The Woman Behind the Snake

She left Singapore at sixteen. She taught herself to navigate a world that had no roadmap for her. Decades later, Cerise Lim Jacobs stands as one of opera’s most quietly radical forces—a librettist, producer, and unapologetic populist whose Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Madam White Snake has captivated audiences across continents.
A Myth, Reimagined
The legend of the White Snake is one China has told for centuries. Audiences in Beijing who attended the 2010 premiere with Opera Boston thought they knew what was coming. They did not.
Jacobs’s White Snake is not the soft, romantic heroine of Ming dynasty fable. She is powerful, untameable, and fiercely alive. “My White Snake is a strong and powerful woman,” Jacobs says plainly. The character’s defiance is, in many ways, a self-portrait.
The Architecture of Drama
Jacobs is a librettist first—and she argues this is precisely as it should be.
Her conviction is both artistic and structural. Opera, she insists, is not built on music alone. It is built on dramatic architecture: the shape of a story, the logic of character, the weight of a word before the note arrives. “It is within the structure created by words that the music is layered,” she explains. Start with music and no story, and you are, as she puts it, building the roof before the walls.
This philosophy brought her to composer Zhou Long, who flew to her Boston home repeatedly over years of collaboration—composing, singing passages aloud until his voice gave out, arguing over why the White Snake would or would not behave in a particular way. The result is a score unlike anything Zhou Long had written before: melodic, emotionally direct, and deliberately accessible. His own publisher barely recognized it.
A Snake That Moves Through Time
Madam White Snake exists within a larger cosmology. Jacobs conceived it as one part of a trilogy—Uroboros—named for the ancient symbol of a snake consuming its own tail. The other two works, Naga and Gilgamesh, orbit the same mythic figure, forming a cycle that can be entered at any point and still holds.
The Hong Kong production marked a bold departure from the original staging. Minimal physical sets give way to cutting-edge video projections: seasons shifting, gardens breathing, a serpent slithering across the stage floor in light and shadow. The technology doesn’t replace the story. It serves it.
Writing for the People in the Seats
Critics have called Jacobs a dilettante. She is not a trained musician. She came from law, from philanthropy, from a life shaped by adaptation rather than conservatory training. She has heard the charges, absorbed them, and continued anyway.
“I have to believe that I’m contributing something of beauty to the world,” she says. And then, with characteristic directness: she writes for audiences, not critics.
That distinction matters. She writes for the people who sit in the dark and feel something—not for critics shaping the discourse, not for peers trading accolades. When the lights fall and the projections bloom and the White Snake takes the stage in all her power, the audience will decide. They always do.
And on this, at least, Cerise Lim Jacobs has never had any doubt.