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that traces its origins to Jinjiang, Fujian. A
major force for music in the People’s Republic
of China, Li studied at the Shanghai School of
Music (beginning in 1936) and the Luxun Institute of Arts in Yanan. He served as editor of the
periodical National Music, and from 1946 to
1949 was dean of the music department in the
Arts and Literature Institute of North China
United University. He was later associated with
the Central Conservatory of Music, the Central
Ensemble of Songs and Dances, and the Central Chinese Orchestra; beginning in 1985 he
served as the chairman of the Chinese Musicians’ Association.
The musical rapprochement between China and
the West extends farther back than one might
expect. In 1879 a Shanghai Municipal Band was
jointly sponsored by the local municipality and
French expatriates, and in 1918 an Italian pianist
and conductor named Mario Paci led the
first concerts of the Shanghai Municipal
Orchestra, which evolved into the Shanghai
Symphony Orchestra, today an orchestra of international repute and a partner with the New
York Philharmonic in the Shanghai Orchestra
Academy and Residency Partnership. By 1927
the city boasted a National Conservatory of
Music, founded by the Leipzig-educated Chinese
citizen Xiao Youmei. In 1937 the Shanghai Opera
House produced and presented a season of six
standard European operas and, in the case of
Rigoletto, included on its roster two Chinese
singers. Western music had clearly built up a
considerable following in China prior to the disruptions in the second half of the 20th century,
even if its enthusiasts were few compared to the
extraordinary Chinese presence in European
and American musical life and the emphatic embrace of Western concert music among Chinese
audiences that is so evident today.
In the mid-1950s Chinese composers became
active in producing concert works that amalgamated Chinese and Western modes of musicmaking. The most enduring example from that
period is The Butterfly Lovers, a violin concerto composed collaboratively by Chen Gang
and He Zhanhao, two students at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (now the third collaborator in the Shanghai Orchestra Academy),
Spring Couplets
A popular hallmark of the annual Spring Festival in China is the calligraphic inscription and display of “spring
couplets.” The tradition of writing poetic couplets goes back more than a millennium. The earliest is sometimes
said to be one inscribed by the king Meng Xu (919–965 C.E.). It read:
新年纳余庆,
嘉节号长春
The New Year enjoys surplus celebrations;
happy holiday sounds invoke lasting spring blessings.
These brief poems are typically written in
black letters on red paper banners that are displayed for a number of weeks, very often hung
around doors — for which reason they are also
called “door couplets.” The couplets are two-line
poems, the lines being equal in length (most
characteristically consisting of five or seven
characters), the corresponding characters of
each line adhering to identical lexical patterns
and matching or symmetrical tonal inflections.
A doorway decorated with spring couplets
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and completed in 1959. (Collaborative composition was common, reflecting as it did the cooperative attitude that was promoted in China.)
Chen Gang was born into a musical family —
his father was also a composer — but aspired
to a military career. Unable to join the air force
due to nearsightedness, he was assigned instead to perform in the Liberation Army Song
and Dance Troupe. There he polished his musical skills enough to gain admittance to the
Shanghai Conservatory in 1955. He would later
teach harmony and composition on the
school’s faculty, direct the Shanghai Chamber
Music Ensemble, and serve as president of the
Chinese Musicians’ Society. He Zhanhao grew
up immersed in folk music and yueju (Shaoxing opera), but he became a violin major at the
Shanghai Conservatory. Yet, as he recalled in
an interview in 2000,
The solution to this conundrum was The Butterfly Lovers, in which the solo violin employs
many gestures characteristic of yueju, such as
extravagant portamento, glissandos, and expressive shadings of vibrato. The composers
also grafted into the violin part sounds associated with other Chinese instruments, including
the zheng, pipa, and erhu. The composers later
revised it into a final form in which its original
preponderance of Chinese-opera style assumed
a more Western guise. The piece was temporarily silenced during the Cultural Revolution due
to what was deemed its “feudalist” foundation,
but it has since emerged as an essential classic
of Chinese concert music.
