Arias Amid Angkor: Cambodia’s Unlikely Opera Awakening

Phnom Penh is a city that rarely stops to listen. Motorbikes snarl around construction pits, wedding bands blast Khmer pop into the streets, and the river ferries cough smoke into the evening sky. Yet inside a dim rehearsal hall behind the National Library, a tenor’s voice cuts through the noise like a blade on water. The high note hangs, trembling, before scattering into the rafters. Even the street outside seems to pause.

For a country better known for lakhon bassac folk opera and the sacred geometry of apsara dance, this moment feels almost improbable: Western grand opera—old, unwieldy, and notoriously expensive—is taking root in Cambodia, a place where most arts institutions are still rebuilding from the Khmer Rouge’s annihilation of artists.

“In Cambodia we don’t have any opera here, so I’m like one in the dark,” says tenor Khuon Sethisak.

Sethisak is not exaggerating. For most of the 1990s, he was Cambodia's opera scene—a one-man ecosystem who learned bel canto from pirated CDs, trained his voice in stairwells, and performed arias for puzzled audiences who thought he was singing Chinese ballads. Sethisak, who understands and can sing in Italian, French, Russian, English and Khmer, even won third place in an international opera singing competition in Russia.

What was once a solitary, almost quixotic pursuit has evolved—slowly, unevenly, stubbornly—into something resembling a movement. In December 2025, Cambodia hosts the first Phnom Penh International Opera Festival, a modest but unmistakable signal that the Kingdom’s cultural trajectory is shifting again. And behind this shift lies a truth no one expected: Cambodia, one of Southeast Asia’s least likely opera incubators, is emerging as an avant-garde experiment in how old art forms rebuild in young nations.

The Angkor Youth Orchestra Association is collaborating with Mr. Sethisak Khuon. They are promising an unforgettable evening of classical music. Photo: Robert Borciaga

A Renaissance Born in Ruin

To understand why opera feels radical in Cambodia, one must understand what was lost. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge dismantled the country’s artistic class—musicians, dancers, painters, scholars—erasing centuries of cultural memory. Very little survived. Apsara dancers rebuilt their lineage from surviving photographs. Instrument makers relearned their craft from fragments.

Opera, being foreign to begin with, had nothing to rebuild from.

“The concept of opera is very new in Cambodia, and many people do not understand it,” Sethisak.

The early experiments were scrappy: performances in hotel lobbies, makeshift costumes borrowed from theatre troupes, piano lines replaced with digital keyboards. But a new generation of musicians—Khmer and foreign—kept attending. They kept rehearsing. They kept showing up.

By 2020, Cambodia had staged just five to seven full operas—Don Giovanni, Madama Butterfly, a minimalist Carmen—but they were enough to prove a principle: audiences were willing to take the leap.

“But, it may be so today only because people here do not have enough exposure yet,” Sethisak says.

The Festival That Shouldn’t Exist

The 2025 festival was born out of equal parts ambition and audacity. Funding was uncertain, artists scattered, and the available venues were either too small or too fragile. At one point, organizers considered staging Don Giovanni inside a converted garment factory.

Ultimately, the performances landed at a riverside arts center backed by a mix of private donors, cultural organizations, and casino-linked entertainment venues eager to expand beyond boxing matches and pop concerts.

The opening night—Mozart, reimagined with pinpeat gongs echoing beneath Angkorian motifs—felt like a cultural glitch in the timeline. The audience included diplomats, university students, elderly survivors, and curious teenagers who showed up because a TikTok clip told them opera was “scary, like ghosts but fancy.”

One young singer, 22-year-old Mony Neath, remembers the moment she heard the overture swell. “The humour and accessibility of the script make it a great first opera for audiences unfamiliar with the medium. Plus, the universality of the 'huge ideas' it deals with... mean it’s perfect for translating into other languages and cultural contexts,” she says.

This is where Cambodia’s opera story diverges from its neighbors. Vietnam’s opera scene is state-backed but cautious. Thailand’s productions are grand but sporadic. Singapore’s scene is polished but small. Cambodia, meanwhile, is attempting something more reckless: building opera not as an elite import, but as a cultural experiment born from collective trauma.

A Mirror of a Changing Nation

The appetite for opera is not accidental. It coincides with an era in which Cambodia is renegotiating its identity, seeking cultural prestige while grappling with development pressures, censorship anxieties, and generational divides.

“By disrupting old stories and generating new ones, the performing arts help us transcend social, economic and political limits,” says a Phnom Penh arts critic who requested anonymity.

Opera, in other words, gives people permission to feel.

And in a country where memory is often navigated carefully, that permission is potent.

“To learn opera is to sing, act, to behave,” Sethisak says.

NagaWorld is hosting the new Phnom Penh International Opera Festival, featuring world-class productions like Don Giovanni. Photo: Robert Borciaga

The Struggle Behind the Curtain

Despite the momentum, Cambodia’s opera renaissance is fragile, hanging on the commitment of a handful of artists and institutions. Everything costs money: sets, costumes, rights, rehearsal spaces, musicians. And Cambodia, unlike Manila or Bangkok, does not yet have a middle class large enough to sustain a commercial opera scene.

“Another challenge is the lack of funding, which is very important for training and making the opera more accessible to Cambodian people,” Sethisak says bluntly.

There is also the problem of talent. Young singers exist—but without long-term training pathways, they plateau early. There are no full-time opera companies. No conservatories offering specialized vocal technique. No classical orchestras capable of supporting a full-scale Verdi production.

“Cambodians need to work on the craft of singing and need to nurture the talent they have and keep training their voices,” Sethisak warns.

Yet the scarcity has also given Cambodian opera a distinctive wildness. With limited resources, directors experiment with hybrid forms. They use traditional shadow puppetry to replace expensive set designs. They swap European staging for Khmer spatial aesthetics. They let orchestras fold into pinpeat ensembles, creating soundscapes that feel both dissonant and strangely right.

In these collisions, a new operatic language is forming—one that does not imitate Europe but interrogates it.

Madama Butterfly has been captivating audiences around the world for generations with its timeless story of unrequited love. Photo: Robert Borciaga

Uncertain Notes

Is Cambodia on track to become Southeast Asia’s next opera hotspot?

If success means producing high-budget grand opera with world-class technique, the answer is no—and it will remain no for a long time.

But if success means creating a living, breathing artistic movement rooted in risk, resilience, and reinvention, then Cambodia is far ahead of anyone who expected nothing from it.

The next festival is already in planning. Sethisak is training new students. International collaborators are circling. And audiences, slowly but unmistakably, are growing.

Outside the rehearsal hall, the city roars back to life—motors buzzing, vendors shouting, ferries scraping against the dock. But inside, the tenor begins again, reaching for a note that seems just beyond human reach.

For a moment, Phnom Penh listens.

And in that moment, Cambodia’s opera future feels not just possible, but inevitable.

-Asia Media Centre