Beneath a snow-laden pine, a white-bearded elder sits as companions play zither, flute and pipa together; red plum dots the snow, and in the distance a man leads an ox cart.
Yuan Qu Verse
Sanqu songs and zaju scripts joined, moving past refined poetic diction to set everyday urban speech to music and bring stage storytelling to maturity.
Yuan ZajuYuan song-drama joined sanqu songs and zaju scripts, broke the limits that classical poetry set on elegant diction, and set the everyday speech of the market to music. The sung words and the story are organised through sets of songs linked by qupai tunes.
Yuan zaju developed from the Song and Jin zaju, the yuanben and the zhugongdiao, and became a mature form of drama in the Yuan. A play usually has four acts, to which one or two wedge scenes may be added; each act uses one set of northern songs in a single mode, sung by one lead, the zhengmo or the zhengdan, while the other roles mostly speak.
Guan Hanqing, Ma Zhiyuan, Zheng Guangzu and Bai Pu are together called the four masters of Yuan drama; their principal works include The Injustice to Dou E, Autumn in the Han Palace and Rain on the Paulownia Tree, while Wang Shifu's Romance of the Western Chamber is far longer than the usual form.
Zhou Deqing wrote the Zhongyuan Yinyun, which set the standard for rhyme in northern song; and in the late Ming Zang Maoxun compiled and printed the Selection of Yuan Plays, through which Yuan zaju came down in large numbers.
Yuan Qu Verse is the class in the chapter on Letters on the sanqu songs and zaju plays of the Yuan. It arranges the sung words in linked sets of qupai tunes and sets the everyday speech of the market to music; Guan Hanqing and others wrote zaju in the early Yuan, and Yuan song-drama reached maturity.
In the early Yuan (about 1280), Guan Hanqing and others wrote zaju, organising the sung narrative in linked sets of qupai tunes, and Yuan song-drama matured.
In 1324 Zhou Deqing wrote the Zhongyuan Yinyun, which set the standard for rhyme in northern song.
In the late Ming (1616), Zang Maoxun compiled and printed the Selection of Yuan Plays, through which Yuan zaju came down in large numbers.
After the Yuan, zaju declined in the Ming as it came under the influence of southern song, and in the Qing it was mostly read rather than staged.
On a Yuan-dynasty theatre stage, costumed performers sing dramatic arias to the accompaniment of flute and clappers while a rapt audience watches from below. Bypassing elite textual doctrines to voice raw marketplace narratives on stage.
Imagine a writer of zaju filling in lyrics under a lamp at night. He wants the people in the street to follow it too, so he uses the words people speak in the market. When he has finished an act he reads it to his neighbour.
The neighbour listens, laughs and says: we say those words every day, and I never thought they could be sung. He laughs too, and takes up his brush to write the next act.
Yuan song-drama sets the everyday speech of the market to music and organises the sung narrative in linked sets of qupai tunes. A Yuan zaju play usually has four acts, each using one set of northern songs in a single mode; Zhou Deqing's Zhongyuan Yinyun set the standard for rhyme in northern song, and Zang Maoxun compiled and printed the Selection of Yuan Plays, through which Yuan zaju came down in large numbers. (This is an illustrative story, not a historical account.)