A trip to the opera in the artistically ballsy nation of Mongolia

Stalin once stood here. Sukhbaatar Square, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Last week, I stood there, too. 

Stalin was overseeing a military parade mounted by a lackey Mongolian regime following his eighteen month “Great Purge” of the country between 1937 and 1939. The then Mongolian nominal leader, Choibalsan, finally brought the purge to an end, frantically jumping through Stalin’s hoops, in a failed effort to blunt the onslaught of the dictator’s hated Soviet NKVD secret police.

Mongolia lost 35,000 people, or 5% of its population during that two-year purge. To gain some context, applied to today’s US population, that would be 20 million souls. Mongolia went through hell.

In 1936, Stalin had posed in the Kremlin wearing a traditional Mongolian deel costume, holding a smiling young girl, her father – on a goodwill visit to Moscow, the donor of the gift – proudly looking on. By 1939, the father was dead. Cosying up to tyrants did not pay.

Everything, of course, has since changed. Or has it? Now, Soviet-style assaults on weaker victims are called “Special Operations”. Deranged leaders simply sup at longer tables.

I stood there, pensive – between two satisfactorily traditional lion sculptures – on the steps of the more than satisfactorily pink, neoclassical, white-pillared opera house, opened in 1963. That was when the functions of the also-very-satisfactorily pink state culture theatre down the road were divided among theatre, opera, and ballet. Mongolia State Opera (MSO) was born.

I remained standing there, looking out on the vast square, now shorn of all Soviet era statuary. Stalin was consigned to a junkyard in the early 90s. At its centre is a bronze statue on a huge plinth, guarded by a phalanx of lions. It is Damdin Sükhbaatar, hero of the 1921 revolution, when Mongolia gained independence from China, only to lose it again to the Soviet Union. The square is named in his honour.

Modern Ulaanbaatar is a jumble of surviving Soviet-style low rise buildings and modern high rise global brand hotels and malls. It is a pleasant, bustling city whose drivers know no fear. On the other hand, surviving cyclists can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Round every corner, flashes the colour of a traditional building, perhaps a temple. Two outdated, gasping coal-fired power stations belch out pollution which, given the right conditions, settles across the city. Ulaanbaatar’s sun is often Impressionist. 

Politics in Mongolia bubbles like subterranean lava, ever about to erupt. In 2013, the city authorities changed the name of the square to the more tourist oriented Chinggis Khan Square. In 2016, the outraged and powerful Sükhbaatar family won a court battle to have the name of their ancestor restored. Family counts for something in this tribal country.

Damdin stands there still, celebrating his victory. I was standing on the threshold of a cultural discovery. About to celebrate the sheer determination that drives a small, feisty nation to pursue the western art form of opera, while bringing its own locally crafted works onstage. How, with a potential Ulaanbaatar audience of only 1.5 million could they manage it? 

Time to stop standing. Time to find out. The recently appointed British Ambassador, Fiona Blyth MBE – who happens to be the niece of my wife, Anne Blyth (full disclosure) – had amazingly arranged a meeting with the Director of MSO, B. Sarantuya. No further particulars offered. Business card really unhelpful. Time to turn from the politics of the square to the art of the opera house. 

Ms Sarantuya proved charming, helpful – and knowledgeable. She gave me a presentation gift of Mongolian wine and beautiful glasses. I will know if she liked me once the wine has been opened. 

And yet. Truth be told, the realpolitik of Central Asia haunts visitors to Ulaanbaatar. No matter how many other fascinating diversions – concerts, temples, Gers (traditional tent-like dwellings that I had wrongly assumed were yurts), the humongous steel statue of Chinggis Khan an hour outside the capital surveying the empty steppe, the arts, especially opera – are summoned, nothing can alter the backdrop of Mongolia’s geographical dilemma. 

Pinched in a geographical vice between the jaws of Russia to the north and China to the south, proudly independent Mongolia understands it ploughs a sensitive furrow in international relations. In which the West can play only a bit part. The remoteness is palpable. An eight-hour flight east from Istanbul, crossing a plethora of unknown “stans”.

Landing at Ulaanbaatar airport is much like Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” descent to the lunar surface in 1969. The view from the aircraft is a lunar landscape of unbroken, parched, totally unpopulated, undulating, green-grey stony ground. Circular depressions are scattered randomly, like craters. 

International airports normally feature outskirts, maybe a reservoir and engineering buildings before giving way to runways, hangers, and terminals. Not Ulaanbaatar. There was a sense of mysterious isolation. Then, just before touchdown the bleakness was broken by a gaggle of livestock, herded by a quad-bike mounted shepherd. A rare concession to rural modernity.

Entering the opera house, I found myself in a warmly familiar world. The interior was well used and buzzing. Rehearsing voices penetrated from every floor. Chorus rehearsal rooms were busy. No lifts. Madam Director had chosen an office on the gazzilionth floor. So what? An opportunity to snoop.

En route I ducked in and out of make-up rooms, investigated the occasional dressing room, waved “Hi” to the costumed Chief of Police hastening to dress rehearsal, listened to instruments tuning up. All the organised chaos of a well-tempered opera house going about its seemingly unfathomable business. Preparing for curtain-up.

The house itself is small, but elegant. Five hundred red plush seats, excellent acoustics and not overdone on the gilt front. An opera house with a sense of practical purpose. On the afternoon of the matinee performance most of the audience was schoolchildren. In Mongolia, art education is taken seriously. 

