Conference Agenda

Maria Callas (1923-77) built her vocal reputation on impeccable artistry, channeling a ferocious, almost monstrous inner passion while rigorously refusing sentimentality in singing and interviews. Have we thought about the paradox? To unpack it, this talk turns to tropes of suffering and toughness that have marked Greek consciousness and social practice throughout the modern era (Herzfeld, Beaton). Little-known evidence comes into play: 1) a surprising archive of light operatic and popular song that Callas performed before and especially during her years in Greece (1937-45) and 2) the quasi-underground urban repertory of rebetiko that she heard then and much later collected on Greek holidays (Savvakis, Vassilikos).

Both archives entwine with Callas’s hybrid identity, the result of an early childhood spent in America followed by teen years in war-torn Athens. Filled with hardships and antagonisms, familial and professional, Callas’s Athens experience involved pitched culture battles, epitomized by her eventually having to sing popular songs and light opera in tavernas (e.g. Yradier’s “La Paloma,” sung in Greek). There she encountered rough-and-tumble occupying soldiers (Petsalis-Diomidis) whose behavior contrasted sharply with the upwardly-mobile environment of her daily opera studies. I theorize the difference in terms of Greekness. Roughly speaking, if Callas’s taverna experiences exposed her to the lower-brow “Romeic” side of Greece (immediate, everyday, Byzantine), her operatic ones fed her high-brow “Hellenic” side (European, classicizing) (Herzfeld). The Romeic—cathected to her father with whom she listened to rebetiko in America—formed the soundtrack of post-Metaxas (post-1941) wartime Greece. Its themes of suffering, linked to rebetiko’s origins in the 1922 Greek genocide and exile from Turkey, never deserted her. And by the 1950s-70s, a rebetiko revival had elevated the genre’s status (Maliaras, Tragaki).

What has Callas’s rebetiko to do with her operatic sensibilities? The iconic war/postwar rebetis Vassilis Tsitsanis, who partnered with the gritty Romeic vocalist Sotiria Bellou, preoccupied Callas by 1976. Indeed her penchants align with those of a whole generation of unsentimental women creatives contemporaneous with her—Didion, Sontag, Arendt, Weil, Arbus, McCarthy—for whom, as Deborah Nelson shows in Tough Enough, toughness was both a moral posture and an aesthetic one that faced down pain and suffering.

The climax of the Jingju (Beijing opera) entitled Yuzhou feng (Cosmic Blade) features a familiar operatic convention: Zhao Yanrong, a young widow, feigns madness before her father (a corrupt and ambitious court official) in order to avoid being forced to become the emperor’s concubine. This was apparently Mei Lanfang’s favorite role because it demanded that he display multiple emotions in close succession—he must show Zhao’s true feelings, create the appearance of genuine insanity for her father,, while also expressing the “incommunicable suffering” in her inner psyche. Lanfang’s observations about multilayered expression recall descriptions of Anna Renzi’s renowned performance in Francesco Sacrati and Giulio Strozzi’s La finta pazza (Venice, 1641), where Deidamia's feigned madness was intended to keep her lover Achilles from fighting in the Trojan War.

While operatic mad scenes typically push rhetorical boundaries, exposing the musical or gestural limits in any given style, feigned madness requires the protagonist to both dissimulate and perform dissimulation. Claudio Monteverdi’s novel aesthetics of feigned madness, described in a famous series of letters, challenged the fundamental premise of the new genre, envisioning an innovative form of musical mimesis in which words—rather than being the mistress of the music— were severed from semantics and affect. The convention is no less subversive in Yuzhou feng, where Lanfang’s rendition of Zhao's feigned mad scenes drastically distorts the highly controlled musical and dramatic conventions that are central to the performance of dan roles in Beijing Opera.

After a brief consideration of feigned madness in early modern western theater and opera, my paper provides a close reading of Lanfang’s virtuosic interpretation of Zhao’s feigned madness as captured in a 1956 film of the opera. I consider both the visual manifestations of the pretense (self-mutilation, auditory hallucinations, and erotomania) and the musical markers of insanity (excessive ornamentation, registral extremes, melodic distortions), which illuminate the norms of the genre, especially with regard to female deportment. I then touch on the treatment of the convention in The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan (2011), an adaption of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by the Shanghai Jingju Theatre. I conclude with a meditation on the potential of cross-cultural studies in opera to illuminate shared aesthetic concerns that are masked by stylistic, linguistic, and sonic differences. In the end, there is a method to madness.

2023 was the 100 anniversary of Yue Opera, China’s National Intangible Cultural Heritage popular in the Shanghai area. The 1953 Yue opera film The Butterfly Lovers is the first colored film produced in China and became the emblem of the nation’s cultural heritage for decades. While nowadays the audience of Yue opera views the 1953 film as a classic from the heyday of this opera genre, the music of the opera-film is composed in the ediom of Western classsical music compared to Chinese opera in the early twentieth century. The state commissioned a Western-style conservatory-trained composer, Ruzeng Liu, as an “educated” individual artist to “elevate the peasants’ taste," which altered the fundamental modes of Chinese opera production and knowledge transmission: improvisation among group musicians and master-student tutelage.

This paper aims to challenge the prevalent present-day notion of canonizing The Butterfly Lovers opera-film as an authentic classic piece of Yue opera. By comparative musical analysis of this opera-film and earlier recordings of The Butterfly Lovers, I argue that the opera-film marks a significant departure from traditional Chinese opera production due to its Westernized instrumentation and orchestration, single-authored composition without melodic improvisation, and composition focusing on chordal progression. This is the direct result of Yue Opera Reform in the 1940s initiated by Xuefen Yuan, the main performer of this opera-film. To secure its audience in the kaleidoscopic music scene of modern Shanghai, Yuan advocated that Yue opera performers should actively learn from its competing genres: other Chinese opera genres, Western classical and popular music, and even Hollywood films. Therefore, the composition of The Butterfly Lovers is rooted in the eclectic quality of Yue Opera after the Reform. Such quality also makes Yue Opera the perfect candidate for this opera-film project to serve the new nation’s goal to modernize its cultural heritage and prove the competence of its culture as compatible with those of Western nations on the global stage during the Cold War. Lastly, I will discuss how collective memory and invented tradition that resulted in the canonization of such a piece as the emblem of Chinese cultural heritage today