With all the talent, time, and resources invested in this opera, I wish I could report that it is also an artistic triumph. But while there is plenty of imaginative writing, especially with the Eastern instruments, "The First Emperor" comes off as a mammoth ship drifting uneasily among all its influences, and it never quite finds port dramatically or musically. Probably the biggest problem is the static, often cumbersome, and intermittently cliche d English libretto that Tan Dun and the otherwise accomplished Chinese writer Ha Jin ("Waiting" and "War Trash") fashioned out of ancient Chinese historical records and a screenplay titled "The Legend of the Bloody Zheng" by Lu Wei . (Tan Dun is most widely known for his Oscar-winning score to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.")
The emperor of the work's title is Qin Shi Huang , a visionary but despotic ruler who built the Great Wall and strove to unite China, but at an enormous price in human lives. The opera centers on his ruthless quest to unify the country both through military conquest and by persuading his childhood friend Gao Jianli to compose an anthem that would spiritually sustain his new empire. Qin's beautiful but crippled daughter, Princess Yueyang , has been promised to Qin's top general, but she falls in love with the composer instead. Treachery, suicide, and murder ensue.
Somewhere here are the outlines of a classic operatic drama -- the destinies of a great empire clashing with the untutored passions of the heart -- but the libretto ultimately conveys little of the depth of the emperor's tyranny or the reach of his sweeping ambitions. The war of expansion happens offstage; the building of the Great Wall, represented abstractly by vast rows of stone-like blocks suspended from ropes, passes by quickly; and the character of Princess Yueyang comes off strangely like a spoiled contemporary teenager. She sings at one point in a duet: "Emperor, my father, you put your Empire above my love. Have you ever thought I am a woman with my own feelings? . . . No, I won't listen to you!"
