Nah Sirin’s (1979- ) opera The Dream of Butterfly is about ‘East Berlin Spy Ring Scandal’ in 1976 where Yun Isang was kidnapped to Seoul. It consists of 2 Act and 11 Chapters, while the 4 major scenes are about inquisition, fantasy, visiting and trial. In this opera, the music not just accompanies the vocal but leads the flow of the drama, playing a very important role. A certain theme or motive relevant to certain figure, emotion, conception, etc., serves to link the entire work in a musical and dramatic way, while such diverse contemporary music elements as atonality, bitonality, serialism and playing technique are used effectively to describe certain scenes. In addition, such traditional features as pentachord and Korean classical rhythms are combined with the Western music elements in diverse ways depending on the flows of the story.
In particular, it is noted that in this opera, ‘the combination of contemporariness and nationalism’ is more flexible and free than its previous counterparts. Namely, the opera work ‘memorizes’ the figure Yun Isang in the dimension of pure art and individual artist, and on the other hand, it illuminates him against the historical background. To this end, the work applies such diverse techniques as tonality, atonality, serialism, pentachord, Korean traditional rhythms and waltz ones. These techniques are freely selected and diversely combined depending on the flows of the story. The fusion of the Western modernism musical expressions and the Korean traditional elements has long been a common challenge facing the Korean contemporary composers since the introduction of the Wester music to Korea. However, the opera The Dream of Butterfly does neither challenge the hegemony of the Western music nor reveal the identity of the nationalism. Rather, it wishes to communicate and sympathize with the Korean people through the medium of ‘music’ about the historical event that occurred in Korea.