Music: Chinese Opera: Gongs & Whiteface

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It seemed a cultural crime. In mainland China during the late 1960s, as part of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution, the ancient art of Peking opera was deliberately put to death. The person responsible was Mao's wife, Chinese Cultural Queen Chiang Ching. To Madame Mao, Peking opera was bourgeois, reactionary, too concerned with court life. She replaced it with an unadorned, realistic style of opera that celebrates the struggles of workers, peasants and soldiers against landlords and imperialists. Gone forever, or so it seemed, were the highly stylized music dramas about kings and concubines, scholars and lute-playing ladies. Gone, too, were the elaborate costumes and makeup and delicate performances in which characterizations were conveyed through a series of ritualistic actions and formal gestures.

But cultural traditions die hard.

Across the Formosa Strait on Taiwan, the Nationalist regime has made a point of preserving the Peking-opera heritage. After appropriating $400,000, the regime dispatched a 73-member troupe to the U.S. to present the operatic form to more than 30 cities in a 3½-month tour (see color pages). After opening last month in Honolulu, the troupe played Los Angeles and San Francisco last week, and by November will have reached Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver. If the tour ends as well as it started, it will be a major step toward American acceptance of one of the oldest, most rarefied operatic traditions in the world.

Peking opera dates back to the 8th century reign of the Emperor Hsuan Tsung, but did not reach its final, refined form until the reign of Emperor Chien Lung (1736 to 1796). The style poses formidable challenges to Western audiences. There is appealing exotica in the pentatonic backgrounds played by such instruments as the two-stringed erh-hu, or alto fiddle, and assorted gongs, clappers, drums and pipes. But the high, falsetto fioritura of the singers is difficult to take at the start, even if it is the Chinese ideal of good singing. Most problematical of all are the symbolic sets and the symbol-laden gestures.

On the current tour, the Taiwan troupe provides thorough program notes and a helpful between-acts narration. These explain to American viewers that in At the River Ford, for example, the all-white face of Prime Minister Ts'ao Ts'ao

indicates that he is an evil character.

The long beards worn by Ts'ao Ts'ao, General Ts'ao Hung and their principal adversary, the loyal General Kuan Yu, symbolize great age. The thin soles worn by the protagonists in The Cowherd and the Village Girl establish their low station in life. Waving ribbons, such as those used by the title character in The Heavenly Angel, may indicate anything from the sea to clouds to the wind. Since many a Chinese opera can run as long as seven hours, the evening's program is wisely limited to climactic excerpts from these and such other large-scale classics as The White Serpent, in which the title character, helped by her maid, the Blue Serpent, struggles with the gods while searching for her husband.