The Story of the Lute

Introduction

Gao Ming's late Yuan southern drama, still sung in high-tune Xiang opera scenes such as Painting the Portrait

The Story of the Lute is a play by Gao Ming of the late Yuan, reworked from the folk southern drama Zhao the Chaste Woman, and later writers called it the ancestor of the sung drama. Cai Bojie is pressed by his father to sit the examinations, comes first and is forced to marry into the family of Prime Minister Niu; famine strikes his home, his parents die, and his wife Zhao Wuniang travels to the capital begging and playing the lute until the couple are reunited. In the earlier southern drama and a Jin-dynasty farce Cai abandons his wife, but Gao Ming made him filial and loyal. The play is one of the representative works of Xiang opera, whose high-tune style, derived from the Yiyang tune of Jiangxi, is the chief of its four vocal systems. In the 1930s Luo Yuting and Xu Shaoqing revised scripts including this play, and the later scene Setting Out with the Lute was performed by Peng Linong and Xu Shaoqing at the first national opera festival, where Peng won a second-class acting prize. Xiang opera was added to the national intangible heritage list in 2008.