◎ Solve the three drinks

Zhao Yanxia, the only surviving grandmaster of Peking Opera, passed away in Beijing last month at the age of 97. Although the audience's aesthetic preferences are different, Zhao Yanxia's artistic influence is undoubted, and she is a representative of an era.

Lean down and hug the crowd

From the mid-60s to the early 0s of the 0th century, Zhao Yanxia created and rehearsed many new plays, and transplanted a large number of local operas, especially Yue opera. Combined with her sharp group voice and flexible use of her big and small voices, the Zhao School had already made some achievements in singing art at that time, and it was not a new wave of Peking Opera - leaning down and embracing the audience.

反映20世紀40、50年代越劇在上海生存與發展的《舞臺下的身影》一書中，久居上海的越劇老觀眾章志茜提到，當時趙燕俠的戲很吸引人看，因為她像新興的越劇一樣，演戲演全本，而不是如其他京劇演員慣演折子，非常有新意；另外就是口齒清楚，容易聽懂。

In fact, these two points add to each other, and Zhao Yanxia has been striving for it: in the theater environment with poor sound amplification conditions at that time, so that new audiences and audiences with insufficient seats can also understand the singing and understand the drama, so that a large number of ordinary people with average income and low education level who poured into the theater after the founding of New China also obtained the artistic enjoyment that only the "leisure class" had in those years. Zhao Yanxia's Yanming Peking Opera Troupe was merged into the Beijing Peking Opera Troupe, she was one of the top five brands, and long-term cooperation with Ma Tan Zhang Qiu and other masters, her skills improved rapidly, and the Zhao School also became popular all over the country. At that time, she was almost the most attended Peking Opera actor, even if she accidentally sang on stage with Mei Lanfang, who returned to her hometown to find her roots, during the tour, the tickets could be sold out quickly.

Borrowing cloth tailoring out Xun into Zhao

Zhao Yanxia's transplantation of the Yue opera "Panfu Sofu", "Chasing Fish" and "The Legend of Chunxiang" is because of the popularity of these dramas themselves. "Panfu Sofu" is an old drama of Yue Opera, with a large section of Shengdan duet in the front, and a large number of performances such as "out of line" and "wild" in the back part of Miss Xiangfu's Yan Lanzhen because of her love for her husband, which is very suitable for Zhao Yanxia's spicy style. She plays Yan Lanzhen, even if she is compared with Jin Caifeng, who is the best at this play among the grandmasters of Yue Opera (Jin Caifeng performed this play more and more openly in the 80s of the 0th century), she is even better in terms of "integrity, bravery, and love brain".

In the live video of Zhao Yanxia's "Panfu Sof" in the 80s of the 0th century, there are two adaptations that are different from Yue Opera that are impressive. One is on the maid Piaoxiang, she was ordered to trick her uncle Zeng Rong upstairs, and it was Zhao Yanxia's younger sister Sun Baoli who played Piaoxiang, and the two had a tacit understanding for a long time. In order to pretend to be pitiful and make Zeng Rong's heart soft, Piaoxiang here has an action of sticking out his tongue and dipping his saliva on his face to pretend to cry, no matter what time it seems, it will cause people to squeak. Audiences who are familiar with Zhao Yanxia will immediately find that this is exactly the same as the handling of Chunlan played by Zhao Yanxia in "Eight Mistakes in the Flower Field" when she pretended to admit her mistakes, both of which performed the childishness and cunning of the little maid.

The other is the famous doll tune of "Panfu". Yue Opera plays "Panfu", Zeng Rong sighed to himself in the study, Lu Zhen and Yan Lanzhen entered the study and asked a tight sentence, all designed to sing in large sections, if the actors are skilled enough to listen to it, this is naturally the essence of the whole play. Zhao Yanxia's version was changed to Zeng Rong thinking and sighing to himself, and Yan Lanzhen used a doll tone after learning Zeng Rong to speak and break the truth. In the live video, the audience really applauded, one sentence at a time, no wonder when Zhao Yanxia went to Hong Kong to perform this play in the 60s of the 0th century, the audience sighed "drunk and drunk". Needless to say, this is all the kung fu she practiced when she played "The Great Hero".

