The movie Parasite (2019) was brought up in yesterday’s class as we were exploring the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho’s Symphony No.7, “Insect Symphony” (1988). I have unsubscribed from Netflix for more than a year (but I have stayed somewhat informed about the potentially addictive by relying on second-hand sources), but Parasite on its own is worth streaming. The first movement of the symphony is titled “The Tramp, the Parasitic Hymenopter and its Larva.” To understand a bit more about why the movement would be named as such, we looked at what parasites or parasitic species could possibly mean in context. Parasite offered an accessible example.
Bong Joon Ho once shared that the title of Parasite bears a double meaning, since both the poor and the rich in the story live off each other. In his words: “So both are parasites.” Aho, however, also refers to the tramp, which could seem a bit confusing at first. But Symphony No. 7 is actually derived from his opera Hyönteiselämää (Insect Life, 1985–87), based on the satirical play by Karel and Josef Capek, Insect Life, or The World We Live In. In the satire, the tramp as the narrator observes all kinds of insects, including butterflies, dung beetles, and ants, which one can hear in Symphony No. 7, and he saw them as representations of human behaviours.
But parasitic Hymenoptera are no typical parasites; they are a specific kind which, unlike parasites that only derivie nutrients and energy from another organism at the host’s expense, often kill their hosts during their life cycle – perhaps something that helps make Aho’s point, that the opera should be heard as “a comic opera with a tragic ending about narcissism, the selfish pursuit of pleasure, and self-interest.” Narcissism together with the ideas of a fluid self and a false self were also considered in this course, when we looked briefly at David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly. It was not until quite recently, after reading a review of its U.K. (operatic) premiere at the Barbican in 2024, that I became aware of how the Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo had turned the play into an opera.
M. Butterfly, largely inspired by the historical story of the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, a male Chinese opera singer and spy, is often interpreted as a work of “inverted Orientalism” in that it subverts the traditional Orientalist trope in Madama Butterfly. It is frequently described as a play that critiques Puccini’s narrative by retelling the story from an “Eastern perspective” – though such a claim is essentially still relying on the very same framework (East/West) that it seeks to critique. But Hwang also intends the play to be one that explores the problem of “fantasy” – fantasy as narcissism. In his words, the protagonist falls in love with a “fantasy stereotype.” The ending of Gallimard “transfiguring” himself into a “butterfly” as a sort of substitutionary act suggests that fantasy as narcissism collapses any distinction between oneself and the other. In this sense, it is perhaps not (merely) about fantasizing about the other but also turning oneself into a “fantasy” through a process of self-fetishization.
But there have also been a lot of other interesting topics that are not as heavy, so to speak, that were discussed in the course; we looked at, for instance, how Bartók as an avid insect collector transformed piano pedagogical exercises by writing “From the Diary of a Fly” as part of Mikrokosmos; how David Rothenberg demonstrated the possibility of improvising with nature, including bird sound and insects (he embodies the spirit of wuwei in a way – something discussed in my recently published article…); how Bob Dylan drew on the idea of “locusts” not only to speak of the Brood X cicadas he heard but also the many prying people who irritated him; and how composers like Beethoven, Berlioz, and Mussorgsky had all worked on the satirical “Song of the Flea” from Goethe’s Faust using different musical techniques.
Soon I will be at the 2025 AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting, presenting on the Chinese-British pianist Fou Ts’ong’s understanding of Haydn and his keyboard music. Fou was particularly known for his love for Chopin and Debussy, but since his late 60s, he had developed a strong interest in Haydn’s keyboard compositions. While reflecting on Fou’s interpretation of Haydn, I realized that the subject of Chinese reception of Haydn has remained rather underexplored. One can think of the recent premiere of Haydn’s opera Il mondo della luna as part of the 2023 Beijing Music Festival on September 23 and 24 at the Dahua City Center for the Performing Arts. Considering that Haydn’s operas are not so frequently performed today, this event seems to hint an (even more) auspicious future for Haydn in China.