Tian Haojiang - the first Chinese to perform on the Italian opera stage and one of the top 10 bass singers in the world - acted as his own host when he gave a solo concert last week in Shanghai Grand Theatre.
"When referring to opera, people always think it is a highbrow art, that it is serious and unapproachable," Tian said. "But I wanted to have a casual concert to let the audience know that listening to an opera is also an interesting thing."
He said he hoped to communicate with the audience freely without the barrier of excessive awe.
"I am a bass. But, first of all, I am a man. We can share the joy that music brings us," he said.
Many opera-lovers were moved not only by Tian's rich voice but also by his sincere revelations about his rich life experience.
Tian's exploration of opera is laborious and full of dramatic coincidences.
Though Tian's father was a conductor and his mother a composer in Beijing, Tian did not have an easy start in music.
Just like many young children today, Tian was forced to learn to play the piano at the age of eight. As an active and rebellious child, he found it monotonous to sit before the old German piano.
When the decade-long "cultural revolution" started in 1966, he was informed that he did not need to take any more piano lessons. He cheered and ran round his house four times.
But he found that he greatly missed the piano after he followed his parents to the countryside in Central China's Henan Province.
In 1969, when he was back in Beijing, the first thing he did was to wipe the dust from the family piano, which he regarded as a long-lost friend.
The piano became his only friend in what was a lonely time for him.
Between 1970 and 1976, Tian worked in a boiler factory in Beijing.
Tian did not realize he had a talent for singing until one summer day when he shouted from the ground floor to his friends upstairs, asking them to go out with him. Another window opened and a stranger invited him round for a talk.
The stranger, a teacher from Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music, advised Tian to take up singing. This was the first time that Tian discovered his gift, but he was regretful that he didn't ask the teacher for his name.
At the age of 20, Tian started to learn opera. In 1977, after the national college entrance examinations resumed, he entered the singing department of the Central Conservatory of Music. He worked in the Central Philharmonic Society of China after graduation. However, as an aspiring young singer, Tian wanted to fully tap his potential and yearned to further his study abroad.
In 1983, Tian gained a full scholarship from the University of Denver in Colorado in the United States and graduated with a master's degree in 1987.
Nevertheless, his pilgrimage to opera had just begun and many great difficulties still lay ahead.
After meeting seven agents and having hundred of auditions, Tian still could not find a job that satisfied him.
At the very moment when Tian was planning to give up opera as a career, the president of the University of Denver recommended that he try for an audition held by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, one of the world's top five opera houses.
The audition process was also a theatrical experience for Tian.
"At the very beginning, it seemed like a disaster for me," sighed Tian.
In the first round of the audition, Tian's piano accompanist did not show up. Tian found a stranger to accompany him just five minutes before the audition.
"What was worse, in the second round, I did the 10-minute audition with only one eye," Tian said.
Tian is short-sighted but he lost one contact lens in his apartment that morning. He fumbled around the floor searching for it for 20 minutes but, in the end, he had to rush to the audition with only one lens.
Tian said: "I felt extremely bad and thought I must have failed due to my nervousness."
One week later, when the opera house informed him that he had been admitted, Tian jumped up and down and cheered like a child.
As a Chinese, he has had to put in five times the effort to perform on a stage dominated by Caucasians, Tian said.
Every year, over 100,000 opera majors graduate, yet more than 70 per cent of them will give up opera as a career.
In world opera circles, there are only 20 noted opera singers from Asia. And there are no more than five of Chinese descent.
For every opera, Tian must recite some 200 pages of lyrics written in Italian, German, English or even Latin, none of which is his mother tongue.
While he performed in Verdi's "Ernani" at the Nice Opera in France, he sang and acted wearing costumes weighing 80 pounds (36 kilograms). After every performance, he almost collapsed in a sweat.
Despite all the physical and mental challenges, Tian will not stop his incessant pursuit of opera.
(China Daily August 22, 2002)
