Huangmei Opera

Huangmei opera (Huangmei Xi) is a regional Chinese opera form originating in the Huangmei region of Hubei and Anhui provinces. It is musically lighter than Peking or Cantonese opera — closer to folk song than to declamatory aria — and famously melodic, with tunes that have crossed over into Chinese popular music. Vocals are sung in chest voice (not falsetto), in a register and timbre close to natural speech; instrumental accompaniment uses the small two-stringed gaohu fiddle and the bansi clapper rather than a large percussion battery. Stories favor rural romance and folk legend, with the female sheng-dan lead pair driving most plots. Tempos move briskly and pieces are shorter than in the major operatic traditions.

Huangmei grew from folk tea-picking songs (caicha xi) of the Yangtze River basin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, codified as a stage form in Anhui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1955 Shanghai Film Studio film 'Tianxian Pei' ('Marriage of the Fairy Princess'), starring Yan Fengying and Wang Shaofang, made huangmei opera internationally visible across the Chinese-speaking world and remains the form's most beloved adaptation. Yan Fengying (1930-1968) was huangmei opera's defining twentieth-century star, and her recordings still anchor the repertoire. The form was banned during the Cultural Revolution and returned in the late 1970s.

The melodies are the form's calling card — many huangmei tunes are immediately singable and have entered Chinese pop covers and karaoke. The female lead's vocal style sits low and warm, not high and piercing like Peking opera; the conversational quality between sheng and dan is at the heart of most scenes. The gaohu fiddle traces the vocal line in unison or close shadowing.

The 1955 film of 'Tianxian Pei' (also released internationally as 'A Pair of Fairies') with Yan Fengying is the standard entry. Several of its songs ('Fuqi Shuangshuang Ba Jia Huan,' 'Husband and Wife Returning Home Together') have become standalone hits across Chinese pop history.

Yan Fengying died at age 38 in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution under contested circumstances. Her body of recorded work and films from 1953-1965 is correspondingly small, which has made every surviving recording and frame of footage a treasured Chinese cultural artifact.