Butterfly Lovers

The Butterfly Lovers was composed by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao in 1959 when classical music was starting to be seen as an essential part of every Chinese citizen’s cultural education. “We must learn many things from [Western] countries, and master them,” Chairman Mao said at the opening of China’s First National Music Festival in 1956. And so The Butterfly Lovers, essentially a three-movement violin concerto, was scored for traditional Western orchestra, but with its harmonic roots in Chinese folk. It’s a piece that has stood the test of time and is now deservedly embedded in the canon of Chinese concert works. But despite its fame across China, Joshua Bell confesses to being a newcomer to the work. “Whenever I was in China and meeting Chinese people,” Bell tells Apple Music Classical, “they kept saying, ‘You’ve got to learn Butterfly Lovers!’.” And so he did, but landed on the idea of recording it in an existing arrangement by Yang Hui Chang and Ku Lap-Man for traditional Chinese instruments. “The Singapore Chinese Orchestra (SCO) invited me to come play with their orchestra maybe 10 years ago,” he says, “and I just really fell in love with Chinese instruments. We played some arrangements of famous violin showpieces for Chinese orchestra and violin including Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, Saint-Saëns’ Introduction et rondo capriccioso, and the ‘Méditation’ from Massenet’s opera Thaïs.” It’s these pieces that Bell has recorded as a complement to The Butterfly Lovers. Based on a traditional Chinese tale from the fourth century AD, The Butterfly Lovers tells of the tragic love between Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. The concerto follows the two characters on their journey, beginning with a haunting flute solo that gradually unfolds into the main theme played on the violin. That opening melody foreshadows the story’s tragic end, as death finally unites Zhu and Liang. “At the end, everyone plays the theme in this giant unison, which is incredibly moving,” admits Bell. “I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.” At no point, however, does Bell make an attempt to make his Western violin sound ‘Chinese’. “I try to be influenced by the Chinese and what I’ve picked up from their style,” he says, “but I really do not try to imitate directly and try to be a Chinese erhu player because there’s no way I can do that—I’ll just be a bad copy.” “The beautiful thing about music is that we can celebrate each other’s cultures while putting our own take on it,” he continues. “There is a lot of division in this world, so do we really need to further divide each other beyond the ways that we’re already feeling isolated from each other culturally? I think this is a great way to play together and find common ground.”