The Research On Wang Guowei’s Study Of Chinese Opera

As the father of the research of the recent Chinese operas, Mr. Jing An make agreat contribution in many fields, including the collection of the historical materials ofthe opera, the research of the theory of the opera, the exploration of the creation ofnew operas, and etc. Wang Guowei created theory of how to differ the "drama" fromthe "opera", he described the "nature" and "poetic" side of Yuan opera, and he alsohas the idea of dividing the opera into tragedy and comedy. All his theory of operahad a great influence in the early20th.It provokes many scholars’ great interest of thestudying of the opera. On one side, he followed the method of the Qian and Jia Schoolto dig up the origin of the opera. On the other side, he used the knowledge of thewestern philosophy and the theory of literature and art to analyze the artisticconnotation of the opera. He is the master of the study of the Chinese traditional opera,digesting the using of both domestic and foreign knowledge. He has left many greatlegacies for the later opera study.This paper mainly talks about Wang Guowei’s thoughts of opera treatment, which ismostly divided into three parts: traditional Chinese opera, opera and opera style. First,this paper explores Wang Guowei’s ideas of traditional Chinese opera from differentconcepts in History of song and Yuan Dynasties opera like ‘drama’ and ‘opera’. Theleading thought of his opera research is basing on ‘drama’ and aiming at ‘poem’;second, it can see that Wang values opera from Wang Guowei’s evaluation of drama:‘the artistic conception is all’.‘real’ and ‘nature’ is the premise of ‘opera artisticconception’. And Wang Guowei’s affirmation of Yuan-Dynasty zaju plays mainlycomes from his appreciation of lyric’s ‘poem’; at last, this paper talks about WangGuowei’s definition of ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ which referring to western dramatheory. Comedy theories mostly rely on the translation and annotation of foreigndrama theory, and then carry out the annotation of life. However, the ‘theory of willtragedy’ explains life tragedy and opera tragedy on the base of ‘relief’ and‘magnificent’. It is a new try of evaluating traditional Chinese opera from westerndrama theory, which inspires many later scholars.