"Eight Stage Works for 800 Million People"*: The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Music--A View from Revolutionary Opera

Abstract

When we talk about the Cultural Revolution, we often talk about the restriction of traditional culture, but really, it continued to live: sent-down youth would listen to a lot of local performances of opera. Throughout the Cultural Revolution, there was deliberate support for some parts of tradition and then there was another culture, too, that was still there, if not officially acknowledged. (Musicologist, b. 1950s)1 There were no restrictions as to the playing of either particular instruments or pieces. All the etudes which we played came from the West. We just played everything. (Artist, 1959–)2 Chen Kaige's 1993 feature film Farewell My Concubine (Bawang Bieji) is framed by a scene showing two Chinese opera singers rehearsing in the early 1980s: for twenty years they have not played the traditional opera Farewell My Concubine together, so they remember, and this was “due to the Gang of Four.” According to them, “now it is better.”