GARDENS AND KUNQU OPERA: BEAUTY'S TOUR DE FORCE
Written on a mid-summer day, 1981
It was one of the dog days in the Jiangnan area. Cicadas inside of the courtyard kept chirping from morning till night, and joining in the clamour was a neighbor's blaring cassette recorder. Even though the potted orchid in my small home was at its aromatic and luxuriant best, it was a typical case of "trees wanting to be quiet, but the wind refusing to quit howling." In helplessness, I could not but "pit poison against poison." Driven by my weakness for Kunqu Opera as a "diehard literatus," I flipped on my turntable, and the air was instantly filled with the notes of such lines in The Peony Pavilion ("The Interrupted Dream"),
The spring a rippling thread of gossamer gleaming sinuous in the sun borne idly across the court…. Streaking the dawn, close-curled at dusk, rosy clouds frame emerald pavilion; fine threads of rain, petals borne on breeze, gilded pleasure boat in waves of mist.
The melodious music and bewitching lyrics spirited my heart from the enchantment of Kunqu Opera to the beauty of a garden in no time. In this half-day piece of leisure snatched from my floating life, I somehow found joy by revelling for a while in the comfort of my small world.
The Chinese garden reached maturity during the Ming and the Qing. Especially after Kunqu Opera became all the rage in the Jiangnan area by the mid-Ming, an inseparable relationship arose between the garden and the opera. Not only the titles of some operas were associated with gardens, but their settings and those gardens' conceptions became interdependent as well, so much so that at times the setting of a certain opera became the conception of a garden, and vice versa, albeit in a different mode of expression. The preeminent dramatist Li Yu (1611-1680), for example, was a landscape gardener himself. The first thing a scholar official does when making a garden is to build a parlor in it, which is water-bound in most cases, but oftentimes a waterside belvedere is added as well.
Every parlor or waterside belvedere, such as the Lotus Root Fragrance Gazebo in the Garden of Brotherly Indulgence and the Hat-Ribbon Washing Belvedere in the Master-of-Fishnets Garden in Suzhou, is also a venue for appreciating operas. With a gentle breeze wafting into such a building on the water, the audience would tilt their heads while luxuriating in the melody of singing to the accompaniment of pipe-wind music drifting in from the outside world. Even in the heat waves of a high-summer day it would be divine to sing a Kunqu aria or two without accompaniment with lush green lotus leaves nodding in front of the building. Such a captivating scene never fails to bring old memories back to mind.
The opera-singing evening parties thrown by Yu Mingheng (1900-1990) and other venerable professors at the waterside I-shaped Parlor of Tsinghua University are still the talk of the town today. At the time, the renowned Professor Zhu Ziqing (1898-1948)1 was also teaching at Tsinghua. Quite a few literary works of these two professors are somewhat related to these parties.
The western section of the Humble Administrator's Garden, known as Additional Garden from 1892 onwards, is the site of the famous Hall of Thirty-Six Pairs of Mandarin Ducks. The hall's parlor features a paraboloid roof with its truss so well concealed that the entire structure becomes both visually pleasing and acoustically effective. It turns out that this parlor was a contribution of the garden's owner Zhang Lüqian (1838-1915), who furnished the garden together with Gu Yun (1835-1896), a renowned painter who was also a Kunqu Opera enthusiast. This was also where Yu Zhenfei (1902-1993) spent his childhood with his father Yu Zonghai (1847-1930) as a private tutor with the Zhangs. Whenever I related these anecdotes to Yu, he would wax affectionate and tell me vivid tales about the years he had spent in that garden.
