operas all too frequently portray?
No, they are not modelled after
people I know. As a secular person, a believer in multiculturalism, these
values inherent in the beliefs would inevitably find their ways into my words.
If I made the fathers in Fences villains,
I was, in a sense following Shakespeare's Romeo
and Juliet, in which the patriarchs Capulet and Montague are dominant. The
mothers are not heard and so I decided to give them voice, sympathetic to the
lovers.
The moral of the story: Love Conquers All. Is life that
straight-forward or black and white for you?
Love conquers all is never
straightforward. After the conquest, it may remain lovely—or loveless. But that
is another story.
