Posted 2017/6/13
Tangju Opera, also called Yingdiao Opera and performed in public in June,1960, is a new opera which came into being in the first years of 1960s in Tangshan City, Hebei Province. Its vocal music originates from Tangshan Shadow Play; while its perform arts carry on the tradition of our operas and adopt the local dance and shadow play figures' movements.
During the beginning of creating the Tangju Opera, it was studied according to the traditional operas. The plays were usually chosen from the volumes of the shadow play and recreated them .other plays sere transplanted from the ripe plays of fraternal operas. Its content is the praise for loyalty and goodness. After 1964, Tangju Opera gave full play to the strong points of a new opera and took the modern plays as the main part to write. Its vocal music is Ban Tune mode and divides into the first-kind mode, second-king mode, third-kind mode, the guiding mode, Huilong (returning) mode and the wide mode. It has five tunes. Plain Tune is easy to create and widely used. The mixed tune is good at expressing the feeling of happiness, activeness and funny; the Hedong Tune is to express the soundless feeling with tears; the sad tune is to express the sadness; and the Reciting Tune is to express the mild, loud feelings. What’s more, there are also the “sanganqi” which is named by the style of poems (three-three, four-four, five-five, six-six, seven-seven) and the Hard Rhyme (the falling-rising tone, the falling tone, the entering tone and the level tone) which is named for the rhyme. The chief instrument is sihu. Other accompany instruments are Western instruments led by local instruments which are for playing, plucking and blowing. It also promotes the accompanists to major in one instrument and know others. So they can use various instruments according to different plays. And the percussion instruments have no difference with those used in Beijing Opera.
Tangju Opera have accumulated more than sixty lists of plays for more than forty years. Its representative plays are Broken Bridge, Wash a Pair of Swords with Blood, Hongyun Cliff, Swallow Flying towards the Wind and Home Village and Fellow Villagers. And the chief performers of the first generation are Peng Xiulan, Su Guiying, Wang Deyou and Cao Xuliang etc. At present, Tangju Opera can perform not only traditional plays but also modern plays. And it can perform not only simple plays of lives but also magnificent historical plays. Its influence now is all over the country.
