When being modernized, there are a thousand twists and turns a Chinese opera can take on the long road from conception to performance, and still more variations depending on which side of the Taiwan Strait it is being staged. During a break in the rehearsals for the opera The Story of Ah-Q, we interviewed Xi Zhigan and Li Lianbi, who wrote its libretto and music. We spoke with them about how they adapted the famous Chinese novel to the stage and about how Chinese opera is being modernized on the mainland. Xi Zhigan writes scripts for the Hubei Fine Arts Academy, whereas Li Lianbi writes operatic scores for the Peking Opera Troupe of Wuhan and serves as director of instruction at the Peking Opera Youth Troupe. Once they start talking about opera, these two men from Hubei get very excited, and they talk themselves hoarse.

Xi and Li are no strangers to those familiar with new Peking opera in Taiwan. The two are responsible for several recent Taiwan stagings: the Contemporary Legend Theater's The River of Yin and Yang, Chu Lu-hao's Zhong Kuei, and Fu Hsing's Xu Jiujing Rises in the Ranks of Officialdom. Up to now, they would do their writing on the mainland, bring the completed scores and librettos over to Taiwan to be performed, and then return home with the videos and show lists. "This is the first time the exchange has truly been at a deeper level," says Xi. "From the planning, to the imagining, to the writing of scripts, it's all being done from scratch. It was quite fascinating, really."

Clownish or old?

In creating operas, they both hold to the philosophy that each opera is unique, and that the content determines the method of performance. "The changes we're making are a result of Ah-Q's character," Xi says. "They don't point to a direction of innovation, nor do they represent a single artistic path we are pursuing." Xi hopes that traditionalists won't get too worked up about how they have strayed from convention. "The old is the old, the new is the new."

In making a new opera, characterization is very important, and the set character types of traditional opera are often insufficient. There's nothing new about transcending these limitations by merging and melding traditional character types. Years ago Mei Lanfang combined traits of the qingyi (leading female) and huadan (vivacious female) roles to create a new type of role, the huashan, that combines features of both. Ah-Q comes from the lower rungs of society, making the chou (clown) seemingly appropriate, but a clown traditionally doesn't have a singing part. It would be too serious if they used a laosheng (old man) role, and so librettist Xi chose a character type that has been developed in the mainland over the past few decades: the chousheng (the clown-cum- leading man).

Mainland people, Taiwan flavor

With a change in the character types, there is naturally a change in the style of singing. Li Lianbi holds firm to the principle that "the words determine the singing style." But in the more than 100 scores he's written for operas, he had the toughest time with Ah-Q. Why? "Writing music for deadbeat characters is hardest," Li explains. "Ah-Q's emotional world is not very rich. Finding the right kind of music for him is like trying to mash frozen tofu."

After waiting for Li to whip off the music, Tracy Chung and Wu Hsing-kuo flew to Wuhan to meet with him during the Chinese New Year's holidays. At first they weren't overwhelmed with what they heard. They thought the music ought to be bolder, and so they gave him some Taiwanese operas to listen to, hoping that he could add a little Taiwanese spice to the musical pot. Li couldn't understand what was being sung, but he grew very interested in the melodies, and integrated some of their dumadiao (horse) and qizidiao (seven character) tunes into the music of Ah-Q. It's just one stanza in some mainlanders' efforts to catch a Taiwanese flavor in their music.

Degrading Mei Lanfang's work

They have a lot of experience of writing operas on the mainland. More than a decade ago, their Xu Jiujing Rises in the Ranks of Officialdom, about the travails of an honest mandarin, created a stir on both sides of the strait. It's one of the few operas where a clown role gets the lead. In The Great Transformation in Primordial Times, they strayed farther from the path of convention. Because they were talking about Yu the Great taming the waters some 5000 years ago, they held that language was in a primitive state before most Chinese idioms had developed, and so Xi wrote arias that used only one or two characters per phrase. And Li smashed the structure of the music, creating something entirely new that drew divergent responses. The college crowd responded enthusiastically, but older members of the audience would approach the orchestra pit after performances, point to Li Lianbi and curse him: "You've totally degraded Mei Lanfang's work!"

