In opera, there’s no passport like a voice that shocks listeners to attention. Born 43 years ago in the high steppes of Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia—a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the Russian border—the Chinese bass Peixin Chen sings in primordial tones that set the whole hall and the listener’s rib cage humming. Right now, his rainmaker role is the righteous ruler Sarastro in Mozart’s Masonic fairy tale The Magic Flute. From the Atlanta Opera in November, Chen’s Sarastro proceeds this month to the Metropolitan Opera’s family-friendly, gently abbreviated holiday presentation.
Chen has lived with the character for quite some time. “I started to sing Sarastro when I was at the conservatory in China,” he said over Zoom recently from Atlanta. “Back then, I tried to sing him big. ‘Why do you sing him like that?’ my teacher asked me. ‘Because he’s the god of the sun!,’ I said. And my teacher said, ‘Instead of singing like the god of the sun, sing like the son of the sun, or the grandson! You’ll ruin your voice. It doesn’t resonate when you push!’ So I tried to make my voice light, without the resonance of the chest cavity, and that was no good, either. Only when I graduated and started to work in the opera house did I really begin to understand.”
But how, you wonder, does a lad from Inner Mongolia get hooked on classical singing, Western-style, in the first place, let alone find his way to the Arts School of Inner Mongolia, in Hohhot (then a 42-hour train ride from home, now a swift 34), thence to the Central Conservatory of Music, in Beijing, and then abroad?
Chen credits numerous “angels” for instruction, moral as well as financial support, and golden opportunities he never dreamed of. “But I was not really in the opera world,” he says, “until I met the famous opera director Francesca Zambello.” An international networker par excellence, Zambello was staging Carmen at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, with Chen in the peripheral part of Zuniga, lieutenant of the dragoons.
“One line!,” Zambello said on a recent call from Washington National Opera, where she serves as artistic director. “I instantly recognized the raw talent. As I got to know him, I saw that he also had this passion and burning soul and the smarts to potentially make a career.” She started pulling strings, and soon Chen landed in the young-artists program at Houston Grand Opera, where he acquired the finish and competitive edge he displays today.
Since graduation, Chen has racked up assignments in Mozart, Beethoven, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini with opera companies and symphony orchestras across the United States and in Europe, often as the motormouth buffoons and weasels of classic comedies. Check out his Web page for a snap of Chen as the creepy music teacher Don Basilio in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, all lip gloss and eyebrow pencil, rocking a wig like whipped meringue.
But at six-foot-two, with the big, square features and the theatrical presence of a human monolith, Chen looks as well as buzzes like the authority figures and heavies that are a star basso’s ticket to the really big time. With any luck, the likes of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Verdi’s Philip II in Don Carlos, and the treacherous Hagen, of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, are waiting in his wings—and for comic relief, throw in that burlesque bull in a china shop Baron Ochs in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, an irresistible prospect.
For now there’s Sarastro, a part not without its pitfalls. Traditionally revered as the Father Knows Best embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, he pours forth arias George Bernard Shaw (for one) deemed worthy of the Almighty. On the debit side, Sarastro is a slaveholder and male supremacist with the kidnapping of an under-age princess to answer for. Even so, the music is the music, and audiences accept that it speaks to their better angels. “Sarastro says some things that in 2024 maybe some people don’t like to hear,” Chen says. “But onstage, I just have to think about the music and the line. If I think too much about other stuff, I make mistakes.”
Peixin Chen will alternate with the American bass Soloman Howard as Sarastro in the Metropolitan Opera’s holiday presentation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which opens December 12
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
