An Exploration Of The Lyrics Of Hunan Huagu Opera

Hunan Huagu Opera as a local opera is widely spread in many places in Hunan Province. There are very few researches on the Huagu Opera and most of them focus on the music and the singers'performance rather than the lyrics itself. The paper explores the lyrics of Hunan Huagu Opera by making use of linguistic theories with a view to filling up the gap of the former researches.Hunan Huagu Opera originates from regional folk music. After three-stage development, it has become a popular local opera in Hunan Province. To begin with, the paper discusses individuality, performability, contemporary quality and popularization of the lyrics of Hunan Huagu Opera. Moreover, it analyzes the features of the lyrics of the Opera from the perspectives of phonetics, vocabulary and sentences and thereby concludes: 1. Musical beauty can be extensively found in mostly rhymed singing parts, which is achieved by a harmony between the pronunciation of Hunan dialects and the melody of the Huagu Opera; 2. Large frequency of vocabulary with feelings and images, dialects, conversational and archaism words is witnessed, the employment of which intends to adapt to the characters of opera and the content and style of the lyrics. 3. Basic sentences and their variations, together with general principles of variations, are revealed from the analysis of the singing parts, and inter-sentential relations demonstrate that in the opera, couplets and parallel structures are often used to keep the orderliness. Lastly, this paper analyzes the features of the lyrics of Hunan Huagu Opera roundly and provides a few references for the writing and appreciation of the lyrics of the opera, which might be helpful in the protection of local opera as a part of the culture.