Song of a Wilted Flower

The hit of the current season at Germany's Nurnberg Opera House is an operatic twin bill called Dreams. Itis the work of the first Korean composer to make an important mark onWestern music, Isang Yun. Based on two ancient Taoist parables, Dreams idealizes the renunciation of earthly values while striving for inner personal freedom.

"What has passed returns to nothingness if one gazes back at it," runs one line of the libretto. "Today is spring; tomorrow the flower wilts." Perhaps it was thoughts like these that helped Yun finish Dreams in a Seoul prison cell last year.

In early 1967, life was finally beginning to fall into place for Yun. After eleven difficult years of studying and composing in Europe, he was now hearing his works performed and praised; commissions were starting to come in. That June however, Yun and his wife vanished from their home in West Berlin. They turned up next as prisoners facing a treason trial in their native South Korea. They had been abducted by agents of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who at the time were rounding up South Korean intellectuals and students by the dozen in Europe as alleged spies. The Yuns were accused of having visited North Korean officials in East Germany and of having made a trip through Siberia to North Korea itself--purportedly under the instructions of North Korean espionage agents.

The plucky South Korean government is under constant threat from the Communist North, and so its fears about spies are justified. Still, Yun insisted that he had gone to East Berlin only to inquire about an old friend in North Korea. His illegal "espionage" trip had been merely to examine a 4th century tomb at Nangnang, which was to be the locale of Butterfly Widow, the second part of Dreams. Unimpressed, a Seoul tribunal sentenced him to life imprisonment; it gave his wife a three-year term, then suspended it and allowed her to return to their two teenage children in West Berlin.

After 24 composers--including Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen--had signed a petition on his behalf, Yun was allowed to resume composing behind bars. The Bonn government, angered by Seoul's cloak-and-dagger tactics on German soil, threatened to suspend its $25 million program of economic aid. South Korea first reduced Yun's stiff sentence to 15 years, then to ten, and last month decided to free him. He is expected to leave for Germany next month.

Giant Butterfly. A cultural hero's welcome awaits him. At the premiere of Dreams, the audience demanded 31 curtain calls. Critics raved about Yun's prodigious orchestral and vocal writing and his intuitive knack for fantasy. The first work, Dreams of Liu-tung, depicts the adventures of a frivolous student who is converted to Taoism when a magician conjures up four dreams that chillingly depict his fate. Butterfly Widow is a comedy about a high-court functionary, Chan-tse, who dreams each night that he is a beautiful giant butterfly. A philosopher tells Chan-tse that he was actually a butterfly in his former life and was probably a lot happier without the nagging of his current wife. Chan-tse pretends to be dead in a cemetery. When his wife arrives at his coffin with a lover, Chan-tse rises up and scares her away forever. Thus freed, he becomes the butterfly he always wanted to be.

Despite the ingenuousness of the plots, Yun's serial music, with its Oriental overtones, is so inscrutable that the orchestra and offstage chorus required no fewer than 30 rehearsals. Yun's use of twelve-tone rows is as free as his theatrical fantasy. The singers often had to master unaccompanied vocal lines, and the orchestra itself was augmented by whips, rattles and bells. At the end, as color projections were flashed onto a transparent curtain, boulder-size clusters of tone shot from the orchestra, and twelve percussion instruments went wild with pings, thumps, roars and growling glissandi. Then the tumultuous sound dissolved as mysteriously as it had arisen. Silence. Curtain.

"In the beginning, it was hell to learn," said one of the soloists, American Soprano Maria de Francesca, "but almost overnight the meaning opened up. Later, I was scheduled to sing Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. Suddenly Strauss seemed awfully strange to me."

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