Opera: Insipid Water Torture

Cultural traditions die hard in history-conscious China. But they do die, as devotees of the highly stylized form of music drama called Peking opera are beginning to learn. The death is especially painful when the executioner is China’s cultural queen, Chiang Ching, the wife of Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

For 200 years, Peking opera has been not only the most popular of all the Chinese operatic styles but practically a national pastime. The plots are familiar tales about kings and concubines, scholars and lute-playing ladies. The performers, in elaborate costumes and makeup, convey their characterizations through a series of ritualistic actions and formal gestures (the closing of a door, for example, is indicated by bringing the hands together). Although shrill and piercing to Western ears, the singing is delicately modulated and full of virtuoso flourishes, which Chinese audiences applaud with shouts of “Hao!” Realism, not Ritual. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Peking opera, like most of the arts, was subjected to “selective reform.” Still, until recently, a limited repertory of traditional Peking operas was being performed regularly in most of China’s theaters. Then Madame Mao got busy undermining the works. Convinced that the arts should “protect our socialist economic base,” she personally supervised the creation of new “revolutionary” librettos that would convert the opera stage from esthetic to political purposes.

Her six model productions are revolutionary in more than one sense. All the traditional elements of Peking opera except the singing have disappeared. Antiseptic plots portray the struggles of workers, peasants and soldiers against landlords and imperialists. The performers, appearing in subdued makeup and homespun cotton garments, substitute unadorned realism for symbolic ritual. The scores are laden with inspirational hymns and martial effects.

Arias, not Action. The most radical of all these works is The Red Lantern, which recounts the heroism of a family in the Communist underground during the war against Japan. Madame Mao has ordered drastic changes for the production. She has banished the traditional Chinese orchestra of wind and string instruments. The singers merely stand up before a lone grand piano and a percussion section and intone arias (“I Am Filled With Courage and Strength”) while the action takes place offstage. The scene is bizarre because only two years ago the piano was condemned as an instrument for “bourgeois spiritual aristocrats.” Now it is revered as a creation of “the laboring people.”

At the biennial Canton Trade Fair last week, The Red Lantern was put on for Chinese and foreign visitors and broadcast over Canton television. Also, a truncated version of the work (two soloists, eight arias) has now been made into a 35-minute film for showing inside and outside China. It is about as ex citing as a Communist indoctrination lecture—which is what it is. Even the workers and peasants who have been marshalled into showings have shown enthusiasm only when a picture of Mao himself has appeared. In response to Chinese critics who compared her new style to “insipid water,” Madame Mao replied: “What’s wrong with insipid water? It is with such water that wine is made.” As yet, no trace of wine has appeared.