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“Farewell, My Concubine” (霸王别姬) is one of the classic works from the Mei Lanfang School of Chinese opera, and holds an unassailable position in the history of Beijing Opera. In recent years, contemporary composers have used Beijing opera as a theme to create a number of widely acclaimed works, such as Shang Jingya’s Beijing Opera and Chinese zither (guzheng) piece “Farewell, My Concubine” which premiered in 2016. It featured both the musical vocabulary of classical guzheng and a Beijing opera dan role performed on the same stage. In this work, the original aria and its melody were transplanted, the musical source material was re-created, and original musical passages were created.
Also, acclaimed composer Guan Xia’s symphony “Fantasia: Farewell, My Concubine for Guzheng, Recorder, Soprano, and Orchestra” premiered in 2006. The work combined a Western composition structure with an Asian narrative structure, a phenomenon of cross-cultural musical creation. This paper’s research results show that both the above works used a process of capturing, reorganizing and distilling from the original material. This kind of editing and enriching is in line with the original intentions of Montage theory, making these two “Farewells” akin to a distilled “musical concentrate”.
Through Shang Jingya’s “Farewell, My Concubine” and Guan Xia’s fantasia “Farewell, My Concubine”, we can observe guzheng music’s flexibility and natural ease in blending, as it fuses not only Oriental, Western and opera music cultures, but also holds a conversation on equal footing with Beijing Opera. The performing arts exist in the present, but they can make history reappear in front of us. These two works, both titled “Farewell, My Concubine”, gave the classic work a new interpretation, displaying a meaningful cross-domain fusion of guzheng music and Beijing Opera. Against the background of our current age, full of rich possibilities and flourishing diversity, these works have written a new page and given a new style to the music of the guzheng.
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