The snow queen: Finally I decided to finish my opera, "The Snow Queen" that I started composing more than 10 years ago but left in a state of limbo for a long time. The original story is of course the well-known fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. However, it is not my idea to write just an opera based on the fairy tale; I would like to relate its content to contemporary society and modern psychology on the one hand, to explore the pre-Christian and Shamanistic roots of the tale on the other, thus presenting Andersen's plot from a more universal point of view. In general, my music tends to reflect multitudinous influences from avantgarde to jazz, pop, ethnic music, classical and pre-classical European music etc., and I think this tendency will become even clearer in the opera. As to my present ideas about the recasting of Andersen's tale, the basic outline of the first act will be similar to Andersen - the boy Kai is abducted by the Snow Queen to the land of eternal snow. But Andersen's tale also introduces a reason for Kai being abducted which for me tastes a little bit too strong of Christian sensibilities: A splinter of a mirror made by the devil gets into Kai's eye... I think there could be a whole lot of other more convincing and more interesting motives for Kai to follow the Snow Queen. Bullying by other children (a very important theme in Japanese society, but I guess not only there), for example, or longing for an elder beautiful woman or adolescent instability which may sometimes lead to a fascination with death. This is the psychological side; at the same time, I would like to present the first act in the atmosphere of a Shamanistic ritual. The second act begins with an aria sung by Gerda who is on her way to search Kai. She meets, among others, two clown-like crows and an old woman who turns out to be a witch: The witch puts Gerda under a spell that makes her forget Kai and her quest; trying to keep Gerda like a sweet little child and to constrain her, the witch seems to me to symbolize a typical kind of disfunctional relationship between mother and daughter. On the other hand, the crows ressemble nomadic people who are not constrained by the usual rules of society, and Gerda regains her courage to look for Kai after meeting them again. The third act starts with an aria of the Snow Queen. I don't want to portray the Snow Queen purely as a demon without heart - maybe this intriguing figure has a hidden similarity to a certain type of women in our time. The Snow Queen is beautiful and intelligent. She is a sorceress - a woman of power, reigning the land of eternal snow, the border of life and death. Out of loneliness, she takes Kai with her. But she is anxious to lose him, therefore unable to express her love for Kai. Perhaps this is a kind of loneliness some women in today's society feel too? Gerda's quest, on the other hand, goes on, and next she comes to a Prince and a Princess who reside in a kind of "Dream castle". I think this could have something of the world of internet, computer games and cell-phone-kids. After that, Andersen has Gerda meet the daughter of a robber, or a robber girl; I will take the liberty to change her into a man, son of a robber, because I need him to be related to in the last scene when Gerda finds the entrance to the snow land. Through all her encounters with people and animals, Gerda has grown and finally comes face to face with the Snow Queen and Kai. Still I am not quite sure how I want to finish the story. I wouldn't be satisfied just to stage it as a kind of battle between Snow Queen and Gerda; rather I would like to find some way to express a changing flow of emotion between these two very different women and Kai. In the moment, I am reworking and orchestrating the second act of the opera - the part which I already wrote in an ensemble version about a dozen years ago -, and besides arranging everything for are rather normal opera orchestra, I also try to create a link between my earlier work and my present style. This is not as difficult as I thought initially, rather it seems to me that I now can express my ideas with much more fluidity now. As for the language of the libretto, the first version was in German, so for the time being the revision is based on the German libretto, but I am not attached to the German language. The libretto could be as well in English (perhaps depending on where the premiere of the opera will take place). No part of this homepage may be used for commercial purposes without permission of the composer. ©2010 Mari Takano