The Surging News reporter Yang Baobao
On May 26, the first musical of the same name, based on the autobiographical essay "Six Memories of Fusheng", by the Qing Dynasty scholar Shen Fu, will be staged at the Shanghai Theater. Yu Di played Shen Fu in it, from the age of 13 to the age of 69.
In "Six Notes of Floating Life", Shen Fu spends a lot of space writing about his love with his wife Yunniang, a vegetable and a meal, and ordinary life is full of frank interest in his pen. In this story, there is very little vigorousness, most of which is deep and long aftertaste.
Becoming the protagonist of an ordinary ancient Chinese love story is not the same as people's impression of Emdi. In 2018, Yu Di entered the public eye because of "Sound into People's Hearts", and became a "Teacher Yu" who was deeply loved by everyone with a thick bel canto singing voice. He said that he had "waited for this show for ten years" and that he had always been a high and low bel canto song, and he hoped to promote the bel canto singing method to everyone.
But think about it carefully, Yu Di is very "Shen Fu". He was long in stature, his appearance was not strong, he was sleek and elegant, his robe was draped over his body, he did not use ancient makeup and hair, and he had traveled back in a second to the old story of hundreds of years ago.
Stills from "Six Tales of Floating Life"
His reasons for wanting to act in musicals are no different from those for participating in "Sound into People's Hearts.". "There are very few classic Chinese-themed musicals that we can remember, so this time we especially want to make a musical for our modern Chinese audience."
Director Tian Chenming has always hoped to cooperate with Yu Di in a musical, in his words, cooperation is inevitable, and the final choice of "Six Memories of Floating Life" is accidental.
Before "Six Tales of Floating Life", he had written two or three outlines, but they did not meet his expectations, and he hoped to write a "work that can only be performed on stage", which should be immediacy, so that the audience can feel with the actors in the moment.
Last year, Tian Chenming overheard the news that Fudan's old bookstore was closing. In college, he had been buying books there. He recalled the last time he bought a book there, so he found a 2008 edition of The Six Tales of Floating Life on the shelf, with a green cover.
The bookstore is about to close, Tian Chenming found the book he bought there, such a mood made him feel similar to the heart of Shen Fu in the book to pursue Yunniang, "Some things in our lives have been lost, I want to get it back, I may not be able to find it, but at least I have a belief in my heart." ”
Taking the book down from the bookshelf, Tian Chenming decided to make "Six Records of Floating Life".
Under tian Chenming's design, the musical "Six Memories of Floating Life" has an ancient background, but it is already a modern story. Removing the limitations of the original work, he hopes that Shen Fu and Yunniang in the play are more like a pair of current lovers, they discuss what the current people discuss, and what the audience feels is the thinking of the main creative team on emotion.
Shen Fu died at the age of 69, but when he wrote the "Six Notes of Floating Life", he had not yet reached the end of his life. In the musical, Tian Chenming let Yu Di play from the age of 13 to the age of 69 when Shen Fu died.
"Every old person has their own memories, and young people may not understand them, but it doesn't matter, because in the long river of life we will all be old, in fact, we will all come to that day." 」 Through the endless reminiscences of Shen Fu in his twilight years, the musical "Six Memories of Floating Life" hopes to express life, love and sorrow in life, helplessness and growth.
For Empires, the biggest challenge is "delicate expression". The opera singer sang from beginning to end, rarely memorizing lines, and this time memorizing more than 100 pages of the script made him very nervous, but at the same time excited.
"I used to really want to say Chinese when I was acting in opera, and I really wanted to let everyone know what we were singing." Before the ember flute, he mostly sang opera in a foreign language, and the audience needed to look at the subtitles to indirectly understand what he was singing. This time, he starred in a musical with Chinese, allowing him to face the audience more directly. It's a novel experience, but it's also a bigger challenge. Audiences who don't need to pay attention to the subtitles will put more attention on the stage, into the performances and stories of the actors.
But "Six Memories of Floating Life" is such a bland and delicate story that sees the truth. Yu Di said that it is the most difficult to express this emotion, and it must be just right and not boring. His greatest hope is that after watching this musical, everyone can call him "Actor Yudi".
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Interview with Yu Di The Paper's reporter Yang Baobao Li Sijie (05:28)
Interview
The Paper: Previously, everyone's understanding of you mainly came from "Sound into People's Hearts", and I always felt that YuDi was academic and mainly sang bel canto, how did you participate in such a musical with a very strong Chinese background this time?
