Chapter 5 is the second of three chapters on “revolutionary operas.” It explores how revolutionary operas reflect and are distinct from parallel genres in the Soviet Union, as well as how they may have been influenced by Chinese model works. It shows how ideology, including Soviet socialist realism and North Korean nationalism, and also collective creation and “seed theory,” is embedded in operas. It discusses the involvement of the North Korean leadership, and in particular Kim Jong Il, in opera creation, and explores the impact of comments made by the leadership after the premieres of the first three operas. The chapter asks what was known about opera in Korea before 1945, offering a discussion of the traditional genre of p’ansori, its twentieth-century ch’anggŭk staged equivalent, and how these two genres—and specific musicians associated with them who moved from Seoul to Pyongyang and continued their careers there into the 1960s—fared. These older forms were effectively stopped dead when Kim Il Sung remarked that they were reminiscent of a time when people traveled by donkey and wore horsehair hats, and, after the five revolutionary operas, they were replaced by “people’s operas” in the new, revolutionary opera mold.
Heroes and Merchants: Stalin's Understanding of National Character