Beethoven meets space battles in ‘first manga opera’ at 2025 Hong Kong Arts Festival

One of the more unlikely pairings in this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival is that of Ludwig van Beethoven and manga. The composer, born in 1770, and Japanese graphic novels, popular since the late 19th century, do not usually keep cultural company. But in this week’s Beethoven Wars: A Battle for Peace – described as the “first manga opera” – Japanese-style animation unfurls a tale of intergalactic strife to live orchestral music written by the German genius. It is no coincidence that when it premiered in Paris in 2024, half the audience was under the age of 20 – a youth market that is the Holy Grail of arts programming. The manga mash-up is the brainchild of French conductor Laurence Equilbey, who will be in Hong Kong to conduct the Insula Orchestra, which she founded in 2012, from March 26-28. The word insula – Latin for “island” – refers to both the orchestra’s home base in Paris, on Seguin Island on the Seine river, and to a mysterious, island-shaped area of the brain that connects emotion and consciousness. Equilbey’s own mind is capable of extraordinary imaginative leaps. Previous visions have included a production of Haydn’s Creation that featured an onstage aquarium in which Adam and Eve could take a dip; and a collaborative version of Mozart’s Requiem with French choreographer Yoann Bourgeois, in which acrobatic sinners flung themselves down a massive slide on their way to hell. Nor does she shy away from horror; some of the reviews for Sky Burial, Insula’s post-Covid take on Faure’s Requiem, in which the orchestra and British artist Mat Collishaw presented a grim, 21st-century view of the Tibetan sky burial ritual, were prefaced with trigger warnings. Vultures tearing dead bodies apart on top of decayed housing blocks prodded divisive reactions: people were either profoundly moved or revolted. But for Equilbey, having space at La Seine Musicale – a performing arts centre on Seguin Island, in a building that was previously a Renault car factory – meant that the orchestra could host any kind of staged event, “whatever we could dream up, no matter how outlandish that could be”, she wrote in an essay in February. Given such evidence of artistic flamboyance, Equilbey herself is a surprise. On a recent chilly, damp evening in Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, after she and her orchestra had been delayed for almost four hours in Paris by a defective train, she oversees a technical rehearsal for Beethoven Wars with minimum fuss and maximum patience. Occasionally she makes mild shushing noises, but for a famous conductor – she was even name-checked by Cate Blanchett’s character in the film Tár – she is about as unshowy as she can be. Every conductor must be meticulous, but her focus seems exceptional. This includes for interviews: uncertain of her English for this one, she asks for a list of questions beforehand. She writes considered answers to each, prints them out and brings them along for mutual discussion. To her, this is a form of collaboration, too. The moment she was inspired to juxtapose Beethoven’s music with a manga film was on a train, she says, when she suddenly realised that both shared heroic values and utopian ideals. She immediately rang Antonin Baudry to discuss working together. Baudry, a film director and former diplomat who used to have his own comic strip, is – like many in France – a fan of manga and science fiction. “Actually I don’t much like science fiction,” Equilbey admits. But she does not like routine either: “I love something risky.” She already knew what music she wanted: Beethoven’s rarely heard incidental works written in 1811 for two plays, King Stephan and The Ruins of Athens by August von Kotzebue. What she needed was an updated, animated film upon which to hang them. The project took about 18 months. “Who’s in charge in that working relationship?” had been one of the pre-interview questions, to which Equilbey had simply written, “Me”. Now she adds, with a smile: “I like democratic work – in the end, you have to make the decision, but I like the feeling of the work together.” Democracy is the opera’s theme and – spoiler alert – Beethoven Wars, with its title written in the familiar Star Wars font, ends happily. But Equilbey, who describes herself as utopian “like Beethoven” – who, after all, wrote Europe’s official anthem, Ode to Joy – sighs at how the globe has shifted even since the premiere in May 2024. “In the film, they sign for peace and when I hear the phrase ‘Men have thought of nothing but making war,’ it touches me.” Utopia has always proved evasive – the playwright von Kotzebue was murdered by a German nationalist. The audience remains rapt throughout the Aix-en-Provence performance, spontaneously breaking into applause that sometimes drowns the film’s dialogue. The opera plays with scale, in every sense: the screens on which the film is projected are huge, and certain scenes unspool like gigantic cosmic visions from the Hubble telescope. Firestorms leave blackened banners and skulls in their wake, and there are wonderfully eerie snow scenes. For those unfamiliar with these Beethoven pieces, The Ruins of Athens section in particular offers exquisite moments; dystopia, like the devil, has the best tunes. Accentus, the French chamber choir Equilbey founded in 1991, grounds the whole enterprise with its human onstage presence. In the final moments, the animation pans out to reveal a manga woman – Equilbey – conducting her manga orchestra. The image – constructed as a trompe l’oeil, an optical illusion of 3D space on a 2D surface – has the curious effect of including the audience within its optimistic conclusion. When this flourish was first suggested, Equilbey said no, no, no. But it was not routine, it was funny. And so, of course, she collaborated. Beethoven Wars: A Battle for Peace, 53rd Hong Kong Arts Festival, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, March 26-28, 7.30pm. The dialogue is in English with Cantonese surtitles.

Beethoven meets space battles in ‘first manga opera’ at 2025 Hong Kong Arts Festival

Conductor Laurence Equilbey and her Insula Orchestra will perform Beethoven Wars: A Battle for Peace at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in March

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