Empis: I've really thought about opera and musicals for a long time. I studied vocal opera as a graduate student in college. I think that the domestic understanding of opera will be easier to bias towards "songs", so most people think that Emdi is a bel canto singer, singing songs of positive energy, singing some evening songs, or singing some foreign operas of Yangchun white snow.
But in fact, after many years of study, including after going abroad to study opera, I think that opera is actually putting together various categories of drama, literature, and music, not just "songs".
Speaking of musicals, I think musicals are an evolution of opera, an evolutionary product of an opera adapted to modern times.
So back to the question, why do you want to do musicals? Because it is more delicate, it may be more suitable for modern people to appreciate. In addition, most of the traditional operas are sung in Italian, French, English and German, in fact, we need musicals with pure Chinese elements in the market. Now domestic musicals are also greatly influenced by Broadway, but there are still very few classic Chinese-themed musicals that I can remember, so this time I especially want to use such an opportunity to make such a musical for our modern Chinese audience.
The Paper: How long has it been rehearsed so far? Are there any stories worth sharing during the rehearsal process?
Yu Di: The official rehearsal only started in March, which was very tense. We composed the music while working on the script. As a musical team, it's a devil's agenda. But everyone is doing it with a lot of care.
What touched me the most was that all the actors stayed in the crew all the time, and the director, screenwriter or composer would fully cooperate and unconditionally support everyone who needed to modify and adjust anything at any time.
In fact, as an actor, the script that has been memorized has to be adjusted at any time, which is very painful, but in the stage of original incubation, everyone understands it, which makes me feel quite moved.
The Paper: Is there anything in a musical that moves you the most?
Empires: Too much. After I read the script, I felt that there were many touching points. The whole play has two and a half hours, and if you can sit down and watch the whole scene, you will find a lot of touching places and a lot of thinking.
We've been talking about love and life and death. There is a line in the play that Yunniang said that lovers are like air, Shen Fu said, but air does not have to do anything, as long as it exists. Is this also true of love?
But the reality is that Shen Fu would think that his father would wait until he had a meritorious name before he would recognize such a son. Because Shen Fu was such an experience of going back after giving it to Uncle Da. His mother felt that he had to obey in order not to disappoint himself.
So we discuss one thing, if there is a prerequisite, is love pure? There are many such plots in the play, and we hope that everyone will think about it together.
Surging News: You hope that after "Six Memories of Floating Life", everyone will call you "Actor Yu Di", Shen Fu's love for Yunniang is plain and touching, and shen Fu's age span in the story is very large, there are more than 50 years old, will you feel that it is a big challenge?
Emboss: I think it's really hard for an opera singer or singer to play a script with more than 100 pages of lines. Because we opera singers don't memorize lines and sing from beginning to end. But after I started to get involved with some musicals the year before and last year, I slowly found that the way musicals are presented is really interesting.
I used to really want to say Chinese when I was acting in opera, so I wanted people to know what we were talking about. Although the opera music melody in Italy and France is beautiful, for domestic audiences, they have to understand the meaning of the song while reading the subtitles, and only then do they know that the original plot is like this. But we don't have to "translate" chinese musicals.
I think the most difficult thing for me about the whole script of "Six Notes of Floating Life" is actually not to play Shen Fu's old age, because the shape, sound, lighting or some effects can help the actors perform this state. The most difficult thing for me may be the performance "delicate", Yunniang and Shen Fu's feelings are plain and delicate, they are expressing their love for each other bit by bit in life, to express these in just over two hours, not greasy, not boring, but also to let everyone move, I think this is the most difficult, involving a large number of lines of processing, including their own emotional expression, as well as the connection between lines and music and so on.
The Paper: Use three words to describe your impression of Shen Fu.
Empires: Romantic, willful, uninhibited.
Shen Fu was a person who did not follow the customs in the social background at that time, he once took Yunniang to play in male clothes, and quietly took her to swim in Taihu Lake, which was very romantic, and it could be seen that he was really spoiling his wife.
The Paper: The love story of your wife many people also feel romantic, will playing Shen Fu substitute for their own feelings?
Yu Di: I want to learn from Shen Fu about spoiling my wife. I will substitute some life experiences, some sweet feelings, some warm feelings, and probably everyone will have feelings after they have those happiness and softness.
But I'm not going to take the right seat to substitute feelings. There are many things in his story that I dare not imagine, and if put into reality, people will collapse.
The Paper: Seeing that the musical drama uses musical instruments to represent the inner feelings of the protagonist, and the harp represents the heart of Yunniang, the black pipe represents Shen Fu's heart, why choose this?
