The reform of traditional art was started after the
founding of the PRC. These reforms also included the Chinese opera.
Many new operas with contemporary and revolutionary themes were
created, but not enough to Mao's liking. In the early 1960s, he
complained that China's stage was still dominated by "emperors, kings,
general, chancellors, literati and beauties", instead of the
proletarian heroic models from worker, peasant or soldier stock who
could teach and serve the broad masses of the people.
Mao's demands for a new revolutionary national art enabled his wife, Jiang Qing, to start her crusade to
dominate the arts world. In 1963, she started with the revision of a number of Beijing Operas on contemporary themes, Hongdengji
(The Story of the Red Lamp) and Shajiabang (Shajia village). She continued with
Zhiqu weihushan (Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy) and Qixi baihutuan
(Raid on the White Tiger Regiment). In the Summer of 1964, these works
were performed for the first time at an Opera Festival in Shanghai and
by then already were called 'model works', yangbanxi. In the course of the Cultural Revolution, they became to be considered as part
of the 'New Socialist Things' that resulted from the movement.
The Festival also exposed her to a number of
performances that appealed to her and that she subsequently started
revising in 1964-1965. These included Haigang (On the Dock) and a ballet, Hongse niangzi jun (The Red Detachment of Women). In 1965, she reworked Shaijiabang into a symphony; a
year later, she turned her attention to another ballet, Baimao nü (The White-haired Girl), based on a yangge
(a type of harvest dance) composed in 1944. A second group of nine
model works was codified in 1973, but they were not as popular as the
earlier eight.
The model works were everywhere. They were broadcast
over the radio, made into movies, reproduced on posters and staged all
over the country, often reworked for local opera traditions. No matter
their form, they had to be identical: model opera scores and production
guides were distributed in order to ensure that each performance was
the same.
In 1966, Jiang's cooperation with Lin Biao
started at the Forum on Literature and Art for the Armed Forces. This
provided her with a platform for advocating her model works. The
educational effects that the operas were supposed to have owed much to
their depiction of the heroes and villains. The heroes had to be gao (高，lofty), da (大，glorious) and quan (全，complete), while the villains had to be base, shabby, ugly and stupid. These effects
were further strengthened by the publication of many
posters reproducing key scenes from the plays.
Click here 
for some yangbanxi arias
Interestingly, Jiang's model works are still very
much alive today, if only because the entire population alive during
the Cutural Revolution did not hear or see anything else. Songbooks and
VCDs or DVDs of some of the model
operas are readily available and quite popular with consumers. This is
mostly the case with the operas that are set before 1949, when the
enemies were the landlords, the Japanese invaders and the Guomindang.
Their
songs are often sung in karaoke bars and at parties. Their enjoyment is
devoid of political meaning, nor is there any lingering negative
association with days gone past. Rather, they elicit pleasure and
nostalgia.
Sources:
Guo Jian, Yongyi Song & Yuan Zhou, Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Lanham, etc.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006)
Kwok-sing Li (editor) & Mary Lok (translator), A Glossary of Political Terms of the People's Republic of China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press 1995)
Lu Xing, Rethoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution—The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture and Communication (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004)
Sheila Melvin & Jindong Cai, "Nostalgia for the Fruits of Chaos in Chinese Model Operas", The New York Times on the Web, 29 October 2000
Barbara Mittler, "To be or not to be—Making and Unmaking the yangbanxi (manuscript in progress)
Roxane Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch'ing (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977)
s.r.landsberger@let.leidenuniv.nl
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