Zhao Yanxia is also good at "appropriating" the singing voice of old dramas when transplanting repertoire. "Panfu" uses the doll tune of "The Great Hero", and the paragraph of "The Legend of Chunxiang" is borrowed from Xun Huisheng's treatment in "The Phoenix". In the 60s of the 0th century, in the "Legend of the White Snake" created by her and Tian Han and Li Muliangzhu, the "Little Obedient" singing segment of the three eyes of the Hui tune, and the "It's Hard to Give Up" singing segment of the "Blue Wave Fairy" with three eyes in the two yellows turned to four flat tones, etc., expanded the volume of the singing section with a novel plate style, increased the lyrical emotional intensity, and the fighting nature of the white snake and the carp fairy to defend the love of the immortals was also greatly enhanced.

"The Legend of Chunxiang" was originally a Korean national story transplanted by Xu Yulan and Wang Wenjuan when they led a delegation to comfort the soldiers to resist US aggression and aid Korea, and after its success, it was transplanted by a number of opera genres, and Peking Opera alone has been adapted by Yan Huizhu in Shanghai, Qin Youmei in Shenyang and Zhao Yanxia in Beijing. "The Blue Wave Fairy" was born from Tian Han's adaptation of "The Golden Scales" from the Yuan Miscellaneous Opera and the Hunan Opera "The Fish Basket", and the original version was staged by several Yue Opera troupes, while Zhao Yanxia's version was refined on the Yue Opera performance version.

Comparing the popular version of King Xu's Yue opera "Chasing Fish" and Zhao Yanxia's "Blue Wave Fairy", the latter mainly adds juggling when watching lanterns, martial arts before pulling scales, stepping on stilts, running dry boats, and playing flags, which is dizzying. Although Zhao Yanxia does not have a long list of oolong hins like Wang Wenjuan, she also has a fight with the heavenly soldiers and generals (the oolong skeins and beats are all opera stage actions), which makes this Peking Opera pay equal attention to both civil and military affairs while singing and chanting, and it is really a ticket for the audience to see a lot of things, and it is worth the money.

Stir each other up and work together

At that time, the frequent opera performances, the thriving publishing industry and the non-strict copyright system made the communication between various opera genres and troupes extremely fast, and the opera performance, as one of the most popular forms of entertainment at that time, was stirred by the continuous investment of outstanding talents and the enthusiastic feedback from the audience, and the passage from new operas to classics was extremely short and fast. This is especially true for actors. In the Peking Opera industry, the generation of actresses who were popular at that time, although they had become famous and married, had not yet formed their own genre, which can be described as scrambling. They are more flexible than the old actors, more experienced than the students who have just come out of the drama school, and have adapted local operas, of course, they have also formed a mutual encouragement, which is really a bit of Zhao Yanxia's "I work together with those sisters" in "Bibo Fairy".

Zhao Yanxia and Wang Wenjuan, who is two years older than her, also have a lot of similarities to some extent. In addition to the similar tastes in the selection of repertoire, their lines are simple and generous, and the words are very clear, and they have become one of the representatives of their respective dramas that embrace the taste of the public more artistically. In the late 80s of the 0th century, after a short period of revival of traditional opera, they all took the initiative to undertake the important task of career reform by pulling their own faction of people and bearing their own profits and losses, and later "gave way" to a certain extent for the success of young people, otherwise they should continue to be on the stage "The God of War will fight the sky and the ambition of the soldiers".

Wang Wenjuan is gone, and Zhao Yanxia is also gone. The group of actresses who were born in the 20s of the 0th century and ushered in the golden period of art in the middle of the century have connected the rise and fall of opera art for more than half a century with their lives.

According to the memories of the old actors, Huang Zhongdalu's "Duracell" Jin Shaoshan's last stage performance was "Farewell My Concubine" starring Zhao Yanxia. And the last stage memory left by Zhao Yanxia to our generation of audiences is a duet of "Wujia Po". In the video, when it was time for her to sing, the collaborator gently sent her in the direction of the microphone, but the old lady did not seem to have the habit of relying on the microphone to help. That's Zhao Yanxia, she doesn't need wheat to sing anything, she relies on a meat voice. After that, she sang "Eight Mistakes in the Flower Field" solo, but she was still far away from Mai.

Image source: Beijing Peking Opera Company