Customer Reviews

Chinese Opera: Images and Stories

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This is an articulate and visually stunning book on Chinese Opera. Better pictorial research on the costumes, make-up and architype body poses is not available in English speaking countries. This is a must have research book for those in film and theatre.

This is an extraordinary book filled with pictures and information about every facet of Chinese Opera. It not only describes the operas and the regions from whence they originated, but also provides details such as the musical instruments used, and descriptions of the various the role types. Everything is illustrated, with color pictures on almost every page. The book certainly exceeded my expectations.

If you're looking for a gorgeous book on the fascinating world of chinese opera, this is it. Has quite a good text featuring stories of the more popular operas. Furthermore, discusses regional variations, history and development and modern developments in the art.

In the mid-1980s, the Hong Kong photographer Siu Wang-Ngai began taking pictures of Chinese opera troupes visiting her city. Over time, she collected hundreds of excellent photographs representing a wide variety of regional traditions. CHINESE OPERA: Images and Stories, bringing together Siu Wang-Ngai's work with an English text by Peter Lovrick, seeks to introduce this beautiful but little known art form to Western readers.

The introductory material of CHINESE OPERA: Images and Stories charts the development of the form, its regional elaborations, and its conventions. What I found especially enlightening here was the discussion of symbolism in Chinese opera's exceedingly sparse set design. Who would have thought that a black flag on the stage means that there is a great wind? The bulk of the book is synopses of notable operas accompanied by Siu Wang-Ngai's photographs of their Hong Kong productions. The operas are organized according to such catagories as "Heavenly Beings", "Emperors and their Ladies", "Scholars and Officials", and so forth. I see only two failings in the work. The first is that, although details of instrumentation are numerous, Siu Wang-Ngai and Lovrick nowhere talk about the theory behind Chinese music itself. Because the number one complaint by Westerners (and Chinese young people) about Chinese opera is that its vocals sound grating and its instrument playing often random, the authors could have explained the completely reasonable basis of the music. My second complaint is that the book leaves out "The Red Lantern" and other prominent operas of the Cultural Revolution. While rejecting most of Chinese opera's traditions for the sake of Mao's political goals, these operas are nonetheless part of that living tradition, and tend to be very frequently performed in China even today. Nonetheless, this is a lovely book, and as there's very little material of this quality in English, I do recommend this to fans of Chinese opera.

If after reading this book you want to see a Chinese opera on DVD, there's limited choice. Plenty of DVDs are produced in China, but of course they mainly lack English texts. A happy exception, and one that proved my own introduction to the genre, is The Peony Pavilion in its "Young Lovers Edition" written by Kenneth Pai (Pai Hsien-yung). This production sought to not simply preserve Kunqu opera, but further develop it as a living artform, and the performers are young people guided by aging masters. Sound and video quality are excellent, the English subtitles are the fine translation of an English-speaking scholar, and there's good documentary material included.