STONE OPERA.

Scenes of the Near and Far East have unfolded thousands of times on the Metropolitan Opera stage, courtesy of "Madama Butterfly," "Turandot," "Aida," and other masterpieces of Orientalism. This season, with the premiere performances of Tan Dun's "The First Emperor," the company is finally letting a non-Western composer describe his world. Tan grew up in a village in the Hunan province of China, during the Cultural Revolution. He knew nothing of Western music until his late teens, receiving a musical education from rural folk songs, the chanting of Taoist monks, and Peking opera, whose techniques he absorbed while playing fiddle in a provincial troupe. He came to New York in 1986, having been introduced to Schoenberg and other twentieth-century composers at the Central Conservatory, in Beijing. He rapidly established himself as the most energetic Chinese composer of his generation. His first opera, "Nine Songs," had its premiere at Pace University, in 1989; his second, "Marco Polo," played at New York City Opera, in 1997. Now he is conducting his latest opera at the Met--the first composer to do so since Italo Montemezzi led "L'Amore dei Tre Re," in 1941.

There's no telling what you're going to get when you sit down to listen to one of Tan's works. A composer of unruly imagination, he has zigzagged from harsh avant-garde noises--John Cage has long been his prime musical hero--to pop-Chinese ditties of bewildering bathos. Often, both extremes are present in a single work: parts of Tan's "Heaven, Earth, Mankind (Symphony 1997)," commissioned to celebrate the return of Hong Kong to China, would fit snugly onto the soundtrack of a one-world airline commercial, while sections juxtaposing a solo cello with the ancient sound of bianzhong bells create an atmosphere of entrancing mystery. When his fusions take hold, as in "Nine Songs" and "Water Passion After Saint Matthew," they seem to reveal some subatomic link among the world's musical cultures. When they fail, they fail spectacularly, creating radical new forms of musical kitsch. Unfortunately, "The First Emperor" falls largely into the latter category.

The project is commendably ambitious: it delves deep into Chinese history while addressing the very modern problem of art's relationship with power. The libretto, by the expatriate novelist Ha Jin and the composer, is set in the third century B.C., during the reign of Qin Shihuang. Qin is unifying China, standardizing the culture, and initiating the construction of the Great Wall. But, the opera reminds us, he is also slaughtering thousands and destroying whatever traditions do not fit his purposes. Pitted against him is the musician Gao Jianli, who, in a heavily embroidered version of the historical record (one inspired by the 1996 film "The Emperor's Shadow"), is presented as a childhood friend of the Emperor and as the lover of his daughter, Yueyang. Qin persuades Jianli to compose a great anthem in celebration of his regime. But, after Yueyang commits suicide, Jianli bites off his own tongue, and leaves behind an anti-patriotic chorus of lamentation. The story has obvious echoes of the Cultural Revolution. When Qin condemns ancient Chinese music and calls for a more modern style that will "touch the heart," he could be quoting from the sayings of Madame Mao.

The opera begins in sensational fashion, with a dynamic ritual of sacrifice. A Peking opera singer invokes the forces of yin and yang in a wailing chant. The chorus shouts, claps, slaps, and stomps. A zheng, or twenty-one-string zither, is savagely strummed; ceramic pots are struck with sticks. A variously blaring, trilling, rustling, and rumbling mass of sound rises up from the orchestra. Across the front of the stage, twelve drummers beat on drums with stones and knock the stones together. It adds up to a strictly organized thunder--and perhaps the most far-out music that has ever been heard at the Met.

The excitement dissipates when Qin walks on, demanding tunefulness in place of raw tradition. The musical language turns prosaic, cliched, ...