Death and Spell-casting Songs from Peking Opera 紫箫记 ("Purple Flute")

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The last of the three arias in which (by proxy) singer-actress Meishan the impersonater claims she had performed before quitting the stage. Whether we believe her claim or not, the key to the choice of song is its reiteration of the brothel-suicide playscript we have already seen twice before. A "performer of ill repute" (changji) is bought out of her brothel slavery by a smitten "scholar" (Li Wei), but with questionable financing. Paternal objection or Li's fleeting eye soon, however, lures Li's affection elsewhere (to a higher--prestige wife-candidate, approved by Li's family), and the vow of love till death is broken without a word (or letter) to advise the heroine Huo Xiaoyu of her loss/betrayal. In a finale highly reminiscent of La Triaviata, Huo takes to her deathbed, from which however she is able to rise to deliver a song of fury against the visiting Li. Sing finished, she collapses side by side with her loyal maid": has she taken poison or just exited this world - not clear. But again (she/we) we are seeing the future of Meishan as enacted (predicted/realized) in her last stage role: which is history and which prediction is obscured since she in acting or re-enacting something that has (on stage, and by proxy) already happened: her furious maldiction of her quondam lover predicts how Meishan will flaunt her anger at Old Chen.

The Tang ghost-story bearing the heroine's name (Huo Xiaoyu 霍小玉) or 紫箫记 as adapted into Peking Opera provides the death-song of Meishan ("Coral") in the Zhang Yimou film "Raise High". Performed by 荀慧生 and 孙毓敏.The final aria: 叹红颜薄命前生就, "Born to a humble station delivered by my fate". She is a song-and-dance performer, a kind of geisha or Madame Butterfly.

The understory is common enough: a "performing lady" (Huo) and ambitious scholar-poet (Li Wei) swear a love-pact and marriage. Ambition and the lure of high status propel the promised husband, Li Wei, into the arms of a court official's daughter, and the flow of epistles halts. What is here enacted is the final moment in Huo's life, just after she has learned of the treachery via a righteous 3rd party.

What makes the performance/script unique is that is toggles between the expression of loss and loneliness, on the one hand, and rage/revenge on the other. The mode of singing gets quite violent (unusually so) and fingers are pointed and waved. Her fury expended and disloyal lover taken down, she then kills herself or perhaps simply expires, but the exit singing make sit quite clear that there will be no peace for scholar Li. She thus becomes a prototype of the "hanged woman", a vengeful and ever-furious ghost,

The performance itself is remarkable for the wild and almost European gesturing and facial grimacing.