A taste of top-class Korean dramas based on Western classical music

There's an abundance of top-notch Korean dramas based on Western classical music on Netflix and YouTube

Six years ago when I had just retired, my wife, who is a professor of Korean studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, decided to undertake some research at the Academy of Korean studies. She said she would be there for nearly three months and asked if I wanted to come along. After some hesitation, I agreed. After all, 75-80 days didn’t seem like all that much.

Like much of the rest of Korea, the Academy that is just outside Seoul was set in a verdant hillside. The gardens were beautiful and the food in the mess excellent. The library had a large number of English books and the people, of course, were wonderful. The days passed well, especially since they had a channel devoted to Western classical music being performed by Koreans.

But the evenings were a problem because although we had TV in our bedroom, there was nothing at all in English. So I would watch IPL on the laptop, while my wife watched Korean entertainment television. From what she told me — every day — the serials were absolutely top-class. What a pity, she would say, that you don’t know Korean. I had no idea what she meant until Netflix came to India and my wife returned to her Korean programmes.

But this time there was joy for me too: Netflix has subtitles and, believe me, the text is done absolutely right with just the right words and every nuance captured properly. It’s quite amazing really. I keep wondering who — and how many — are so highly proficient in both languages.

A still from Secret Affair

Over the last two years we have watched around two dozen serials of different genres because they are, oh, so good. Not all, of course, but enough of them to make you marvel at the enormous effort that goes into the sheer excellence of these programmes.

My wife tells me that for modern Koreans the pursuit of perfection is a reward in itself. So they don’t seem to do quickies, which could be one reason for the quality.

The plots are simple and clean. The scripts are almost always crisp. The editing is top-notch. The scenes are never more than three minutes long, thus making the episode move along smartly. And they get the accompanying musical score mostly right.

The acting, possibly because the lighting is so good and because 90 per cent of the shooting is in close-up, is superb. The actors know they have to get it just right, which by and large they do. They have to because competition is stiff and the pay not all that much.

A classical subset

Gradually, it dawned on us that Korean entertainment television has a most remarkable subset: serials based on, of all things, Western classical music. So far we have watched half a dozen of these because they are so different from anything we have ever seen anywhere on TV. The stories, naturally, are about the foibles of all the usual human relationships. But they are woven around strong themes of Western classical music and musicians.

And these serials are true to the way the Koreans actually do their classical music — seriously and with utter devotion. They assemble a huge cast to portray the huge orchestras, which, most unusually in these days, feature the full Monty: strings, woodwind, brass and percussion.

A still from Korean TV show Cantabile

As a friend of mine who teaches piano says, the effect is “lush and rich” with “Korean motifs of sadness and oppression”. The richness and the lushness are probably the result of the seven notes that Western music uses compared to the five of Korean music.

The one we just finished watching is called The Beethoven Virus, a 2008 award-winning show. It is a splendid piece of work, stretching over 18 episodes, each of which on average is over an hour long. If you like Western classical music and a good story, you should definitely watch this serial.

There are others as well. One is called Cantabile, which is Italian for singable. Another is called Secret Affair, in which a masterclass pianist falls in love with a young man very much her junior. There is nothing crass in these serials.

Not all are on Netflix. We watch some on YouTube if they have subtitles, which most do. One of these, Five Fingers, is about a pianist and his angry relationship with his family. Another is Spring Waltz, which is also about a pianist and his past.

There are many others which we are yet to watch. In the coming week there is going to be a fierce evening contest between IPL and Korean serials.

Korea and Western classical music

While watching these serials it is impossible not to wonder how Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Tchaikovsky and the rest of those guys struck a chord in Korea. And when did it start to happen?

What is it about Western classical music that persuades parents to send their children to learn it and, if they are any good at all, to send them for advanced study? How come there are so many renowned Korean conductors and composers now? How come there are so many superstars?

Western classical music came to Korea with the missionaries at the end of the 19th century when the country was dirt poor. In 1910 the Japanese invaded Korea and colonised it. 

A still from Spring Waltz

And with them came another wave of Western classical music which took hold as the Korean elites took to it, possibly to please their Japanese masters. There is a very famous serial called The Hymn of Death that highlights this aspect. It is, if I may borrow my friend’s phrase, “lush and rich” in its sets, lighting and overall cinematography. It is also based on a true story.

Things moved along slowly till 1945 when the Japanese were evicted by the Americans. Then, quite out of the blue in 1948, a musician called John S Kim started the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Korean War (1950-53) dampened things a lot but, as they say, classical music turned out to be an idea whose time had come. By the sheerest of chance and luck, the US vice president (Alben W Barkle) was in town when the orchestra — which had relocated for safety to Busan at the southern tip of Korea — played Beethoven’s Ninth in the open air.

Barkle arranged for Kim to be sent to the US to study under Eugene Ormandy and Leonard Bernstein. His commitment and passion seem to have been infectious because when he returned to Korea and started spreading the gospel of classical music, it fell on highly receptive ears.

Today, Korea, along with Japan and China, is the only country that funds Western classical music generously. In the West orchestras are now reduced to doing flash-mob gigs to raise money.

That, I would say, is the real shift from the West to the East.

Emotion & rationality

Traditional Korean music, called Kugak, is full of pathos. Many observers and experts say this is because of the centuries of oppression that Koreans have had to face. The Koreans also say that Kugak is intuitive and that only Koreans can appreciate it.

The emotions Kugak inspires are called han and hung. Han is about sadness; hung is about the ecstasy of group performance. In other words, it is touchy-feely stuff that, if you are born Korean in Korea, you have from the start.

Western classical music, in contrast, has to be learnt and is, in that sense, rational rather than emotional. The Koreans say its orderliness is very appealing.

They have absorbed it so completely that they now say there is a Korean way of playing Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and the rest of those composers. In a way, it is like us Indians appropriating English, you know, like when we say, “Woh by air plane se gaye hain”.

Truly and entirely Indian.