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New Chinese Opera Makes Debut in Beijing
A Chinese opera, "Mournful Twilight," made its debut Thursday in Beijing, waking Chinese opera up from a ten-year slumber.
The "Mournful Twilight," taking four years to complete and featuring a tragic theme, was produced by Chinese artists. It tells the story of a group of young students who devoted their lives to the pursuit of truth at the time right before the founding of New China in 1949.
Noted figures in Chinese opera and more than four first-class artistic troupes jointly brought the opera to the stage.
According to experts, this script was written for arias to be sung with folk melodies, in line with the principle that "opera is a dramatization of music."
The playwright combined lyrics and narratives in a poetic language style like Shakespeare, which is said to be a good experiment at localizing elements of Western opera.
Guan Xia, head of the China Opera and Ballet Theater, said "Locally-written operas are rarely seen these days in China, apart from the old ones performed many times." The latest locally-written opera "The Daughter of the Party" was written in 1991.
Experts said that China should learn from other countries to produce more works on the basis of classics.
So far, more than 130 locally-written operas have been staged in China, including "The White Haired Girl" and "Red Guards of Lake Honghu."
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