The Butterfly Lovers Is, Above All, Chinese Music

The Butterfly Lovers Is, Above All, Chinese Music

On 18 July, the composer Chen Gang died at the age of ninety-one. In the days that followed, many tributes and recollections appeared online. For many Chinese listeners, his name immediately brings to mind the violin concerto The Butterfly Lovers. Over several generations, the work has travelled far beyond conservatories and concert halls. It has become part of childhoods, homes, and the private memory of ordinary life.

Among the tributes, I watched a video made by a well-known violinist and violin maker who has lived and worked in the West for many years. He spoke warmly of an encounter with Chen Gang and of his respect for him. He also offered a demanding assessment of The Butterfly Lovers. In essence, he said that the work is beautiful, moving, and extraordinarily successful, but that by the standards of the mainstream Western violin concerto it is not a work of especially high structural or technical complexity. He placed it closer to a popular idiom centred on memorable melody.

Given the timing, many listeners found this uncomfortable. Some heard it as a slight against a work beloved by Chinese people, delivered during a period of mourning. My own response was more complicated. The violinist repeatedly called Chen Gang “Teacher Chen Gang”, dressed in dark clothes for the recording, and made a visible effort to show respect. I did not take him to be denying either Chen Gang’s stature or the value of the concerto.

The difficulty, I think, was that he used a very particular Western set of criteria without fully explaining its assumptions or its limits. It is easy, then, to hear “this does not meet some of the expectations of a mainstream Western concerto” as “this is artistically inferior”. Those are very different claims.

I do not want to enter that argument. I only want to leave a record of my own relationship with this work, and of an understanding that has gradually formed over the years. For me, the importance of The Butterfly Lovers does not depend on whether it outranks any Western concerto. It lies in the fact that it is, above all, Chinese music — music that Chinese listeners can understand from within.

My relationship with it began so early that I can scarcely identify a beginning. I had heard it by the age of five or six. At that time, I knew little of the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, and I did not know, or care, whether there were words attached to it. Even now, I have no desire to look for lyrics. To me, it has never been a song that needs verbal explanation. It has always been a complete piece of music.

After hearing it so often, I could hum the whole work from beginning to end. I may not have reproduced every note at the correct pitch, but I would immediately notice if someone sang a phrase incorrectly. I knew not only the solo line, but the orchestral pulse, the percussion gestures that recall gongs and drums, and the moment when a background voice enters. Later, listening to recordings, I could even hear fine differences between the interpretations of Yu Lina and Sheng Zhongguo.

This familiarity did not come only from deliberate listening. It also came from a particular scene in childhood. We lived in single-storey housing, and across the road was a neighbour surnamed Yang who was an early enthusiast for sound equipment. In the 1970s, it was still unusual for a household to play music loudly and well enough for it to carry through a neighbourhood. When he put music on, people nearby could hear it.

When The Butterfly Lovers began to play, the air seemed to change. Children came outside, danced, played, and carried on with whatever they had been doing. What we were playing had nothing to do with the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, yet the music quietly joined the people around us to that particular stretch of time. It asked no one to sit down and listen seriously. It asked no one to understand an ancient love story. It simply flowed through the yard, the road, and the evening air, and gradually became part of life.

Years later, when people remember childhood toys, courtyards, or old neighbours, they often remember the music that repeatedly accompanied them. Not because the story in the music matched their own lives, but because it became the atmosphere in which life was lived. The legend of Liang and Zhu had no direct connection with children playing outside, but its melody became entwined with my childhood and adolescence. It was never merely a famous work I had heard once. It became part of my own auditory memory.

That is why I care about what the violinist’s criticism gets right, and what it leaves out.

From the perspective of the modern Western violin concerto, his response is not without basis. In concertos by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and many twentieth-century composers, there is often a powerful sense of harmonic movement, modulation, and structural tension. A phrase does not merely sing forward; harmony continually alters its meaning. Tension, suspension, turning, and resolution create an expectation of time. The soloist and orchestra may sound as though they are conversing, debating, or even confronting one another.

A listener formed by that tradition may genuinely feel that The Butterfly Lovers lacks a familiar kind of propulsion. The harmonic and modulatory logic may seem less dense. Some melodies may appear to linger. The soloist and orchestra may not seem to oppose each other with the same force. What the listener hears is a beautiful melody unfolding, but not always the irresistible structural momentum expected from a Western concerto.

Yet this is more a difference in listening habits than a flaw in the work.

The Butterfly Lovers certainly uses a Western orchestra, the concerto format, and a good deal of harmony. It also has clear dramatic climaxes. But harmony mainly supports the melody, colours the feeling, and enlarges the scene. It is not the work’s principal engine of meaning. The piece moves through the breathing of the melody itself, the turns of operatic vocal line, the accumulation of tempo and intensity, the rise of register, changes of orchestral colour, and the emotional turns of the story. It does not repeatedly pose a harmonic problem and compel itself to solve it, as a typical Western concerto often does. It is closer to a character in Chinese opera: singing, telling, and gradually carrying feeling into a deeper place.

