【Approaching the Writers】
Guangming Daily reporter Han Yeting
Zheng Xiaoying bright picture
At the age of 93, she is the first female conductor in China, known as "Karajan in a Skirt" by industry fans, and has won the Special Contribution Award for Chinese Opera, the Wenhua Conducting Award, and the Golden Bell Award for Lifetime Achievement. She is still active on stage today, she said: "If one day you fall on the podium, that is the most romantic thing." ”
What can a 93-year-old do? Entertain your grandchildren, raise flowers and walk birds, bask in the sun, play tai chi, or lie in a hospital bed and wait for the end of your life. For Zheng Xiaoying, those still seem to be far away, and she is still rushing on the road of music. In the past July, she has conducted several concerts and held music lectures in Xiamen, Beijing, Hangzhou and other cities.
Every time the performance, from the audience seat, the baton flew flexibly in Zheng Xiaoying's hands, not only controlling the rhythm of the music, but also mobilizing the emotions of the audience. At the end of the performance, Zheng Xiaoying, who was full of silver hair, turned around to greet the audience, and the scene would always erupt into thunderous applause. The applause was not only a cheer for the wonderful performance, but also a praise for the life of a 93-year-old man.
Zheng Xiaoying was born in Shanghai in September 1929. Her mother, Wen Siying, received a new-style education from an early age, and after graduating from middle school, despite the threat of her family's "severance of ties", she traveled alone from her hometown of Chongqing to Shanghai to learn new-style women's sports, and later became China's first generation of female physical education teachers.
Zheng Xiaoying inherited the stubbornness and strength in her mother's bones. When she was a teenager, she saw the country's mountains and rivers shattered, and she wanted to become a fighter pilot to defend her country, but she gave up because the military school only recruited boys. By the time I graduated from high school, the Liberation War was in full swing. Zheng Xiaoying, who had already been admitted to Peking Union Medical College, resolutely "fled" to the Liberated Areas and became a member of the Cultural and Labor Corps despite the strong opposition of her family. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, she was sent to the Composition Department of the Central Conservatory of Music, and in early 1960, she was sent to the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory to study opera and symphony conducting. In the autumn of the 33-year-old, Zheng Xiaoying conducted a difficult Italian opera "Tosca" at the Moscow State Musical Theatre in the Soviet Union, becoming the first Chinese conductor to appear on the stage of a foreign opera conductor.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Zheng Xiaoying returned to the podium as the chief conductor of the Central Opera House. Once, she conducted the performance of the opera "La Traviata", and the theater was full of noise, and the audience some sniffed melon seeds, some chatted, and some lay on the side of the orchestra pool to ask questions and ask questions, obviously treating the opera field as a theater garden. At the end of the performance, Zheng Xiaoying sat in the audience and thought for a long time, "It is not that the quality of our audience is low, but that music education has been missing for too long."
Since then, whether it is an opera or a symphony, before the performance, Zheng Xiaoying, as a conductor, always has to give a 20-minute explanation. At the beginning, there were very few people willing to listen to the explanation, and Zheng Xiaoying stood at the door of the theater with a loudspeaker and shouted, inviting the audience to enter the lecture in advance. At first, there were only twenty or thirty listeners, and later there were more and more people, and even some people bought tickets many times just to listen to Zheng Xiaoying's lectures, which is the famous "Zheng Xiaoying model". For more than 40 years, Zheng Xiaoying has directly listened to tens of millions of people wherever she has spoken. "Music comes from the people, and the masses need music." Zheng Xiaoying said, "People who engage in performances can't put up stinky shelves, and you leave the audience and it's nothing." If you pay a little more and help everyone break through that layer of window paper, you can exchange their understanding and respect for the value of your labor. ”
Zheng Xiaoying on the stage, elegant temperament, radiant; When interviewed, her voice was loud and full of breath. You can't imagine that such an old man has been battling cancer for more than twenty years.
In the second half of 1997, after retiring, Zheng Xiaoying planned to go to Xiamen to prepare for an orchestra. During that time, she was very thin, went to the hospital for a check-up, and got rectal cancer. "I was nervous at first, because I still had a lot of things to do, and I wasn't willing to do it." "After calming down, I decided to get the treatment and said to myself, 'Nothing can stop me from standing on the podium again,'" Zheng recalls. "After the operation, in order to recover as soon as possible, Zheng Xiaoying endured severe pain and insisted on walking around the corridor of the hospital every day, one step, two steps... Keep it going to a thousand steps. A few months later, Zheng Xiaoying was discharged from the hospital, and her hair fell out due to chemotherapy. She resolutely put on a wig and flew to Estonia to conduct the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. When she conducted the orchestra to play a concerto based on the famous Chinese song "Overlord Unloading Armor", the agitated melody was not only a interpretation of the scene of Jingo iron horses on the ancient battlefield, but also a vivid portrayal of her fight with the disease.
In 2014, Zheng Xiaoying was diagnosed with cancer in the lower lobe of her lungs. She didn't tell anyone that she ran to the hospital alone for targeted therapy and returned to the rehearsal hall more than half a month later. In 2015, Zheng Xiaoying was diagnosed with cancer for the third time, this time in the upper lobe of her lungs. "As soon as the doctor told me about targeted radiotherapy, I immediately agreed, it was very convenient, and I didn't have to be hospitalized, for five consecutive days, half an hour a day." Zheng Xiaoying said quietly, as if she was telling someone else's story. When it comes to life, she always has such a dashing sigh: "If one day you fall on the podium, that is the most romantic thing." ”
With that stubbornness, Zheng Xiaoying created a number of "firsts" in the male-dominated music conducting industry: becoming the first female conductor in China, creating China's first female chamber orchestra with friends, participating in the creation of China's first public-aided private professional symphony orchestra - the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra, winning the Special Contribution Award for Chinese Opera, the Wenhua Conducting Award, the Golden Bell Award for Lifetime Achievement And other honors, and was known as "Karajan in a Skirt" by industry fans (Editor's note: Karajan is a famous conductor in Austria, known as " Commanding the Emperor").
Today, although she has passed the age of the back, Zheng Xiaoying still has no intention of resting, as long as the melody sounds, her body and mind will be fully devoted to the score. When there was a show, she would rehearse with young people, rehearse for hours at a time, and she could skip a sip of water. During the noon break, she lay on the couch for a while, woke up, had a cup of coffee, had some snacks, and continued on stage. She especially likes sweets, such as cakes and chocolates, and jokes that they are the secret of her "longevity". In addition to the performance, Zheng Xiaoying also played with new media, registered accounts on major online platforms, and often used the Internet to carry out art popularization work. Someone always asked Zheng Xiaoying: "Why don't you stop working?" "What's not to do without work?" Work is my life. "As long as I can 'flutter', I will always stand on the stage." ”
Guangming Daily ( 2022-08-14 12 edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily