This is an inspiring, romantic, fateful memoir of the first and still most famous Chinese-born singer ever to make it on the world stage. A wild child living on his own during the Cultural Revolution, forced to labor in a factory for seven years, then nearly being thrown out of a music program for wiggling his hips like Elvis in performance, Hao Jiang Tian seemed an unlikely candidate for Western classical musical stardom. This compelling book shares his operatic tales of love, art, and survival that lead fatefully to the Metropolitan Opera, and on to the world’s musical capitals, often alongside Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, where he forged the way for Asian singers in the often reluctant opera world.
Born in 1954, Tian was forced to study piano by his People’s Liberation Army musician parents, but won a reprieve when his piano teacher was arrested during the Cultural Revolution. Then the boy smashed to bits his parents’ treasured record collection. After his parents were themselves sent away and he was on his own, he taught himself to play accordion and entertained schoolmates and then his often-illiterate factory mates in the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team. Just before Mao’s death, he tricked his way into a voice training program, and ultimately left China during the “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign” of the mid-80s. Not until he was 38 and had found his one true love did he first gain a footing in the opera world; his first job was at the Met, where he has sung every year since 1991. Inevitably the book draws the reader back to China, where Tian, now an American citizen, attempts to rescue young artists from the today’s gritty realities there and to understand himself the baffling changes that have taken place since he departed.
