Research On Hunan Flower-drum Opera

Flower-drum opera is the most popular play in Hunan province. It is known as the following six varieties: Changsha flower-drum opera, Yueyang flower-drum opera, Hengyang flower-drum opera, Lingling flower-drum opera, Changde flower-drum opera and Shaoyang flower-drum opera, which are distinguished by the language applied separately from different local languages. As they share the similar style, material sources, music tone and form of performance, they are all called Hunan flower-drum opera. Hunan Flower-drum opera, usually performed by two or three performers, is developed from the ground opera, which is performed on the ground rather than a stage, just as its name implies.According to different performing forms, makeup of performers, lists of plays and tones in various periods, the theatrical troupe of flower-drum opera has experienced three historical developing periods as follows: the junior one (a small, scantily-equipped traveling theatrical troupe giving shows in villages and small towns), the senior one (a theatrical troupe giving shows of both Hunan opera and flower-drum opera) and the professional one.There are three reasons why Hunan flower-drum opera sprout up and developed rapidly in mid-Qing Dynasty: Firstly, the steady and unified society guaranteed a peaceful environment for the flourish of arts; Secondly, the booming of economy built up the material basis and farmers' demands for better amusement formed the market for the development of Hunan flower-drum opera; Thirdly, it resulted from the overwhelming victory of "Flower"(local informal shows) to "Crown"(formal elegant plays created by playwrights).Hunan flower-drum opera has various tones, quick rhythms and delightful melodies, breaking the traditional views of aesthetics on music and showing us to thegreatest degree the character of music------expressing people's emotions. There aremore than 500 traditional play books of Hunan flower-drum opera, most of which draw materials from real life, showing the life of romance, family and labor about common people. Much more importance is attached to the details rather than the plots of the story, breaking the tradition of singing anecdotes only. The charm of it is achieved by creating a comedy situation composed of delightful music, comedy language and artistic acts. The characters are intensively shaped along with the development of the story, and most of which are individual rather than typical ones. The language is simple, vivid and close to life. Most Hunan flower-drum operas are comedies. In the long history of development, it has formed its own characteristics: One is that it mainly shapes positive characters; another one is that the characters are all designed on the basis of farmer's thoughts, feelings and logic; and last it takes much of exploring funs and elements of comedy from daily life. Further funny languages, delightful music and humor create the comedy atmosphere.Hunan flower-drum opera is quite valuable, for it works out an idea of amusement in spite of the two fundamental Chinese traditional ideas of civilizing and expressing emotions, thus enriches Chinese traditional literature. Hunan folk-customs affects Hunan flower-drum opera in the following three aspects: Firstly, the sing-and-dance activities of folk-customs offer it a large stage and some customs accelerate directly or indirectly the development of it; secondly, it learns a lot from the structure, language style and narrate strategies of folk-customs; thirdly, the delightful pastoral style, the dominant one of Hunan flower-drum opera, benefits a lot from the folk-customs as follows: The pastoral style agrees with the optimistic Hunan people who pursue happiness and joy. And the pastoral style emphasizes the development of personality, which corresponds to the freedom-pursuing folk-customs in which people are seldom affected by the central-plain culture and have slim consciousness of severe morality. Besides, the advantageous geographical conditions and beautiful landscapes in Hunan area build up a base for the development of pastoral style.