Busan Opera House

By Park Moo-jong

What music to our ears! The Republic of Korea will have a gorgeous seaside opera house like Sydney three years from now.

Busan city government announced last week that the construction of the Busan Opera House will start in the first half of this year to be completed by 2021 at a cost of 250 billion won ($214 million).

Lotte Group, based in the southern port city, did a really good job of donating 100 billion won and the city earmarked the remaining 114 billion won to build the "Symbol of Busan."

In June last year, I wrote in a column titled "Aborted opera house," in which I lamented the Seoul city government's "final" decision to scrap a project to build an "international-level" opera house on the Nodeul islet in the Han River, under Hangang Bridge just south of Yongsan.

The plan was initiated in 2004 by then Mayor Lee Myung-bak (elected president in 2007) and his successor Oh Se-hoon announced in 2006 the "Han River Renaissance" project featuring the construction of the opera house with 1,500 seats at the cost of 450 billion won (about $400 million).

The next year, City Hall bought the then privately owned islet for 27.4 billion won (approximately $24.3 million) and chose a design by a French architecture firm through an international contest. The design cost 27.7 billion won. By scrapping the project, the city government of Mayor Park Won-soon lost a huge amount of money paid for the design.

Nobody took responsibility for the loss of so much money in citizens' taxes?

When the Sydney Opera House, one of the 20th century's most famous and distinctive buildings, was inaugurated in 1973, many Korean music lovers were envious of the Australians, asking themselves: "When will we be able to have such a fantastic thing?"

Seoul betrayed them.

Now, the nation's second-largest city of Busan has taught a lesson to the Seoul city administrators. The Sydney Opera House, as one of Australia's most popular tourist destinations, attracts more than 8 million visitors annually and hosts well over 3,000 performances every year, attended by more than 2 million music fans from across the world.

The ongoing Australia Open Tennis in Melbourne where the Korean sensation, Chung Hyeon, is stunning the world with his "incredible" performance, reminds me automatically of the Sydney Opera House.

In fact, the nation has no world-class opera theater like La Scala in Milan, the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Opera House in London, the Lincoln Center in New York City, Le Grand Opera in Paris, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires and the Bolshoi in Moscow, to name a few, all of which are favorite tourist attractions.

Its capital city of Seoul has one opera house in the Seoul Arts Center, but it is hard to compare it with the foreign ones in terms of scale, facilities and quality of performances.

The long-cherished dream is coming true not in Seoul, but in Busan.

The Busan Opera House is to be located in the "Maritime Cultural Complex" in the redevelopment area of the North Port and will be five stories high with two basements. It will house a main theater with 1,800 seats, a small theater with 300 seats, an exhibition hall and subsidiary facilities.

It is glad to hear a city spokesman say, "The opera house will become the largest-scale venue of performing arts for opera, ballet, dancing, musicals and plays in the southeastern part of the nation, and the structure will become a symbol of Busan like the opera houses in Sydney and Oslo."

Snohetta, a world-renowned international architecture, brand design and interior design office based in Oslo, was selected as the designer of the Busan Opera House. According to the company, its goal is to build a place to meet, no longer just a place to see and be seen; a place to be together.

It says that "the Opera is designed to be exceptionally accessible in the urban context, not just physically accessible but visually accessible, and above all mentally accessible. The spaces it describes are democratic, open to 365 days a year."

Historically, opera is like filmmaking as a total work of art, and has a special relation with coast cities as seen in famous opera theaters located in international port cities such as Sydney, New York City, Oslo, Venice and Copenhagen among others.

For reference, the Italian word, opera, means "work," both in the sense of the labor done and the result produced, derived from the Latin opera, a singular noun meaning "work" and also the plural "opus."

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Italian word was first used in the sense of "composition in which poetry, dance, and music are combined" in 1639; the first recorded English use in this sense dates to 1648.

The birthplace is Florence of Italy, where the first opera "Daphne" was performed in 1598 during a carnival and later Venice took the baton to open the "Era of Opera" as a port city.

Busan, an international port city and famed host of the Busan International Film Festival, is expected, with the construction of the opera house, to present music lovers and tourists from across the globe a gorgeous space for the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts.

Park Moo-jong is a standing adviser of The Korea Times. He served as the president-publisher of the nation's first English newspaper founded in1951 from 2004 to 2014 after working as a reporter for the daily since 1974. He can be reached at moojong@ktimes.com or emjei29@gmail.com