In days of yore, the Chinese garden was an integral part of people's sentiments and everyday life, and Kunqu Opera was instrumental in enriching the garden's charms. The scenery of the garden is resonant with the enchanting singing of the opera in both character and appeal. When the movie Suzhou Gardens was in the making a few years ago, and when the Americans arrived to shoot the movie Suzhou two years ago, both crews accepted my suggestion that some Kunqu tunes be used as background music, and the result was a success. Because the well hammered-out water-mill tune of Kunqu Opera is most appropriate for singing and performing at small functions for its elaborate dancing techniques, accurate pronunciations, elegant lyrics, and lilting syllables, the water-bound chamber or hall inside a garden become its best venues. Unlike those tunes that have to be sung at the top of one's voice on rugged rural opera stages, the water-mill tune is as captivatingly subtle and graceful as the sparse but state-of-the-art structures of a garden. One of the lyrics in The Peony Pavilion ("The Interrupted Dream") puts it this way,
Unwearying joy—how should we break its spell even by visits each in turn to the Twelve Towers of Fairyland?
What this line captures is exactly the spirit of the Chinese garden. The inauguration on June 18, 1980, of the Astor Court, a replica of Suzhou's Late-Spring Peony Lodge, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, touched off a wave of Chinese garden-insanity worldwide. By the same token, I surmise Kunqu-insanity will come about before long.
The beauty of Kunqu Opera is not limited to performing art. With its literary librettos, tones, pronunciations, tonality, music and its rhythms and percussions having been thrashed out and refined repeatedly for centuries, it is a veritable repository of Chinese culture. I remember lecturing on the Chinese garden to a Kunqu Opera class at the Shanghai Theater Academy on a pre-1966 day. It sounds like a joke, but the man who invited me was the academy's president, the far-sighted Yu Zhenfei, himself a Kunqu Opera superstar known for his roles in such operas as "The Interrupted Dream." If an opera performer has the vistas of a Chinese garden in his mind's eye, his action will no longer be "water without a source" or "a tree without roots," and his performance will be passionate, lively and lifelike. The reason why Mei Lanfang (1894-1961)2, Yu Zhenfei and others could be idolized as opera gurus of their time is because of their sublime cultivation in many cultural fields aside from theater. Some garden visitors today are abandoned to beer and skittles and totally ignorant of the aesthetics of the garden's artistic conception—isn't it a great pity?
The beauty of the Chinese garden boils down to a single word, elegance, that is, elegance in demeanour, interest, mood, lifestyle, energy, and what not. A high-calibre Kunqu Opera libretto must be scholastic, and being scholastic is essentially the same as being elegant, for culture must be embodied in such a work, be it an opera or a garden. In the Chinese garden the scenery runs up and down as it turns this way and that, disappears at one moment and reappears at another, now stops the visitor on his track for in-situ viewing, now pushes him along for some in-motion viewing, but all the time it keeps him engrossed. The leisure thus generated on the tour evokes a poem or a painting that cannot be digested by those who come in a hurry, but is reserved only for those willing to take their time and ruminate what meets their eyes as they sit down or walk along. Kunqu Opera is presented for the same purpose, with each of its songs refrained three times and ended with a lingering effect on the theatergoer; far from the disco's pulsating beats, it is gentle and graceful in tonality and rhythm. The reason why young people nowadays dislike Kunqu Opera is manifold. For one thing, their understanding of it is impeded by their lack of cultural edification; for another, in a typical case of "highbrow music having few followings," this opera's melodic music contravenes, say, the rush of disco music. This has nothing to do with the aesthetics of Kunqu Opera; rather, it is like some children who do not like eating olives because they do not know how to savor their taste. Instead of downgrading a sublime form of art to cater to a large audience, we are duty-bound to promote education in aesthetics and help the younger generation improve their cultural attainment.
As I bring this short essay to an end, the melody of the lyrics of the Kunqu Opera The Story of the Jade Hairpin ("Heart-Stirring Lute") seems to have drifted into my ears once more:
Heavy are shadows of flowers multilayered upon a
white-washed wall;
Curtains lift on remnant lotuses swaying in wind
from a waterside hall.
The weather is still smothering, but my vision is graced with the picture-perfect views of the Chinese garden.