ABSTRACT

In 1997, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia visited South Korea’s president Young-sam Kim. On April 29, there was a welcoming reception at a banquet hall at Cheong Wa Dae—the Blue House, which is the executive office and official residence of the President of South Korea—and the first music played at the reception was “Libiamo ne’lieti calici,” commonly known as the “Drinking Song,” from Verdi’s opera La Traviata (Kong 1998: 48). Even when one considers the popularity and historical importance of this opera in Korea as the first Western opera performed with an all-Korean cast, many people would ask: Why La Traviata? Why is it an Italian opera aria, rather than Korean music or Saudi Arabian music that was performed as the very first piece at such a ceremonial, diplomatic banquet for a non-Western guest at the Korean presidential office? This chapter explores transcultural transformation of Western opera in Korea during the Japanese Occupation period (1910–1945), focusing on two issues: how Japanese colonial cultural policies constructed a distinctive sociopolitical and cultural identity of Western opera, and how this politicized image of Western opera is portrayed in two Korean films: In Praise of Death (dir. Ho-sun Kim, 1991), a biopic about Shim-deok Yun (1897–1926), the first prominent operatic soprano in Korea; and Sopyonje (dir. Kwon-taek Im, 1993), a story about a fictional singer of p’ansori, an indigenous Korean musical genre developed into Korean operatic music Ch’angguk. The second film also shows the politicized tension between Western music and p’ansori, the latter of which was suppressed and condemned in the process of Japanese colonialists’ cultural annihilation of Korea. 1