Virginia Review of Asian Studies Volume 18 (2016) 199-212
Xie: Yue Opera
THE SADDER THE BETTER: YUE OPERA AND THE TACICS OF TEARS
Wendy Xie
Appalachian State University
Yue opera, one of the major opera genres in China, enjoyed a meteoric rise in the 1930s and 1940s. Propelled by intensified emotional conflicts, the majority of the Yue opera repertoire should be categorized as tragic melodramas. In this paper, I argue that the popularity of Yue opera was closely associated with its tactics of tears. In particular, this paper looks at the bitter lyrics and crying tunes, in which the genre’s defining trope of lament is best represented. In addition, I aim to investigate the interrelationship between the genre’s tactics of sadness and the nostalgic sentiments prevalent in the semi-colonial milieu in 1930s/1940s Shanghai.
The Sadder the Better: Yue Opera and the Tactics of Tears
In Sang Hu’s 桑弧1947 film Long Live the Wife (太太万岁Taitai wan sui), a conversation happens between two typical petty-urbanites in Shanghai:
Mother-in-law: “What is Yuan Xuefen playing these days? …”
Daughter-in-law: She is playing Xianglin’s Wife …
Mother-in-law: “Xianglin’s Wife? Never heard of it.
Daughter-in-law: “I heard it is a new play. A sad one.”
Mother-in-law: “Great, a sad one, the sadder the better.”[1]
This exchange in the film, provides a revealing glimpse of the popular entertainment scene in 1940s. The Yuan Xuefen 袁雪芬 mentioned in their dialog is a preeminent actor of Yue opera. Yue opera is a regional, “lowbrow” genre that originated in a small town called Shengxian 嵊县 in Zhejiang province around 1906 and later became popular the metropolis Shanghai. Xianglin’s Wife 祥林嫂 was adapted from the novel “New Year’s Sacrifice” by Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936), China’s patron saint of the progressive discourse. Xianglin’s wife is a young widow forced by circumstances into remarriage, because of which she is considered unchaste. Before long she is widowed the second time and loses her toddler son to a wolf. Eventually she is driven to death by the series of misfortunes and her own sense of guilt.
In both Lu Xun’s original text and the Yue opera adaption, Xianglin’s wife is a victim caught in the trap of a patriarchal society. The Yue opera play’s narration in particular generates a plethora of sadness by exhibiting the cannibalizing effects of ritualized hierarchical relationships between husband and wife, and the one-sided chastity code associated with it. Its tragic theme reflects the appeal of the Yue opera genre in general: “the sadder the better.” Indeed, tragic plays, like Xianglin’s Wife, make up the majority of the Yue opera repertoire.[2]
Another distinguishing feature that sets Yue opera apart is that its repertoire exclusively consists of love stories,[3] drawn from folk tales, classical dramas, vernacular stories, and especially the “scholar-meets-beauty” romances 才子佳人小说 of the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Nan Wei, the playwright of Xianglin’s Wife, “betrayed” the original novel by filling in a typical romantic plot: Xianglin’s wife, as the daughter of a maid in the wealthy Lu household, grows up together with the Young Master Niu and they develop mutual attraction to each other. Their love is doomed because of the unbridgeable social gap between them. Although controversial among some of Lu Xun loyalists, this addition of romantic plotline proved to be hugely successful because the audience were moved by the highly sentimental contrast between the once innocent, beloved young woman and the tragic end of her life.
The migration of Lu Xun’s iconic story to a popular performative form marked a turning point. Yue opera had remained an insignificant blur until the staging of Xianglin’s Wife attracted attention from the leftist cultural elite. Invited by Lu Xun’s widow Xu Guangping, a group of left-wing intellectuals, including Tian Han 田汉, Hong Chen 洪琛, Huang Zuolin 黄佐临, attended the May 1946 premiere of Xianglin’s Wife in the Mingxing Theater in Shanghai. This special group left the performance feeling impressed by the play’s use of a traditional art form to address a contemporary concern, and also by the enthusiasm of Yue opera’s broad fan base. Even Zhou Enlai 周恩来, the senior Chinese Communist Party leader and head of the underground CCP operations, became aware of Yue opera’s huge popularity and decided to convert it into a Communist propaganda tool. This episode of Yue opera history leads us to my discussion of Yue opera’s narrative structure and political significance.
