On the Art of Opera

On the Art of Opera is a 1974 treatise by Kim Jong Il on opera. According to Korea University associate professor of North Korean studies Jae-Cheon Lim, it is one of the most important North Korean works on the arts. At the time of writing, Kim had just started his career in the North Korean cultural industry. The piece takes as its framework the Juche ideology and "seed" theory that Kim had previously applied to cinema. Because opera is a mixed art form, Kim finds it particularly revealing of a nation's artistic state and important for the application of his seed theory. Kim finds hierarchies between and within elements of opera, like instruments subordinate to vocals and music over dance. The main thrust of the work is to replace classical – mainly Western but also certain forms of Korean – opera with an allegedly superior Korean revolutionary opera. Kim analyzes various Western operatic forms such as aria, recitative, and leitmotif to reject them. In Kim's view, the ideal revolutionary opera should be based on stanzaic and strophic songs, of which the highest form is a supposedly novel form of offstage chorus called pangchang. The opera that is, according to Kim, most characteristic of his ideas is Sea of Blood, which is to be emulated. Background On the Art of Opera is a transcript of a speech that Kim Jong Il apparently made to creative workers in September 1974. Although it is not certain that Kim personally authored the piece, Lim takes its publication under his name as an indication that he was especially interested in the field. At the time of the speech Kim was only beginning his career in the cultural administration of North Korea. The speech was delivered against the backdrop of performances of the first Korean revolutionary operas such as Sea of Blood, the production of which Kim had been involved in, some three years before. The publication of On the Art of Opera came one year after Kim's first major written work, also on the arts, called On the Art of the Cinema. On the Art of Opera is one of Kim's two treatises explicitly on music, the other one being its companion piece On the Art of Music (1987). Juche ideology and seed theory For Kim, the process of making an opera is at least as important as the result. Operas are to be based on the Juche ideology.