The musicologist Liu Ching-chih, in his 2010
study A Critical History of New Music in China,
observed of the East-West fusion compositions
of the 1950s and ’60s:
I asked, who am I studying this for? Am I
going to play Bach and Beethoven for the
peasants? … I ask if they understand, they
all say no. But they love to hear yueju! … So
this influenced our thinking — how could
we use folk music with the violin? How
could we nationalize the violin?
Superficially, all of these works look Chinese,
but within the Chinese packaging lurk foreign
goods: the harmony, counterpoint, forms, structures, and textures are all European imports.
He finds this at odds with traditional values
of Chinese music:
The Butterfly Lovers, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
Chen Gang
Born: March 10, 1935, in Shanghai, China
He Zhanhao
Born: August 29, 1933, in Hajiasham, Zhuji, Zhejiang Province,
China
Work composed and premiered: composed 1958–59,
premiered May 1959, at Shanghai’s Lyceum Theatre, by the
Shanghai Conservatory Symphony Orchestra, Fan Chengwu,
conductor, Yu Lina, soloist
New York Philharmonic premiere: this performance
Estimated duration: ca. 27 minutes
The Butterfly Lovers violin part echoes traditional Chinese instruments such
as the pipa
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The principal point about music in China … has
been that it conveys ideas and is permeated
by philosophy. There is not the emphasis on
beauty of sound, line, and form found in European music. Whether vertically (time),
horizontally (place) or philosophically (content), Chinese music has held a special and
profoundly traditional style of its own. …
However, whether or not a work has a
Chinese style is not the sole criterion by
which to judge it. The true value of a work of
music lies in the motivation, expressive capacity, sentiments and particular qualities of
its composer.
Ask a violinist his or her impression of Fritz
Kreisler, and you are almost sure to receive a
reverent response. He was among the greatest
of the great ones: a legend in his own time and
a fiddler for the ages. His destiny seemed clear
practically from the outset, when at the age of
seven he became the youngest student ever admitted to the Vienna Conservatory, where Anton
Bruckner taught him music theory and Joseph
Hellmesberger, Jr. (remembered for his Brahms
connections) served as his violin professor.
After graduating with a gold medal, he
moved on to the Paris Conservatoire and was
awarded its premier prix at age 12 — and that
The Work at a Glance
The Butterfly Lovers is based on a Chinese folk tale, dating back to the late Tang Dynasty (ninth or tenth century), involving Liang Shanbo (a boy) and Zhu Yintai (a girl). In fact, the work’s title in Chinese is Liang Shanbo
yu Zhu Yintai, and it is popularly referred to as the Liang Zhu Concerto. (The names are sometimes transliterated as Shanpo and Yingtai.) Zhu ran away from home, disguised herself as a boy, and enrolled in a school,
where she was a classmate of Liang’s for three years. She fell in love with Liang but could not reveal this without compromising her disguise. She eventually left. Liang, missing his companion deeply, traveled to Zhu’s
home, where he discovered not only that his beloved friend was a girl, but that her father had arranged her
marriage to a wealthy neighbor. Liang died of a broken heart, and Zhu, who had tried in vain to defy her father’s decision, visited his grave, which she begged might open to her. At the sound of a thunderclap, the
grave opened and Zhu leapt in. The two lovers then emerged as butterflies and flew away.
The concerto is cast in a single movement made up of three principal sections. The first corresponds to the
idea of romance, with the violin presenting a love theme and then playing a duet with the cello to depict the intertwining emotions of Liang and Zhu, before the friends separate in a spirit of sadness. The second principal section focuses on Zhu’s defying her father over the arranged marriage, with some of the orchestra’s deepest sounds
— bassoon, double bass, gong — creating an ominous atmosphere. Brass instruments proclaim the father’s decree, the violin represents Zhu’s vain arguments,
another duet between violin and cello depicts
the lovers’ farewell, a percussion crash signals
the opening of the grave, and the swelling of the
orchestra suggests Zhu’s jumping into it. In the
third and final section, flute and harp recall some
of the music from the concerto’s opening, after
which the muted violin and the delicate orchestral texture illustrate the lovers’ transformation
into butterflies, in which form they flutter off to a
happy life free from earthly constraints.
The tale of The Butterfly Lovers has been
described as a Chinese Romeo and Juliet story, so
much so that a statue of the pair can be found in
Verona, Italy
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