International partnerships
The visiting Opera at the 2008 Savonlinna Opera Festival was the Shanghai Opera House.
The Shanghai Opera has played a major role in the development of operatic and vocal art in China. Ever since it was founded in the 1950s it has performed not only opera, dance and music theatre but also standard works in the choral and instrumental repertoire. Hence the Shanghai Opera is nowadays one of the leading and best-known arts establishments in China.
In the course of its history the Shanghai Opera has premiered many Chinese operas and dance works, such as the operas King of Chu, Thunderstorm, The Wager and The Predestined Love for Half A Lifetime, and the national dance dramas Dagger Society, Going up to the Moon, Phoenix in the Qi Mountain, Hua Mulan and The story of Wuyu. It has also given the first performance of hundreds of other smaller-scale music and dance works.
Complementing the great Chinese works in the repertoire of the Shanghai Opera are numerous Western operas and operettas: Madama Butterfly, La bohème, Tosca, Turandot, Eugene Onegin, Romeo and Juliet, Die Fledermaus, Carmen, Aida, Faust, Otello, The Pearl Fishers and The Nose, to name but a few. The Shanghai Opera also performs cantatas, masses, oratorios and great choral works such as The Yellow River, Long March, Stabat Mater, Carmina Burana, Shostakovich’s The Song of the Forests, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Choral Symphony.
The Shanghai Opera has collaborated widely with European opera houses and festivals, among them the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome and Florence, the Opéra Comique in Paris, the Opera Center of San Francisco and the Ludwigsburg Festival.
A major centre of finance, commerce and communications, Shanghai is China’s most international city and the Shanghai Opera has helped to build bridges between China and other countries. Together with its host city the Shanghai Opera has steadily attracted growing international interest.