How should Peking Opera actors learn the genre, and who should they learn?
Teacher Huang Shaohua, a famous Peking Opera performance artist, once mentioned that Peking Opera actors learn the art of Xun School, and she suggested that they should listen to master Xun Huisheng's old records, and then have their own understanding and then learn from the teacher.
In fact, it should be so, as we all know, there are not many disciples of Master Yu Shuyan, and the famous ones are seven, which is commonly known as "three small and four less".
And Master Yu Shuyan's Yu Pai Laosheng art has indeed developed very well today, and the main reason is that Master Yu Shuyan's old record, commonly known as "Eighteen and a Half Sheets", has played an important role.
The famous Peking Opera performance artist Tong Xiangling teacher Chengma Lianliang and Zhou Xinfang, two masters of Peking Opera, but he was an old student of the Yu School, and his research on the art of the Yu School was almost all from the "Eighteen and a Half Sheets" record.
Nowadays, the art of the Cheng School of Peking Opera is distorted, and many young Peking Opera actors do not learn the singing of Master Cheng Yanqiu, but learn from their so-called teachers.
As a result, if you compare Master Cheng Yanqiu's old records with their teacher's singing segments, they will say that Master Cheng Yanqiu's singing is not authentic, of course, this is under the premise that they do not know that the record is Master Cheng Yanqiu.
This also shows that they are not learning from the roots at all, they only know that this genre was founded by Master Cheng Yanqiu, but they have not heard Master Cheng Yanqiu's singing.
There is also the Peking Opera Xun School, which is also some young Peking Opera actors who do not listen to master Xun Huisheng's old records at all, but instead learn some new singing methods of the second generation of the Xun School.
Therefore, to learn the art of a certain genre of Peking Opera, you should still go back to the roots and have your own understanding of the genre!