"This isn't the boldest of experiments," Li says, citing the music on the mainland called juge--or opera songs--that combine elements of Chinese opera with current pop music. These songs have a strong beat and appeal mostly to the young. Li holds that Peking opera ought to develop in different ways that can compete with each other, just as ballet in the West has its classical incarnation, and has also been adapted a to variety of other performance styles, including figure skating, synchronized swimming and sky-diving.

Art can't conform to a model

The experiments in operatic innovation on the mainland have caused the Chinese opera there to boldly open up. Many people find the origins of this trend in the "revolutionary model operas" of the cultural revolution. The truth is that as far back as the early years of the Republican era, there were "modern operas" that reflected contemporary social conditions or even directly addressed issues in the news, or else were adaptations of contemporary novels. But the operas that have had the greatest social impact were none other than the "model operas" of the Cultural Revolution. Xi Zhigan and Li Lianbi both worked putting on model operas. What are their feelings in retrospect?

"The biggest flaw of the model operas was the mistaken conception behind their creation that all art was in the service of politics, but the creative reworking they called for artistically was something new," Xi Zhigan says. Character treatment was the most criticized aspect of model operas. The characters of traditional operas--the emperors, generals, ministers and talented men and beautiful women--were substituted with the heros of the proletariat--workers, peasants and soldiers--who were all inhumanly flawless "models" of virtue.

But there was innovation in form. Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who held tremendous power, assembled some of the greatest operatic talents in the country to figure out how to turn the traditional forms of Peking opera into something that would work for modern people. The music in those operas in particular went through revolutionary change. The resulting tunes were very famous, and everyone could sing them. This was partly because there weren't any other operas performed in those days, but also because the melodies were good and catchy.

Groping and doubts

After the Cultural Revolution, the model operas disappeared from view. What goes around comes around, and once again traditional operas, which seemed new and fresh, were all the rage. For ten years after the Cultural Revolution, Xi Zhigan didn't create anything. His creative juices just weren't flowing. It would take a great effort for him to jump past the conventions of the "model" characters to mold a new character like Xu Jiujing, who was so true to life. Li, likewise, went through his own period of groping and doubts. From swarming busily to make model operas, to a total about-face to traditional opera, to combining elements of both, Li and Xi were finally able to jump out of the confines of both styles and find a new way to express their feelings.

Adherents of both old and new opera can be found on the mainland today, where three different approaches are evident: The first seeks as much of the old flavor as possible. Xi reveals that one of the new fashions in the mainland opera world is yinpeixiang (sound matched with images), where recordings of operas by famous old stars like Mei Lanfang are played while present-day actors perform the actions on stage. The second approach tries to attract young audiences by reworking old operas or creating new historical operas. This school combines techniques and concepts from modern drama with adaptations of traditional operatic scores. "The method and conception is very modern," Xi says. "Very traditional operas can still be made very modern." Xi holds that Ah-Q belongs to this general class of operas. The third school makes modern operas, in which the tradition of combining singing, reciting and acting is used to create works wholly about modern life and sentiments. But within this school itself, there are many divisions and struggles.

Though Peking opera is and always has been a grab-bag form of art, in adapting traditional opera to suit a modern vocabulary, every generation faces questions about what can and can't be changed. When Mei Lanfang and others of earlier generations were pursuing their own experiments, they too felt these same kinds of pressures. Yesterday's creations become today's traditions. Can we create a Peking opera that will belong to our age and serve as tomorrow's tradition? Perhaps only time can tell.

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Xu Jiujing Rises in the Ranks of Officialdom, which was about the difficulties of being an honest official in the face of entrenched special interests, was popular on both Taiwan and the mainland. It too broke some artistic conventions in creating a lively character that combined two traditional Peking opera roles: the old man and the clown. (photo by Hsu Pin)

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The mainland librettist Xi Zhigan (right) and composer Li Lianbi teamed up to give birth to the opera The Story of Ah-Q. Their experience of working with the Taiwan theater world was a happy one. (courtesy of National Fu Hsing Chinese Opera Theater)

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To attract younger audiences, the National Fu Hsing Chinese Opera Theater went to universities, colleges and schools to give demonstrations and lectures. As a result many young people went to the opera for the first time. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

To attract younger audiences, the National Fu Hsing Chinese Opera Theater went to universities, colleges and schools to give demonstrations and lectures. As a result many young people went to the opera for the first time. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）