/ARTS WEEKLY/MUSIC-CHINA: From Mozart to Puccini, But Where’s the Soul?

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Oct 26 2004 (IPS) - When the ‘Three Tenors’ gave a mega-concert in the capital’s Forbidden City in 2000, there were more than one or two listeners among the ecstatic audience who complained the world virtuosos didn’t sing any Chinese melodies.

Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras were in the capital to promote China’s bid for the 2008 Olympics but they did little to show respect for Chinese sensibilities by crooning only melodies like ‘Oh, Sole Mio’ and ‘Moon River’, grumbled some in the audience..

Four years later, French musical star Jean Michel Jarre inadvertently redressed the blunders committed by the ‘Three Tenors’. Nearly half of Jarre’s repertoire during his Oct.10 concert, which marked the beginning of France’s Year of Culture in China, was based on Chinese song motifs and performed by traditional Chinese instruments.

Jarre’s musical and visual extravaganza was only the third mega performance allowed by China’s communist leaders to be staged in the heart of the Forbidden City. The other two memorable occasions for audiences worldwide were the 1998 mega production of ‘Turandot’, which celebrated the return of Puccini’s oriental theme opera to its original site, and the 2000 ‘Three Tenors’ concert.

Jarre’s renditions of famous pieces for the Chinese instruments ‘pipa’ and ‘erhu’, all blasted out into the Beijing night through high-definition sound equipment that local media later described as ”revolutionary”.

However unusual Jarre’s digital interpretations might have sounded to Chinese ears, they came to symbolise the internationalisation of China’s classical music world. Indeed, music world insiders increasingly look to China’s integration in the global music community and wonder what role it will play in the future development of classical music.

As a new book by authors Sheila Melvin and Jingdong Cai, entitled ‘Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese’ tells, there is probably not a single conservatory in the West without a roster peppered with Chinese names nor a major orchestra in America without Chinese musicians.

On any day here around 38 million Chinese children are learning to play the piano, in a country that nowadays produces more pianos than anywhere else.

Chinese composers and musicians are now regularly winning prestigious musical prizes. Chinese former child prodigies, like 21-year-old Lang Lang, and his rival Li Yundi, are now among the best-selling classical pianists in the world.

Just how did Western classical music develop such deep roots on this oriental soil? And is there any connection between the country’s willingness to embrace a foreign musical tradition and its tendency to look down and neglect its own long-time musical canon?

These are some of the questions that husband-and-wife team Melvin and Cai set to answer in their study of classical music’s migration to the East and its gradual permeation of Chinese culture.

”If there weren’t any classical music, there wouldn’t be any modernity,” the authors quote Li Delun, the China National Symphony’s long-time conductor and one of the few Western-trained musicians to survive the purges of the Cultural Revolution.

As this insightful book explains, Western classical music always held a special status in Chinese society because of its history as a sophisticated import enjoyed by emperors, intellectuals, and revolutionaries, alike.

The famous Jesuit Missionary Matteo Ricci presented a clavichord to Ming emperor Wan Li as far back as 1601 and even taught his eunuchs to play some pieces. When British emissary Lord Macartney led his famous embassy to the court of the Qing Dynasty Emperor Qianlong in a bid to open China to direct trade, he brought along a German band hoping to impress his hosts.

The Qing dynasty (1616-1911) imperial court liked Western music, and several emperors employed a Western-trained orchestra. However, the interest and the musical knowledge imparted by the Jesuits and others never spread beyond the walls of the Imperial palace.

It was only after China’s defeat in the Opium Wars in mid and late-19th century that things began to change.

Throughout the 19th century Christian missionaries taught singing, music theory and instruments such as piano and the violin. The popularisation of Christianity and the spread of church musical composition was an important factor that helped classical music leave the walls of the Forbidden City.

Chinese people came to believe that that Western music was more scientific, more heroic, and because it was international, it came to be hailed as progressive. China’s own long tradition of music was looked down upon and either ignored or transformed into orchestral type pieces.

The Chinese Communist Party inherited the view that perceived Western music as modern. Mao Zedong grouped Western music with the ”modern things” that must be learned from foreign countries. His wife Jiang Qing, a former Shanghai starlet, created ”eight model operas” during the Cultural Revolution, which could mix Western ballet and music with the traditions of the Peking Opera.

By the 1990s, many local governments had begun to use classical music as a means of projecting a modern and progressive image. To show how modern and trendy Shanghai was becoming, the city leaders commissioned a French architect to design an ultra-modern opera house made of glass and steel costing 157 million U.S. dollars and located just next to the Shanghai Communist Party headquarters.

This made all other cities envious and soon they all embarked on a building spree.

Beijing is building its own glass-and-steel Grand Theatre, which may cost over 400 million dollars by the time it is finished in 2005. It is also designed by a Frenchman and stands right next to the Great Hall of the People opposite the Forbidden City. Other cities like Hangzhou, Wenzhou and Nanjing have all held design competitions for ultra-modern theatres to showcase how advanced they are.

But authors Melvin and Cai make some poignant points about the nature of this enthusiasm. By comparison with the huge sums invested in these buildings, the government spends next to nothing on supporting musicians or encouraging creativity.

Many orchestras in China are bankrupt and concert tickets are usually not sold but given away to employees by state work units. As international recognition is the only way out of the daily drudge, Chinese musical students concentrate on perfecting their techniques but learn little about the music’s background.

Even at the opera master classes held by the Shanghai Conservatory in 2000, several of the Metropolitan Opera coaches were stunned by the lack of basic musical knowledge by singers. Students may get every note right but many of them did not even know in what century Mozart lived.

Nevertheless, attending a classical concert during the Christmas and New Year has become ‘de rigueur’ for fashionable young urban Chinese in the cities, as the authors point out. While Beijing opera theatres scramble to assemble even modest audiences, many Chinese families spend a little fortune on purchasing tickets for the Christmas and New Year concerts.

While the book describes with passionate detail China’s fervour for Western classical musical, it also raises some disturbing questions about the country’s obliteration of its own musical heritage. If China’s new generation knows little about their own musical tradition, is it really prepared to embrace a musical culture it can grasp only skin-deep?