Interview

February 2022

Interview

Dreaming Every
Moment

Soprano Seo Sun Young Does What She Loves

WRITTEN BY
Jang Hye Seon,
contributing writer

Photos courtesy of
Pak Jin Ho
of Studio Bob

The beginning of the year is a busy time. People may even feel like they have to intentionally start something new. Today, we sat down with opera singer Seo Sun Young, who says that she has immersed herself completely every day in what she wants to do and “never regretted doing things differently.”

It Started With Love

“If you have an overflowing sense of love for something―whether it’s God, another person, or Nature―that love becomes poetry. Adding melody to the poetry turns it into music. Love is the very first thing that you need in your heart when you sing music.”

Seo Sun Young studied music in Seoul, went abroad to Germany to learn more, and was active in Theater Basel in Switzerland; her journey’s beginnings, however, were in southeast Korea. Seo vividly remembers when she sang in a church choir in Changwon, her hometown, during her second year of elementary school. She would wait all week for Sunday to come around because she enjoyed creating music with her friends at church.

“People who met me in my childhood remember me as a really serious student, but when I look back, I don’t remember ever forcing myself to study,” she says. “When I studied vocal music, I interpreted the music by turning the situations that made the poets write a particular way into my own stories. It was really fun for me to analyze opera scripts and express them musically. If you really love what you’re doing―whether it’s music or anything else―you’ll soon find that you’ve developed your skills without even knowing it.”

Seo performs at the Music Festival Pohang. © Music Festival Pohang

From Düsseldorf to Basel

Seo graduated from the Excellence Program under soprano Michaela Kramer at the Robert Schumann Hochschule. At the school, she walked along the aesthetically pleasing Rhine River to think and also to clear her thoughts. Seo took those walks to focus more on her immediate next steps because, at the time, her future path was unclear. After that time―akin to a “period in the wilderness” for her she headed to Basel.

“If it wasn’t for baritone Lee Eung Gwang, I would have never forged a connection with the Basel Theater,” she recalls. “Lee had a leading role at the theater, and I applied to the Open Studio Project on the back of his recommendation. As it happened, the date of my audition was between two of my performances of Puccini’s ‘Suor Angelica’ at my school. I would have had to do my performance in the opera on Thursday night, go to my audition in Basel on Friday morning, and then head back to perform in the opera again on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t feel like I could handle it. I gained the courage to go, however, when he strongly recommended that I attend the audition, saying ‘you must come because it’s a rare opportunity.’”

Fortunately, Seo did well in the audition. Despite her good performance, however, she still had to wait a long time until the final selections were made.

“The theater had a rule that at least one person from among the four selected for soprano, mezzo soprano, tenor, baritone or bass must be a Swiss citizen,” she says. “Thankfully, I was chosen.”

Seo takes on the role of Rusalka with the Korea National Opera.

Acting Skills Required

Rusalka, a water spirit, was the first leading role given to Seo both in Europe and in Korea. During the 2011/2012 season, she played the title role in Dvorak’s “Rusalka” at the Basel Theater, and debuted in Korea at the first performance of “Rusalka” with the Korea National Opera in 2016. Rusalka tells the story of a mermaid who does not grow old or get ill. The character, in a shocking turn, loses her ability to speak―and thus sing to gain the form of a human being; in fact, the opera is unique in that its main character, Rusalka, has to act on stage for an extended period without singing. Seo says that her “acting coach” was none other than Korean TV programs. On stage, she typically took roles where she was killed or lost someone she loved. These experiences are rare in real life, which means she frequently had to learn about expressing emotions through TV shows or movies.

“One program that had a significant impact on me was 2006’s ‘Hwang Jini.’ Ha Ji Won plays the role of Hwang Jini, and the drama, with its priceless dialogue, does such a good job of expressing how love can be abandoned for art and the hurt it causes that I wanted to write down everything I heard and saw in it, along with the values Ha has about the arts,” she says. “Even these days, I seek out this show when I have the time or want to clear my head.”

Seo performs as Amelia in the Seoul Arts Center’s performance of ‘Un Ballo in Maschera.’ © Seoul Art Center

Finding the Heart of the Song

Before she headed to Germany for study, Seo completed the “Lied and Oratorio” professional program at the Korea National University of Arts. She felt that while there would be many opportunities to learn opera in the future, she would not have another chance to learn about vocal music and oratorio.

She says, “During graduate school, I learned about vocal music and oratorio and how to gradually move away from the kind of ‘shouting vocalization’ that I had done in youthful passion.”

In Korea, Seo has taken to the stage as a singer during the Korean Orchestra Festival, which is held at the Seoul Arts Center. In 2012, she received a great deal of attention for her “Five Songs Based on Wesendonck Poems.” Everyone was curious about her because it came right after she had won first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Seo placed the text of the song she translated herself onto the screen.

“I translate the poetic diction of the song myself. I have always taken time to consider how the work’s context and the mentality of the narrator impacts which definitions should be used from the dictionary, whether a certain word should be used in a conversational context, and what words should be used in Korean when they are translated into a narrative form,” she says. “I think that it is key to understand the feelings that should be placed into the translation through a multilingual perspective, including that of German, French, Russian and even Czech.”

Seo takes the stage as Cio-Cio-san in the Opera national de Lorraine’s performance of ‘Madama Butterfly.’

Preparing the Next Generation

Seo became a professor at her alma mater at Korea National University of Arts in March 2021. “There’s a lot more to do compared to when I was in Basel,” she says. “There’s much more of a repertory that I have to manage as well. I think I focus just on what’s at hand, thinking ‘let’s just do one project at a time.’ If I don’t do that, I think that everything would just fall down like dominoes. While I still feel I can handle everything, I occasionally miss my time at Basel when I was able to immerse myself into just one character for months on end.”

Seo believed that once she joined the school’s faculty, she would more or less have to abandon her life as a singer. She considered for a long time whether it was the right time to apply to the position at the school given that she had reached a point in her life where she could show off all the roles she had learned. Seo believed that while she was serving as a visiting professor over two years she could reduce her singing activities because she had long found a good balance between being a performer and an educator.

“However, last year, my school schedule forced me to abandon three projects. It made me more heartbroken than I had imagined,” she says. “I expect I’ll have to abandon a lot of things going forward, including my work on the stage. That being said, if my school duties aren’t too much, I feel like I’ll just need to balance things out by putting myself out there as much as I can. I plan to live my life thankful with what I’ve gotten rather than being sad about what has been lost.”

* This article is provided by Monthly Auditorium.

Park JaeHong

Seo studied at the Korea National University of Arts and the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Germany. She received top honors at the International Tchaikovsky Competition, second place at the ARD International Music Competition, first place at the Vinas Competition and first prize at the Maria Callas International Grand Prix. Seo received the Newcomer Award in the field of the arts at the Third Annual SAC Awards. She is currently a professor in the School of Music at the Korea National University of Arts.

Dreaming Every Moment