MH: For those of you who do not know the opera intimately, and it's a wonderfully intimate opera, The Peony Pavilion was composed in 1598. It's always referred to as the 'Romeo and Juliet' of China. It is a wonderful romance. The opera begins, in Tan Dun's adaptation, where Du Liniang, the bridal Du, an aptly named 16 year old is allowed into the family garden for the first time. Just as spring is awakening she is awakening and coming into her full bloom. She has a dream in which a young man, an aspiring scholar, comes into the garden and they become lovers. When she awakes she cannot recover from the vision of this handsome young man and she dies of 'love sickness'. Before she dies, she paints a self-portrait, which she tells her maid to leave hidden in the garden beside her grave. Lo and behold, a young scholar does come through on his way to the capital to take the civil service exams and discovers the portrait, falls in love, has a dream in which the ghost of the deceased bridal Du meets this young man—whose name, appropriately is Liu Mengmei (Liu is willow and Mengmei is to dream of the plum blossom). Of course, she is buried beside a willow and plum tree. He makes love to her in the dream and she reveals that she is a ghost but if his love is strong enough she will come back to life because—as you described—the lord of the underworld couldn't believe such a beautiful young thing hadn't fulfilled her destiny to become married. So, he digs her up, she comes back to life, and they marry.

That's not the end of the opera… that's the end of your opera, which is the happy ending… but the young scholar makes his way to Hangzhou, he takes the civil service exam. He places first but before that's announced it turns out his wife's father is defending a city that is being besieged by barbarians representing the Jin Dynasty. This all takes place during the Song Dynasty.

TD: You mentioned [Shakespeare's] Romeo and Juliet. Funnily enough, it happened in the same year, 1598.

MH: [Playwright] Tang Xianzu is the Shakespeare of China.

TD: Tang Xianzu is really the Shakespeare of China. He wrote so many plays, and each one is a masterpiece, like Shakespeare. These two plays [The Peony Pavilion and Romeo and Juliet], one in the East and the other in the West, influenced generations of scholars and creators.

MH: The dynamic of life and death… of course, Romeo and Juliet ends tragically… but in the late 1500s in China there was this fascination and romance with ghosts and the supernatural. Tang Xianzu really brings this all together. Your sensitivity to the spiritual vibrations of the garden is special and you have an ability to convey that.

TD: I realized something in your garden, that this time we used the original Chinese script which is a little shy… shy is not the right word…

MH: it's a little more discreet, not so erotic.

TD: It's even more erotic because it's shy. The expression and translation becomes so hidden, but the hidden nature lets you feel it. Every single word is a metaphor. Why 'plum'? Why 'willow'? Why the zither's sliding sound? The vertical flute. In the overture you will hear only two instruments, which are the Chinese zither played on this side, and the vertical flute played by the fishpond, on the other side. The two instruments have two agendas—sex, spiritual and musical. So they haunt each other throughout the opera. It reflects the dramatic structures.

MH: It's quite revolutionary to bring them together; the zither is not typically used in an orchestrated way. Do they carry a sexual connotation? Is one more masculine and one more feminine?

TD: It's just like the plum and willow. Originally I asked [male lead actor] Zhang Jun to do a new aria I wrote: 'You are the plum, I am the willow. You are the ching, I am the flute. I am the moon and you are the sun.' Something like this. In the end, the opera didn't need it because the two instruments tell everything.

So, when the opera starts it is the simplest overture, very minimal, but to me it carries enormous complexity in a very direct way. Kunqu opera, I won't say I'm an expert, but I know over the years it has gotten kind of fatty. They added a lot of things, even adding a cello. This time we had a vegetarian version where we go back all the way to the Ming Dynasty. The whole opera has only one flute. It was, for me, a quick decision because when I was in the garden I couldn't hear the birds and every detail if I had a big orchestra. I had to imagine what the most important instrument was in the Ming Dynasty and I think it was the bamboo flute so that's how it starts.

MH: So, talk about that because in opera, in traditional Kunqu, there are melodies that the actors perform when they are delivering their arias, if you will. Those melodies provide certain structure, but there were no notations for any musical accompaniment. So all of the sounds that you bring to the performance are your own creation. To what degree can we hear your reinterpretation of the traditional melodies? How do you go about blending those traditional arias with your instrumentations?