In Chinese traditional music, tension is not primarily contained in functional harmony. It is often found in the way a melody circles and pauses; in the way a note is prolonged, bent, coloured, or allowed to slide; and in the ebb and flow of rhythm, timbre, and feeling. It is also inaccurate to say that pentatonic music cannot fit within twelve-tone equal temperament. The familiar five degrees — gong, shang, jue, zhi, and yu — can all be represented by corresponding tempered pitches. What fixed pitch cannot fully reproduce is the direction of a note, its inflection, ornament, vibrato, and small shifts of intonation.

The violin is a Western instrument, but it is also capable of slides, vibrato, grace notes, and a flexible bowing language. It can therefore carry something of the voice-like expression of the erhu or Chinese opera. This is why I have always felt that the overall musical language of The Butterfly Lovers is fundamentally Chinese. It is not a Chinese tune placed inside a Western concerto and then judged as though it were meant to be Tchaikovsky.

The concerto and the orchestra function here more as a vessel that allows the sound to expand, and as a technical means of enlarging scale and drama. What actually flows within that vessel is Yue opera, Jiangnan folk music, Chinese melodic line, and an emotional rhythm familiar to Chinese listeners. The solo violin is not chiefly a Western virtuoso instrument in this work. It becomes a voice capable of singing, sighing, and suggesting the dramatic presence of opera.

For this reason, the use of Western instruments does not make The Butterfly Lovers less Chinese. It is not identical to Yue opera, silk-and-bamboo ensemble music, or an erhu solo. The freer intonation, improvisation, and delicate breathing of smaller traditional ensembles inevitably become more fixed in a large orchestral structure. But that is a creative transformation, not a loss of cultural identity. The work borrows Western technique without surrendering the subjectivity of Chinese music.

This may also explain why many Chinese listeners resist the claim that the work is merely “popular music”. Many people have not had formal musical training and may reduce music to songs, and songs further to lyrics. At a karaoke gathering, someone may sing with limited skill and still feel that a line of words tells their own story. That is a real and understandable part of popular musical life.

But The Butterfly Lovers moves people in a different way. It does not depend on lyrics to tell its story. Many listeners, like me, knew it first as music and cared little for words. Its force comes from the emotional structure made by melody, timbre, rhythm, and memory. Its accessibility does not make it shallow. To be immediately close to listeners without specialist training, while remaining open to repeated interpretation by soloists and orchestras over many decades, is itself a rare artistic achievement.

I also do not think the overseas violinist needs to be treated as an enemy. His response can help us see more clearly where the work stands. Within the internal tradition of the Western concerto, The Butterfly Lovers does not fully conform to expectations built around harmonic development, modulation, and structural opposition. But to call it “lower in level” on that basis risks treating the standard of one particular tradition as a universal measure.

A more accurate description would be that The Butterfly Lovers is a modern Chinese work whose primary language is Chinese music, using the concerto form to enlarge its expressive range. It does not need to compete for a place within the internal hierarchy of Western concertos in order to deserve serious attention.

There has also long been discussion about the authorship and credit of the work. The standard attribution is “He Zhanhao and Chen Gang”, with He’s name first. The most reliable accounts show a clear background of collaboration: He brought Yue opera experience, the original conception, and the melodic source; Chen contributed to the structural, harmonic, and orchestral demands of a large concerto; and figures including Ding Zhiruo and Yu Lina also made important contributions through early planning, try-outs, revision, or particular musical passages. It is neither possible nor necessary now to assign each person a precise percentage.

Credit and authorship matter, and should be described as carefully as possible. But I do not want to turn the history into a simple story of one person taking another’s achievement. The Butterfly Lovers emerged from a particular period and a particular way of working together. No participant’s contribution should be erased, and the work itself should not be obscured by endless retrospective disputes over ownership.

Chen Gang has now gone, their collaboration, their differences, and the later debates around them will gradually become material for music history. What The Butterfly Lovers has left behind will endure longer than those materials. I feel fortunate that such an outstanding work, so deeply Chinese in its musical being, has accompanied me through several decades of life.

It first came to me from a neighbour’s sound system across the road in childhood. Since then, it has returned in different recordings and at different stages of life. Each time I hear it again, I hear more than the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. I hear the air of that earlier time, people who have long since gone, and part of my own path into the present.

I am grateful to He Zhanhao and Chen Gang for leaving such a work behind. In the sound of a violin and an orchestra, it still allows many of us to hear the breathing of Chinese music itself.

Listening reference

The Sheng Zhongguo performance mentioned in this essay can be heard on YouTube: The Butterfly Lovers performed by Sheng Zhongguo and Takako Nishizaki. The video, music, and sound-recording rights remain with their respective rightsholders. This page provides an external link only; it does not reproduce the recording or offer a download.

Sources

• Xinhua on Chen Gang’s death and the making of The Butterfly Lovers
• He Zhanhao’s recollection of the work’s creation
• Shanghai Conservatory of Music on the violin-nationalisation experiment group