Hankering after Soviet certainty, in one-to-one conversations some artists and administrators from the Soviet era harked back, with ill-concealed nostalgia, to the days when joint scholarship programmes with Moscow were common and funding streams for cultural activities more certain. Mongolia has established a successful democratic structure, seen as normal by the younger generation, but old attitudes still require more tides of time to wipe that Soviet era’s beach clean.

Showtime! I was now sitting in a box, located off stage right, with excellent sight lines and a “how-de-do” view of the orchestra pit, watching the house fill. The plot of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville is likely well known. If not, a link to a convenient Met synopsis is here. 

This was a co-production with an unidentified Italian house from director Stefano Monti. Monti, currently based in Milan, is a veteran of Rossini productions – including the Rossini Festival – and has delivered a fresh and spontaneous version of this opera buffa, where nothing gets in the way of the sometimes-complex comedy lines. The success of the show was marked by frequent, LOL outbursts from the young audience. I’m almost sure the Mongolian surtitles were accurate.

The “on the ground” staging was by “G. Ganbaatar” – again, no further particulars. G.G did a great job. Hands together for G.G. The opening comic scene when Count Almaviva commissions an ensemble of local ne-er do wells to play while he serenades Rosina under the balcony of her creepy guardian, Dr Bartolo’s house, set the tone brilliantly. 

The band of players ebbed to and fro across stage, in perfect time with the music. When it came to pay-up time, they nearly rioted. The stingy Almaviva seemed reluctant to open his purse. 

Almaviva had swaggered on in American WASP tennis gear, straight from Harvard’s Benner Tennis Center, racquet nonchalantly dangled over his shoulder. Maybe his pursuit of Rosina was not too serious. 

No descent into slapstick, a lazy stage director’s cop out. Good omen. And, the rest of the performance followed that example, offering a hilarious Almaviva pretending to be a drunken soldier billeted on the Bartolo household, then suitably discombobulating authority when, threatened with arrest as the fake student, Lindoro, he reveals himself as Count Almaviva. Which counts for something, even in Ulaanbaatar.

Set in post-war America – the backdrop looked like a Chicago skyline – the set was simple, but effective. MSO offered no programme, no cast list, nor was there much blurb online. They thought they had set it in the nineteenth century – but were there really VW Beetles on the streets then? Quibble. Stop it. We’re in Mongolia.

The quality of singing was of a level with a good second order European house. Perhaps a German Staatsoper. That’s not a criticism. Young, quality voices at an early stage of development. Hardly surprising, as in the late 20-teens Mongolian singers consistently scored highly in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. Baritone, Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar went viral, straight to the hearts of the BBC Cardiff audience and beyond. 

Who knew that the two-tone Tuvan throat singing technique so common on the steppes would translate to the execution of western classical repertoire so well? It did, and still does. Not one of the singers on stage would have been out of place in a European or American house. Two were standouts. Almaviva and the maid, Berta. Almaviva for his fabulous, fluent tenor voice that filled the house, Berta for her brilliant comic acting. 

I am on a voyage of discovery as to the identity of all the singers and once/if there is a big ‘reveal’ I shall update. 

The orchestra gave a polished and zesty performance under the baton of Ts. Gansukh STA, NFP (No Further Particulars).

Mongolia Opera offers a surprisingly comprehensive repertoire of native, Asian and European repertoire: Verdi’s La Traviata, Aida and Il trovatore; Puccini’s Tosca, Madame Butterfly and La bohème; Bizet’s Carmen; Mozart’s don Giovanni; Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor. 

And, in the Mongolia/Asia corner we have: TS. Natsakdorj, Princess of the Countess House; B Dambinsuren, Three Heads with Reason (A must watch for those conducting the UK’s Covid Inquiry); and L Murdorj’s, Khukoo Namjil. Most are rooted in Mongolian legend.

In my conversation with Director B. Sarantuya I raised the question, with so much repertoire “in the bag” and musical talent to support it, why not mount an annual festival – a mix of familiar and that not so familiar Mongolian repertoire. For a second, her eyes lit up.

That would click Mongolian Opera firmly on the “Worth a Journey” dial for anyone – it seems Mongolia is on the world and its wife’s bucket list – planning the long trip to the least populated country on the planet. If Wexford Festival Opera (watch this space next week) can mount a two-week festival with a local population of 150k, why not Ulaanbaatar with 1.5m? Walk 1,000km, tether your yak and head to the opera house. I feel a promotional Podcast coming on.

Mongolia is reaching out. The London Coliseum is about to embark on its Christmas season of The Mongol Khan, an epic of greed, deceit and betrayal at the heart of government, starring the wild-eyed tee-shirted diva, Dominic Cumming and the ‘Let the Oldies Snuff It,’ Boris Genghis Johnson. 

Sorry, that show is playing just down Whitehall. The Coliseum features that much more stable and successful historical character, Genghis Khan. 

As Mongolia reaches out to Britain, so, I hope, opera houses in the West will reach out to Mongolia. Scholarships, shared productions, student exchanges, organised visits, are all simple ways this artistically ballsy country can tap into the mainstream, become a permanent part of the network that makes opera such a global phenomenon. 

Next week I am in Warsaw, attending The 2023 International Opera Awards. I shall suggest a new category for 2024 – Unlikeliest Opera Company of the Year. Go Mongolia State Opera!

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