The White-Haired Girl (Chinese: 白毛女; pinyin: Bái Máo Nǚ) is a Chinese contemporary classical opera by Yan Jinxuan to a Chinese libretto by He Jingzhi and Ding Yi. It was later adapted to a ballet, a Peking opera, and a film. The ballet adaptation was regarded as a revolutionary opera.
The folklore of the white-haired girl is believed to have spread widely in the areas occupied by the Communist Party of Northern China since the late 1930s.
Many years later, a literary work was created in the liberated area controlled by the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1940s. The film was made in 1950 and the first Peking opera performance was in 1958. The first ballet performance was by Shanghai Dance Academy, Shanghai in 1965. It has also been performed by the noted soprano Guo Lanying.
The opera is based on legends circulating in the border region of Shanxi, Chahar and Hebei, describing the misery suffered by local peasantry, particularly the misery of the female members.: 151 The stories are based on real-life stories of no fewer than half a dozen women, in a time frame stretching from the late Qing dynasty to the 1920s or 1930s. The political overtone and historical background when it was created means that communist propaganda was added in inevitably, and the most obvious example was the added portion of happy ending and the protagonists joining the communist force, which did not happen in real life.
Along with Red Detachment of Women, the ballet is regarded as one of the classics of revolutionary China, and its music is familiar to almost everyone who grew up during the 1960s. It is one of the Eight Model Operas approved by Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution.The White-Haired Girl also intentionally showed the political meaning by creating a figure of diligent and beautiful country woman who was under the oppression of the evil landowner. As it aroused an emotion against the "old ruling class", it satisfied "moral ideas of the left-wing literary and artistic intelligence, the popular social and cultural values of rural and urban audiences". The film presented "the traditional Chinese agricultural lifecycle", where the poor lived in poverty no matter how hard they tried. It implied a revolution to overthrown the unchanging social structure. As the mise-en-scene of the film, it used a fair amount of medium-shot to define the character through facial expressions.
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