Chinese Opera: Images and Stories

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

This beautiful book illuminates an art form that, especially in its
hundreds of regional varieties, is almost unknown in the West. The
striking photographs by Wang-Ngai Siu, a Hong Kong lawyer who is also an
internationally recognized photographer, help bring Chinese opera to
life.

Siu’s images blend the singing, speech, acrobatics, mime, and dance
that constitute Chinese opera. Between 1986 and 1993, when there was an
annual Chinese regional opera festival in Hong Kong, Siu took more than
30,000 color photographs of performers in action. Each of the pictures
selected for this book captures the inspiration of the dramatic moment,
as well as the costumes and staging of the various regional styles.

Peter Lovrick provides entertaining summaries of the opera’s stories,
many of which are steeped in history, myth, legend, and folklore. He
also shares his insights into the various elements of the Chinese
dramatic tradition. The book’s organization is intended to reflect the
Chinese social order, which includes divine beings, emperors, generals,
common folk, outlaws, and ghosts.

A more detailed discussion of the music, such as the Chinese approach
to operatic forms, would have been welcome, since this aspect poses by
far the biggest challenge for Western audiences. In recent years, opera
houses have been able to bridge the language barrier by providing
simultaneous translations, but the gap in the musical aesthetic between
cultures remains. Nevertheless, Chinese Opera is an excellent
introduction that will be appreciated by students of Asian studies and
theatre.