World Premiere: May 1959

Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO's first performance of this work

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, cymbals, tamtam, clappers, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 27'

The Butterfly Lovers, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1959)

Chen Gang 

(Born March 10, 1935 in Shanghai)

He Zhanhao

(Born August 29, 1933 in Hejiashan village, Zhuji, Zhejiang Province)

The Butterfly Lovers is the collaborative work of Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, two of China’s leading composers, who met when they were students at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1950s. Chen, born in Shanghai in 1935, was introduced to music by his father, Chen Gexin, a prolific composer of popular songs. He entered the Shanghai Conservatory in 1955 to study composition and music theory under Ding Shande, the school’s director, and the visiting Russian composer Valery Arzamanov. After graduating in 1960, Chen joined the Conservatory faculty; he has also served as director of the Guangxi Institute of the Arts. His compositions, which draw on both Chinese and Western influences, include orchestral, vocal and chamber works whose performances he has overseen in China, the United States, Canada, France, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

He Zhanhao was born in 1933 in Zhejiang Province, on China’s southeast coast, south of the Yangtze River Delta. His early musical experience was as a member of an ensemble accompanying traditional Zhejiang yueju opera, during which he learned to imitate on the violin the technique of the erhu (a spike fiddle with two silk strings, a hexagonal body covered with snakeskin, and no fingerboard). He went to the Shanghai Conservatory in 1957 to study violin and composition; the following year he began researching the use of folk instrument techniques on the violin, a project whose best-known result is The Butterfly Lovers. He joined the Conservatory faculty upon his graduation in 1964. His compositions, written for Western and Chinese instruments separately and in inventive combinations, are characterized by lyricism and expressive appeal.

Chen and He have provided the following information: “The Butterfly Lovers Concerto was written in 1959 when we were students at the Shanghai Conservatory. Musically the Concerto is a synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions, although the melodies and overall style are adapted from traditional Chinese opera. The solo violin is used with a technique that recalls the playing technique of the Chinese two-string fiddle. It is a one-movement programmatic concerto, with three sections that correspond to the three phases of the story — Falling in Love, Refusing to Marry and Metamorphosing into Butterflies.

“The narrative, derived from Chinese folklore, tells the story of the lovers — Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. In order to pursue her studies, Zhu Yingtai has disguised herself as a boy. She has been studying together with Liang Shanbo, but her identity is unknown to her friend. This happy period of study and friendship comes to an end when Zhu Yingtai is compelled to return home. The couple part at a pavilion, eighteen miles from the city. This forms the exposition of a tripartite sonata-form movement.

“In the central section, the formal development, Zhu Yingtai defies her father, who has arranged a marriage for her. Liang Shanbo decides to visit Zhu Yingtai and only now finds out that she is a girl and about to be married. There is a tender duet between violin and cello as Liang Shanbo realizes the nature of his affection for his former companion. He dies, the victim of despair, and Zhu Yingtai, on the way to her wedding, stops at her lover’s tomb and leaps into it. The tomb bursts open and at the sound of the gong the music reaches the climax.

“In the final section, the recapitulation, the love theme reappears and Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai emerge from the tomb as a pair of butterflies, flying together, never more to be parted. Their true love was perpetuated in a verse:

A rainbow shines and flowers flourish.

Amid the flowers butterflies flutter

In pairs that never sever.

The spirits of Liang and Zhu never perish.

“The exposition begins with a flute solo against a background of soft tremolo on the strings, followed by a beautiful oboe melody that represents a peaceful, sunny spring day. The solo violin, accompanied by the harp, sings a simple, graceful love theme and enters into a dialogue with the cello, which renders into music the first encounter of Liang Shanbo with the girl Zhu Yingtai at a wayside arbor. A free cadenza leads to a lively rondo, in which the solo violin alternates with the orchestra. Three happy years of close affinity pass quickly before Zhu Yingtai is called home. An Adagio utters their reluctance to part.

“The development section opens with ominous foreshadows on the gong, cellos and bassoons. Brasses break in with a fierce and malicious theme, the theme of feudal forces. The violin pours out first the anxieties of Zhu Yingtai in free rhythm and then her protest in powerful syncopated chords. The two themes — the protest theme and the feudal forces theme — are woven into a climax of conflict as Yingtai protests against her undesired marriage. In the Adagio that follows, a duet for violin and cello evokes the longing of Shanbo and Yingtai for each other when they visit in the girl’s parlor. The music shifts abruptly into san-ban (free rhythm) and kuai-ban (fast tempo). Yingtai pours out her grief to the heavens at Shanbo’s tomb after his forlorn death. The device of jin-la-man-chang (singing freely upon a rushing accompaniment), borrowed from Shaoxing and Beijing operas, ushers in another climax. After the violin finishes its last plaintive phrase, the whole orchestra bursts into a powerful tutti. The tomb opens, and Yingtai plunges in. The music swells to the largest climax of the Concerto.

“The flute and harp imbue the recapitulation with a celestial bliss. The love theme reappears on the violin con sordino [muted]. Out of the tomb fly a pair of butterflies, which are believed to be the transfigurations of the deceased lovers.”

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda