ANN ARBOR—When Bright Sheng’s latest opera, “Madame Mao,” makes its premier at the Santa Fe Opera July 26, the MacArthur Award winning composer says the composition will reflect a valued aspect of his life at the University of Michigan, his contact with students.

“The students are audacious,” Sheng said. “I care more about what my students think about my work than I do about what my colleagues think. Students tell the truth. I talked to my students about my approach to ‘Madame Mao’ including the story, musical and dramatic approach to the opera. They told me, ‘That’s cool or that’s not cool’.”

“I don’t really need to teach,” Sheng said. “If I weren’t teaching, I’d have more time. But I don’t treat teaching as a job. It is a great honor to be with a major university. I like the academic side, the access to libraries.”

There are, he says, only three reasons to teach.The first reason to teach is to learn from the students. “It’s great to be around young people and to learn what they are up to.”

Since teaching requires organizing one’s thoughts, that’s a second asset, said Sheng, honored recently by U-M with the title Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor. “You are looking at other people’s works, perhaps through serving on a dissertation committee. You have to concentrate on both the intellectual and practical or theoretical side of the music.”

The third motivation for teaching is an obligation owed to his own teachers—to pass on to his students that which he learned from his teachers. “I was fortunate to study with many great teachers,” Sheng said. One of those was Leonard Bernstein with whom he was associated for about five years. “Bernstein was foremost a teacher.”

An example of the close student/teacher relationship Sheng engenders occurred in the winter of 2000-2001. Taking advantage of the freedom offered by the MacArthur award, Sheng took a year long sabbatical, even though he missed the student contact. The feeling was mutual. One snowy night while Sheng was working late at his home in the Michigan countryside, a group of his students appeared at the door with a cake to surprise him.

On U-M’s North Campus in a small room with cream-colored block walls, an industrial strength metal desk, a Chinese scroll unrolled to show its black and white figures and what can only be described as a “beat-up” piano, Sheng finds an environment he says is fertile both for faculty and students. This is where the composer finds the balance of academic and mainstream styles essential to his craft, a craft the MacArthur Foundation said, “bridges East and West, lyrical and dissonant styles, and historical and contemporary themes to create elegant compositions with a distinctive signature.”

Last year on campus, Sheng gave a staged reading of the first act of “Madame Mao” at U-M’s Festival of New Works, a developmental theater designed to give creative artists a means to obtain audience feedback for new screenplays, plays, and musicals. The opera, in the format of Chinese Opera with some dancing, chronicles the life of China’s Jiang Qing, otherwise known as Madame Mao, a naïve young actress who, after marrying communist ruler Mao Zedong, came to have great political clout. “We found out from that audience what works and what doesn’t,” Sheng said. “The first act ended in a place that was not logical, so we had to move two more scenes into that act. It was a rough run-through, but it was good to get audience reaction.”

Whether “Madame Mao” is a success or a failure, Sheng said he has made up his mind: “I will not write more than one opera every 10 years.”

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For a biography on Sheng, visit http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2003/Jul03/r072103