The study of shifting discourses about the politics of love and desire in modern China has attracted much academic attention in recent years, including Ban Wang’s The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China, Jianmei Liu’s Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women's Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, Jing Tsu’s Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937, and Haiyan Lee’s Revolution of the Heart. A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. In these works, the emancipation of romantic love and individual feelings is viewed as a challenge to traditional social constraints, thus crucial to modern political transformation.
However, these discussions have largely been restricted to elite literary discourses. As a popular regional opera, Yue opera has been viewed as mere stereotyped, formalic love stories, and been prejudiced against by critics. In contrast, my essay is intended to use Yue opera to exemplify the thus far neglected affective dimension of non-elite artistic discourses. My approach is to examine Yue opera in the theoretic framework of melodrama. Giving intensified emotional conflicts and romantic love an overarching signifying power, a typical Yue opera play is an exhibition of heightened sentimentality and should be categorized melodramatic tragedies. Specifically, as mentioned above, I investigate the function of affective structure and the politics of sadness in Yue opera.
Although the classical scholar-beauty romances, one of the main sources of Yue opera, are known for the typical “happy ending”, romantic Yue opera plays are more complex. Its melodramatic forms mediate social issues and produce emotional meanings far beyond the superficial clichéd formalic. Through analysis of the melodramatic features in the plotlines and characters of selected Yue opera plays, I explore the following: 1) the various narrative techniques and audiovisual devices employed to elicit emotions; and 2) the social implications of the melodramatic narratives in the context of war and semi-colonialism.
Articulating Sadness: Agnition and Crying Tones
Yue opera plays construct a unique tragic structure by combining melodramatic elements and the classic scholar-beauty romance. Ben Singer identifies five “key constitutive factors” that defines melodrama as a “cluster concept”: pathos, overwrought or heightened emotion (emo-tionalism), moral polarization (good vs. evil), non-classical narrative structure/form (e.g., use of extreme coincidence and “deus ex machine”), and graphic sensationalism (emphasis on action, violence, and thrills) (44). Different configurations of these basic features or constitutive factors can all be seen in Yue opera plays.
For instance, in The Butterfly Lovers, arguably the most celebrated piece in Yue opera, the melodramatic construction is deployed throughout the play:
1. The heroine Zhu Yingtai disguises herself as a man in order to attend school.
2. Zhu and her schoolmate Liang Shanbo share the same room, but initially Liang does not suspect Zhu’s identity.
3. Liang finds out Zhu is a women and falls madly in love her. But it is too late since Zhu has already been promised to another man by her father. Soon thereafter Liang dies of heartbreak.
4. Zhu visits Liang’s tomb. Upon her wailing, the tomb opens up and Zhu rushes into it and disappears. (Altenburger 174)
5.
The play is characteristic of many narrative conventions that define melodrama: mistaken identity (woman in male disguise to obscure her gender), barely missed opportunity (only a few days too late for the marriage proposal), extreme pathos of thwarted love and unfulfilled longing, death after heartbreak, and the ultimate self-sacrifice (suicide).
The defining melodramatic element manifests itself when Zhu confesses her love for Liang in a tear-inducing aria:
I cannot become a couple with you,
because my father has promised me to the Ma family;
I cannot marry you,
because my father has accepted the betrothal gift from the Ma family;
I cannot become your wife,
because my father has drunk the wine of the Ma family;
I cannot act against my father’s will,
because the Ma family is too powerful for us to rescind their marriage proposal. (Yuan 37)
In the drastically mood-shifting scene, Zhu’s despair and heart-wrenching feeling of helplessness is evident in the parallelistic language. Comprised of four dyadic sets and structured in formulaic phrases, the parallel construction in the aria effectively formulates modes of admonition, anguish and sorrow. The repetition of a pattern creates emphasis, multiplying the power of lyrics and calling attention to the agony of the heroine. The ornate redundancy in fact fits best the melodramatic construction, adding to its tragic intensity. From this point on, the plot climbs up the emotional scale and the climax is reached.
As shown above, an important focus of melodrama is its recourse to scenes of suffering designed to elicit maximum amounts of pathos. In his well-cited article “Melodrama and Tears,” Steve Neale addresses melodrama’s “ability to move its spectators and in particular to make them cry.” He argues that melodramas’ ability to generate sadness is fundamentally based on the relationship between the narrative point-of-view of the characters and the audience. When the character learns the key information and his point of view thus comes to coincide with the point of view of the viewer, an event that Franco Moretti calls agnition takes place (160).