Yu Di: I discussed it with the screenwriter and the composer for a long time. We are thinking, how to shape the male and female protagonists from the music? Then I thought of the harp and the black pipe.
First of all, the sound of the harp is very classical, and it is the oldest batch of European instruments. Second, it has the feeling of a plucked stringed instrument like a Chinese guzheng. Third, it is like water, the old Chinese saying is "good as water", Yunniang is very understanding of Shen Fu, she is like water, Shen Fu wants what she can become into what shape, so we feel that the harp can represent Yunniang.
The instrument representing the male protagonist we want to choose wind music. At first, I wanted to choose the flute, but then I felt that the tone of the flute was not masculine enough, because the flute was called "Flower Soprano" in the symphony orchestra. After a long time of entanglement, I proposed to choose the black pipe, because the black pipe is high and firm, and it is very similar to the timbre of the violin, which can connect the violin, the bass part is very deep, can connect the cello tone, and the midrange area is very sweet, like shen Fu's long love.
The Paper: This is your first time composing music?
Empis: I was involved in the composition of a musical for the first time. I used to write my own songs or something, and our music director was Mr. Tian Mi, who was a very good composer, and I worked with him this time. We've also collaborated on a lot of songs, including my own albums, singles, etc., either he helped me compose and arrange music, or I composed the music myself, and he helped me be a producer.
So this time we cooperate, I feel quite safe, I can use my ideas to express some of Shen Fu's ideas with music, I will write some of my solo parts, he will help me improve, such as what instrument to use to play, how to deal with the harmony part and so on.
The Paper: So the composition part was also done cooperatively.
Empiter: Yes, I didn't write all the pieces alone. I probably wrote thirty or forty percent. And the orchestration work is very large, we have a dedicated team.
The Paper: I saw that the music of "Six Notes of Floating Life" is composed using the traditional Chinese five-tone scale, and Western instruments play such a form, where is the difficulty?
Empis: I think the difficulty is first of all the five-tone, which is actually very limited in application. And there are very few calls in Chinese music, because we Chinese listen to lines.
Therefore, we have carried out a lot of Western-style treatment of the harmonic part of the music, so that it sounds very colorful, but there is no sense of violation, and it also retains the euphemistic and feminine side of our oriental music. It's hard to deal with, but it's also a flattering way.
The Paper: I would like to ask you if you have seen the original work of "Six Notes of Floating Life"?
Emboss: I've seen it. We had one of these passages in our textbooks a long time ago. When our screenwriter Tian Chenming said that he was going to do this musical, I took out the book and turned it over again. Later he said you still don't turn it over. I said why? He said he would make a lot of changes.
In the historical background at that time, many of the stories in "The Six Records of Floating Life" have their rationality, but when we put it now, the contents of three wives and four concubines, and three from four virtues are somewhat awkward. So through some adaptations, we can let the current audience accept this story. Moreover, the musical drama cannot show all the plots in Shen Fu's essays, and it is necessary to choose.
So although I flipped through the book, I finally put it aside, and I still looked at our script, because it is suitable for modern people to watch "Six Notes of Floating Life" at the moment.
The Paper: Do you like this story?
Emboss: I love this story. First, I spent time, energy, and love to invest, like having a baby, and you will definitely love him. Second, I think that this love between Shen Fu and Yunniang is very pure, from this point of view, there are neither political events nor historical events in his story, nor are there other excessive embellishments, pure two people grinding each other, and living together for decades that are short and not short. That impressed me.
The Paper: In the West, classic plays like Hamlet actually have countless adaptations, and there are many experimental attempts. But "The Six Tales of Fusheng" is actually not a well-known story in China, and even Chinese audiences may not know much about it as much as Hamlet. Do you do an experimental play at the beginning, and do you take into account that the audience may not be so receptive?
Yu Di: We actually thought about this question when we chose this topic. Why did you choose "Six Notes of Floating Life"? I think its core is actually very suitable for the present, because all of us are in a state that lacks real softness and being cared for right now. Need to be taken care of and cured. Life is full of a lot of information, everyone is busy, but they don't pay so much attention to the person you love the most. But if you actually spend two and a half hours sitting in the theater watching our show, after watching it, you will realize that there is someone who loves me now, or that it is really happy to have someone who loves me. In this sense, I think "Six Memories of Floating Life" is quite suitable for the present.
Editor-in-Charge: Liang Jia
Proofreader: Ding Xiao