Opera

The pioneer of Chinese opera in the 20th century was Li Jinhui, who created 12 operas for children, such as The Sparrow and the Child and The Little Painter. Regarded as the forerunner of Chinese opera creation, Li had enormous contemporary influence. In 1934, Nie Er and Tian Han wrote Storm Over the Yangtze. Their technique of "adding music to a drama" later evolved into a universal opera structure. Starting in the mid-1930s, pro-fessional composers in Shanghai and Chong-qing made various explorations in the field of folk opera. They produced The Beauty Xishi (Chen Gexin, 1935), The Peach Blossom Spring (Chen Tianhe, 1939), Song of Shanghai (Zhang Hao, 1939), Song of the Great Land (Qian Renkang, 1940) and Desert Song (Wang Luobin, 1942), among others. Most of these works borrowed from the creative experience of major Western operas in their efforts to solve the problems of musical dramatization. One of the most successful and influential of these operas was Huang Yuanluo's Autumn.

In the revolutionary base of Yan'an, too, operas were produced, including Village Melody (music by Xiang Ou and others) and March of the Army and the People (music by Xing Hai). Before long, on the basis of the Yangge style of singing and dancing native to Yan'an, the Yangge operas Brothers and Sisters Clear the Wasteland (music by An Bo) and Husband and Wife Learn to Write (music by Ma Ke) were composed, enlivening the opera stage and changing the direction of development of Chinese opera art and preparing the way for the birth of the large-scale opera The White-Haired Girl (music by Ma Ke and others). The White-Haired Girl was a milestone in the history of Chinese opera, and signified that Chinese opera had finally found its own unique development road.(Fig. 3-10) It was also a work with a self-confident esthetic style. Following The White-Haired Girl came Liu Hulan (music by Luo Zongxian and others) and Red Leaf River (music by Liang Hanguang). Historians of opera later termed the short period of time from when Brothers and Sisters Clear the Wasteland appeared to the creation of The White-Haired Girl, Liu Hula and Red Leaf River, the "first high tide of opera".

In the first 17 years following the founding of the People's Republic of China, there were various strands of creative thought in opera circles. One inherited the local opera tradition, representative of which were Young Erhei Gets Married (music by Ma Ke and others), Morning Glow (music by Zhang Rui), Red Coral (music by Wang Xiren and Hu Shiping) and Dou E's Grievance (music by Chen Zi and others); another based itself on folk music and dance drama, popular drama or children's song and dance dramas, representative of which was Sister Liu; another used the model of adding music to drama, repre-sentative of which was Stars, O Stars! (music by Fu Geng-cheng and Hu Yi), which was created after the "cultural revolution"; another used traditional grand Western opera for reference, representative of which were Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang (music by Liang Hanguang) Grassland Song (music by Luo Zongxian), Cloud Gazing (music by Zheng Lucheng) and Aiguli (music by Shi Fu and Wusimanjiang); and finally another based itself on the creative experience of The White-Haired Girl. In both concept and techniques, this last variety clung tenaciously to the internal requirements of the opera as its starting point; it was not controlled by any particular method, and adopted techniques from Western opera, local folk operas and drama enhanced by music. This model produced two outstanding worksÑThe Red Squad of the Honghu Lake (music by Zhang Jing'an and Ouyang Xianshu) and Sister Jiang (music by Yang Ming, Jiang Chunyang and Jin Sha).

Owing to the fact that the new era brought changes in the artistic environment and concepts favorable for opera to thrive, interest in opera grew, and two trends can be discerned:

One was a trend toward enhanced elegance and a deep and serious probing in the direction of creating grand operas. The main objective of the artistic search was to harmonize the esthetic content of the operas on a higher plane to achieve an all-round balance. Early fruits of this trend were The Flower Deity (music by Huang Anlun), Grieving for the Dead (music by Shi Guangnan), Open Country (music by Jin Xiang), Howling at Heaven (music by Xiao Bai), Alilang (music by Cui Sanming) and Come Back (music by Xu Zhanhai).

The 1990s saw the birth of Marco Polo (music by Wang Shiguang), An Zhonggen and The Goddess of Witch Mountain (music by Liu Zhenqiu), The Overlord of Chu (music by Jin Xiang), Sun Wu (music by Cui Xin), Zhang Qian and Cang Yuan (music by Xu Zhanhai), The Eagle (music by Liu Xijin) and Miss Amei (music by Shi Fu). From the point of view of the fine integration of the operatic elements, together with their ideological and artistic quality, Open Country, Zhang Qian and Cang Yuan can be viewed as peaks of creative attainment in the field of serious grand opera in the new era.

The other trend was toward a more popular style, taking its cue from America's Broadway musicals and making explorations along the path of the popular music of China. The first fruits of this genre appeared in the early 1980s, as We, the Youth of Today (music by Liu Zhenqiu), The Glorious Times (music by Shang Yi) and Legend of Friendship and Love (music by Xu Ke). Experiments in this vein continued all through the 1980s and 1990s, and at least 100 new operas were staged; nevertheless few of them turned out to be a great success.

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