--- description: Long Yu has come a long way since the day in 1976 when he accidentally killed a duck. The duck was going to die anyway,... title: Bernstein in Beijing: China's Classical Music Explosion image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt783d906e5d57e5c6/698a4af5b21a9c0145508cac/360_beijing_fest_1031.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Bernstein in Beijing: China's Classical Music Explosion by [Jeffrey Kluger](/author/jeffrey-kluger/) Nov 6, 2008 5:00 AM CUT  Long Yu Long YuMax Liang by [Jeffrey Kluger](/author/jeffrey-kluger/) Nov 6, 2008 5:00 AM CUT Long Yu has come a long way since the day in 1976 when he accidentally killed a duck. The duck was going to die anyway, but not until it had been properly fattened up in the breeding factory where Long, then 12, was required to work in the waning days of China’s Cultural Revolution. The ducks were force-fed through a tube operated by a foot-pedal — a single pump per meal. One day Long got careless and accidentally pumped twice. End of duck. “Boys’ minds wander sometimes,” he says today. “Still, the factory bosses were very angry at me.” Nobody in Chinese officialdom gets angry at Long anymore. The artistic director and chief conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, Long spent this October the way he’s spent all his recent Octobers, dashing from concert hall to concert hall around Beijing, joining the capacity crowds jamming into decidedly Chinese venues to hear some decidedly un-Chinese music: Puccini in the Forbidden City; _Dido & Aeneas_ at the Beijing Concert Hall; Handl’s _Messiah_ at the Wang Fu Jing Church; Wagner’s _Tannhäuser_ at the downtown Poly Theater. People who order their tickets in advance get in; the rest get introduced to another Western tradition — scalpers, who buy in bulk and sell out fast. It’s been that way every year since Long first launched the annual Beijing Music Festival (BMF) in 1998\. And that, most people in the Chinese arts community believe, is nothing compared to the classical music explosion still to come. “Fifty million Chinese children are now studying a classical instrument,” says Long. “In 20 years, I believe China will be one of the biggest countries in the world for music.” The idea of China as the gravitational center of a globalized world is something most countries have gotten used to. But classical music hadn’t seemed like it would be part of that mix, if only because Western opera and the Eastern world never made a natural fit. To outsiders, the traditional Peking opera seemed as much circus as song, with extraneous acrobatics and melodies that struck European ears as atonal and arhythmic. Western opera — with its volume and bombast — fell similarly flat in the East. But since Western ways were the planet’s dominant ones, it was China that was open to learning from the outside. “If a poor country wanted to develop, it had to follow the West,” says composer and conductor Guo Wenjing who performed at this year’s BMF. Maoism and the Cultural Revolution made that harder to do. Even indigenous opera was swept aside in favor of such turgid revolutionary works as _The Red Detachment of Women_ and _Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy_. Long experienced the suffocation of the musical arts in a more personal way than most when his grandfather, who had studied music in Paris, was sent to the country to work — but only after the Red Guards destroyed his musical library. “When I was five he started teaching me music anyway,” Long says. “We were only allowed to learn revolutionary songs, but he taught them in a classical style.” The artistic thaw didn’t begin until the 1970s, as warming relations between the U.S. and China made cultural exchanges possible, including visits by the Philadelphia Symphony in 1973 and violinist Isaac Stern in 1979\. That fired the musical interests of the Chinese at the same time the country’s domestic policies were boosting music in other, unintended ways. Even during the Cultural Revolution, there was a need for musicians who could play the approved political operas; young people clamored to land those jobs, if only because that would permit them to remain in the city, rather than being sent to collectives in the country. What’s more, China’s one-child policy made parents protective of the tiny families they were allowed to have and reluctant to take any chances with them. “A lot of children were made to study piano simply because it kept them home and off the streets,” says Long. The result was a fertile cultural topsoil in which classical music could take hold and grow. When China began allowing students to go abroad in the 1980s, many swarmed to the music capitals of Europe and the U.S. to study in the classical tradition. Long himself left China in 1988 and spent five years at the Hochschule Academy in West Berlin, then several more years in Hong Kong as part of the small classical music community there. In 1990 and 1992 he visited Beijing and was given the opportunity to conduct the Central Philharmonic Government Orchestra — a party-run symphony with a musical reputation as dreary as its name but which represented the best China had. Finally, in 1997, he decided to return to Beijing full-time with the intention of establishing an annual music festival. The first such two-week event occurred the following year, and it’s been growing in scope and ambition ever since. This year’s BMF was a wholly global affair, with fourteen corporate sponsors that included such multinational giants as Audi, Credit Suisse, UBS and American Express. Performers came from across Europe and the Americas. Germany alone sent two complete opera companies — a massive mobilization that involved 420 people and 16 trailer-sized shipping containers. The overall program was an eclectic one that included an evening-long tribute to Leonard Bernstein performed by the China Philharmonic, a globally competitive orchestra that pushed aside the government symphony in 2000 and that Long himself was tapped to lead. Just days after the 2008 festival ended, Long traveled to New York City, where the Bernstein performance was shown on eight giant screens in Times Square, just blocks from the spot where Bernstein’s _West Side Story_ had its Broadway premiere more than half a century earlier. Next year’s BMF is already being planned, and Long is looking at other long-term projects, including a collaboration with Israel and Germany to produce an opera about the small Jewish community in Shanghai that sheltered Holocaust refugees during World War II. Even as the classical industry in China grows, nobody pretends it’s fully mature yet — nor without some problems particular to the country. A billion potential music fans means a billion potential buyers for pirated recordings of the masters, and bootlegged Mahlers and Beethovens are already turning up. Then too, there are Chinese audiences themselves, who still have a little learning to do about the classical ways. “Some younger people may love Bach, but they couldn’t tell you if he’s alive or not,” says Marc Johnston, president of Align Entertainment and manager of both Long and Lang Lang, the 26-year-old classical pianist who has lately become China’s Elvis — only bigger — and who performed at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. “Others are still learning the basic protocols, like not applauding between movements.” Still, this very unfamiliarity can sometimes produce a particular kind of thrill. One evening at the Forbidden City Concert Hall this month, American pianist Murray Perahia was performing a selection of classical compositions. He held the audience fast as he moved from Beethoven to Mozart to Bach, but he truly blew the doors off the place when he reached his Chopin. As he left the stage after his last listed piece, some of the audience members — unfamiliar with the tradition of the encore — left the hall. Perahia returned to play some more, and the remaining audience not only applauded, but let out a full-throated, almost primal whoop, one that seemed equal parts surprise, delight and palpable gratitude. Every performer strives to elicit that triptych of feelings. Only the rarest ones — in the rarest places — manage to achieve it. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6909390/bernstein-in-beijing-chinas-classical-music-explosion/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6909390/bernstein-in-beijing-chinas-classical-music-explosion/"},"headline":"Bernstein in Beijing: China's Classical Music Explosion","datePublished":"2008-11-06T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:45:11.948Z","description":"Long Yu has come a long way since the day in 1976 when he accidentally killed a duck. 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