The Butterfly Lovers clearly plays on the discrepancy between Liang’s perspective and the viewer’s privileged knowledge: the viewer knows of Zhu’s true identity and her love for Liang all along when Liang is still fooled by Zhu’s cross-dressing disguise. Only at the moment of Zhu’s confession, Liang finally comes to realize what the viewer knows. The realizations of being “too late” and that “change is impossible” generate agnition. Sadness is the product of a moment when Liang’s point of view and that of the viewer are reconciled.
Indeed, “tears” and “sadness” are the two keywords for the general theme of the Yue opera plays performed in the 1930s and 1940s. The four most famous Yue opera actors at the time, Wang Xinghua, Zhao Ruihua, Shi Yinhua, and Yao Shuijuan, all had the reputation for playing tragic female roles. Shi Yinhua was nicknamed the “Tragic Female-Role Player” (青衣悲旦qingyi beidan). Wang Xinghua also excelled in sad characters: “When she started to howl on stage with tears streaming down, no one in the audience could help but crying along with her” (Qian 34). Yao Shuijuan also shot to fame for playing suffering women.
The hyperbolic excess dominates Yue opera, calling to mind the often-cited comparisons Barthes made between theater and wrestling: The virtue of wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. In wrestling the “Exhibition of Suffering […] is the very aim of the fight.” As in the theatre, “wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks” (Barthes 23).
Aside from an agnition structure, music and singing also play an important role in eliciting tears as the overload of emotional import makes normal speech inadequate. Peter Brooks claimed, “the emotional drama needs the desemanticized language of music, its evocation of the ‘ineffable,’ its tones and registers” (60). In her analysis of women’s film in the 1940s, Mary Ann Doane went even further: “Because emotion is the realm in which the visible is insufficient as a guarantee, the supplementary meaning proffered by music is absolutely necessary” (85). In Yue opera plays, the type of communication that music represents is essential.
The chief characteristic of Yue opera musical repertory is the prevalence of sad melodies, or “crying tunes.” It was no coincidence that the maturation process of Yue opera was accompanied by the creation of one of the genre’s principle tunes, a type of crying tune called chidiao. The chidiao tune came to existence at an impromptu moment, when Yuan Xuefen performed “Crying at the Head,” an aria from Xiang Fei, on stage in November 1943.
Xiang Fei is the tale about the Fragrant Concubine in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), who is so named for the scent her body naturally produces. She is taken away to Beijing as an Imperial Consort of the Qianlong Emperor. She arms herself with daggers against the advances of the Emperor, because she would rather die than give up on her loyalty to her husband, whom she assumes to be still alive. One day, a solider brings the head of her late husband on a plate, which prompts her to sing the following aria in the heart-wrenching mourning scene:
Upon learning of the death of my husband,
I am not sure whether to believe it or not.
…
Clenching my teeth, I tear off the cloth.
My poorest husband!
Grief-stricken, I cannot help but cry.
I once hoped we would run away together.
I did not foresee your untimely death.
Our love is ephemeral as a spring dream. (qtd. in Qian 746-747)
Here again Moretti’s agnition structure is on full display when Xiang Fei’s belief that her husband is alive comes in conflict with the audience’s knowledge otherwise. When Xiang Fei lifts the cloth that covers the head, the discrepancy between hers and the audience’s point of view is reconciled. At this point, tension is released and Xiang Fei, as well as the audience, is overwhelmed with sorrow. Feeling the inadequacy of traditional sigong tunes to represent the intensity of Xiang Fei’s emotions, Yuan Xuefen invented a new melody impromptu on stage: the chidiao tune. In the previously sung sigong tune, the instrument’s lower string is tuned to the sixth scale degree and the upper string to the third scale degree above it. In chidiao, by contrast, the instrument’s lower string is tuned to the fifth scale degree and the upper string to the second scale degree above it. Changes also happen to the rhythmic mode: the tempo slows down from the original fast 1/4 meter to a medium 2/4 meter or a slow 4/4 meter. The dominant use of the flattened 7ths, combined with slide down and vibrato, helps giving full expression to the extremes of Xiang Fei’s grief and loss. Unlike the sigong tune, which is lively, brisk and spirited and typically fits a bright and positive mood, the chidiao melody is derived from Beijing opera’s erhuang music, which is pensive, sad, and sentimental in feeling. As chidiao’s dramatic quality is predominantly associated with a darker, heavier mood, tales of sorrow (especially the sorrow of unfulfilled love) and feeling of loss are best expressed in the newly invented musical style.[4]