Liu and Guo Lanying performing Marriage of Xiao Erhei.[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Liu Shiming’s life has been devoted to modern Chinese opera and folk hit singing, which the famous tenor believes must explore its ethnic folk music resources and win the hearts of own people to achieve global recognition, as Wen Zongduo and He Keyao report.

When then-Premier Zhou Enlai stopped dancing and approached the stage at a ball held at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in Beijing, Liu Shiming had just finished the last note of The Horse Herdsmen’s Song. It was late 1959 and the academy was celebrating its 10th anniversary. Zhou’s presence was the icing on the cake at the ball, and Liu, still in his sophomore year, had sung at such occasions before.

The music was still playing and other dancers were still revolving with fast steps while Zhou stood in front of the stage which was slightly raised from the ground so the eyes of the taller Zhou were almost level with Liu’s. He held one arm in front of himself and stared at Liu with satisfaction.

"You have a good voice," he said. "Why did you come to Zhongxi (the theater academy)?"

"I like to sing traditional opera," Liu answered, noticing that Zhou was accompanied by a couple of students, but not by guards or officials.

"Fine," Zhou said gently with a smile, "but if you like, you can try singing opera." Liu understood the premier meant the Western style of opera that had just started to gain momentum in arts circles in New China.

Almost 56 years later, sitting on a large cozy couch at his home in the south of Beijing’s downtown, Liu remembered Zhou’s words and expressions clearly.

"Zhou’s brief advice left an imprint in my mind, but not in the heart," said the barrel-chested but pot-bellied tenor. "I’ve seldom mentioned it over the decades and would not have done so now, if you had not kept asking. I’ve been lying low in life and pursuing art for art’s sake," said the established actor-singer, pop hit singer and folk song artist.

Though Zhou’s remarks remained buried deep, life took a strange twist when Liu graduated. After seeing his peers assigned jobs by the college authorities, he was left in the dark. When he went to the academy office, he was told to go the Central Experimental Opera Troupe, the top one in New China at that time and the predecessor of today’s China National Opera and Dance Drama Theatre.

"I had no idea what happened in the two-to-three years after my personal chat with Premier Zhou," Liu recalled, "but right before graduation, I was suddenly called to audition in front of several strange people who heard me sing two songs." They turned out to be inspectors from the opera troupe.

A career at the troupe was new to Liu, a long-time lover of Peking Opera and quyi folk performances usually sung to the accompaniment of a single instrument such as drum, one or two-stringed instruments.

Liu was the youngest of eight children born to a chief telephone engineer in Beijing, and a bout of pneumonia he had soon after birth left him dumb until the age of 5, when he suddenly started to follow music on the radio and sing tale verses in Peking style to drum accompaniment. The radio and various recordings of Peking Opera and local folk performances were his favorite possessions in childhood.

"Traditional music gave me the voice and life," Liu said, his eyes shining through a heavy round face.

Yet singing in the opera troupe proved to be a challenge, in terms of both musical and theatrical ability, and even age. "I was soon selected as the stage partner of the top soprano Guo Lanying." Guo was a famous singer even when Liu was a pupil.

Instead of continuous Wagnerian melody, modern Chinese operas combined song and speech, in line of such light operatic forms as French comic opera, German singspiel and British ballad opera. Liu’s first major role was as the title character in The Marriage of Xiao Erhei, a love story set in changing rural China. The youthful, vibrant nature of his timbre that Premier Zhou had noticed matched the young hero well, but Liu still wanted to excel.