Key Passages Talk: The Making of Ghost Village: Across the borders of Life and Death, Scholarship and Opera

This talk will take you into the process of creating a new, experimental opera based on a historical ghost story from Pu Songling’s seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece, Liaozhao’s Strange Tales (Liaozhai zhiyi). Entitled Ghost Village, the opera is a creative collaboration between Judith Zeitlin, as scholar and English language librettist, and the composer Yao Chen, a China-based, Chicago-trained professor of composition at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

Building on the European operatic tradition, Ghost Village also evokes Chinese aesthetic and theatrical sensibilities. The eerily beautiful wedding scene, for example, draws inspiration from the rich Chinese tradition of spirit marriage and female ghosts. Though set in the past, this opera speaks to many pressing issues in today’s world, particularly war, terrorism, the refugee crisis, and the general suffering of innocent individuals through political violence. At the same time, Ghost Village builds on the long operatic tradition centered on love that crosses the boundaries of life and death, exemplified by such foundational early works such as Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (1598), and Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607).

Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A scholar of early modern Chinese literature, her innovative work combines literary history with other disciplines, including visual and material culture, theater, music, medicine, gender studies, and film. Her many publications include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (1993), and co-edited works such as Writing and Materiality in China (2000), Thinking in Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (2007), Chinese Opera Film (2010), and The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality (2019).

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and Hester and Cedric Crowell Endowment