TD: It's kind of like medieval music or baroque music. Kunqu opera is single lines of melodic mood. We have a few moods and Kunqu is very rich and has hundreds of moods. This mood is almost like a verse in writing poetry. If you write fourteen lines you have to follow the rules for the verse. And if you are singing a certain line you have to follow the traditional structure. It all happens in a simple melody. The overall idea is how we're addressing it in one style.

This is the only [performance of Peony Pavilion] that is so simple. Very simple. In general, the simple two instruments were like a Chinese painting. In a Chinese painting you have a lot of white space. This is my inspiration. I leave so much space in the opera because I want you to hear the vocal calligraphy. Meanwhile, I have to add in a lot of sound of the wind and water and the birds. The 3D sound is anchored in different formats. I have to give it a lot of texture.

MH: In addition to the vocalization, there are so many gestures. The physical performance is very melodic and has its own calligraphy and discipline. Were you at all inspired by the physical movements of the performers in the way you adapted your melodies with the flute and zither.

TD: This reminds me of when I watched a video playback of a performance in Shanghai, I saw [lead female performer] Zhang Ran – who is also Zhang Jun's student, they make a beautiful couple on stage – perform one gesture. She was sitting down, but sat down over one minute. I was amazed. I said: 'She is incredible.' And they said, no, [the video playback] was just in slow motion. I was so disappointed. I said to my assistant director: 'Can you make her sit down over one minute?' and he said they would try.

Anyhow, what I wanted to say is Kunqu opera is very special in that there are no boundaries between action and sound. I loved to study in the music conservatory the early music. In Western formats it's the same thing, you learn medieval music historically and how sensitive the movement of sounds could give you inspiration for today's technique. I'm a big fan of [Claudio] Montiverde. A huge fan. I find that Chinese Kunqu has both. When you are trained, or when you learn Chinese Kunqu you could learn the action from the sound, and you could learn the movements from the sound. But it all came from one original form, which is Chinese calligraphy and Chinese painting. That's very special. In my garden you're surrounded by all this and the energy coming from the stage is very interesting. You always see the instruments, but meanwhile you hear the garden.

MH: I feel like this is the real reason why doing this performance in the East Met – the Metropolitan Museum – is such an important contribution to me personally and to the art because when you talk about the white space that surrounds calligraphy that is such a pregnant part of the painting with meaning, what you're doing is informing us about an aesthetic, cultural, tradition that crosses the boundary between performance art, visual art, they're all a piece. Bringing together the performance arts, with the visual arts, if we really truly understand the painting in poetry and the poetry in painting, if we really want to understand China, we have to do more of this collaborative effort. I'm really grateful to Tan Dun for taking on this challenge. We are such a compressed, tight little space, but in fact, that is the magic of Chinese gardens. With your imagination you have created an underworld and a new world and an outside and inside in a tiny space that is truly remarkable.

TD: People know a lot about Japanese gardens and a little about Chinese gardens, that's why talking to Max and visiting his garden and his curation, I was quite moved. I feel revolutionary again. How to find that China. Where is that beautiful China? It's become very revolutionary. I really learned what is revolutionary in New York, while I was a student here. I tried to find China from New York – and I did.

No matter if you're in China at the conservatory or at Columbia, the professors always teach you how to be complex and they never teach you how to be simple. But the reality is, when you become simple is when you become successful. As a practical matter, the problem is we're facing a gap. To cross this gap you have to be revolutionary. For example, scoring for Kunqu opera I was in many major opera cities. I find the orchestrations are getting bigger and bigger with vanity. They are bigger than ever especially because China is rich now. It's incredible and you can get everything now. So they almost become like symphonies, these [Kunqu] operas. And they need to be loud because they perform for 2,500 people. We need microphones, orchestras, etc. But tonight you will see something quite special because tonight's audience is 50. It's incredible. That kind of experience made me think to listen to John Cage and to be very specific. Listen to the noise, but with the feeling of the silence.

Turning the Met's garden into that space, fading away of time, and this beautiful dialogue between the pond and willow. Everything is so simple, but becomes so colorful. Even yourself, you will experience it will become so operatic in that space. That beautiful China is happening—in that sound, in that space, in that Kunqu. To do the Kunqu five times, it's a journey searching for the Beautiful China. I really want to thank Max and the Met for taking this suggestion and letting us come.

MH: Tan Dun, you've taken us all along on your journey, and we thank you very much.

(Reporting from New York City)