Peking Opera performance artist Cheng Yanqiu is one of the four famous dans of Peking Opera and the founder of the "Cheng School" art. "Cheng Pai" sings like a cry, and the gentle resentment contains rigidity and self-improvement, and the performance is delicate and sincere, which has been popular in the past hundred years and is still widely circulated on the stage.
Cheng Yanqiu, who lives in seclusion and farming
Cheng Yanqiu is a moral model in the opera world. Throughout his life, he was very self-disciplined and self-righteous, and at the same time he had a strong sense of nationality and patriotism, and during the Japanese rule of Peiping, he fought alone against many Japanese puppet armies, which was rumored to be a beautiful talk. He also resisted tremendous pressure, refused to cooperate with the Japanese and pseudo-Japanese, and lived in seclusion in the countryside for many years to work as farmers, reflecting noble patriotism.
Cheng Yanqiu, formerly known as Chenglin, the character Ju Nong, the number of Yushuang. He was born in 1904 in Xiaoxiangfeng Hutong, Hainan, Beijing. His father, Rongshou, died when he was less than three years old, and the family became increasingly poor, and at the age of 5 they moved out of their ancestral home and into Xixiaoying near The Qinghua Garden in Haidian. After that, he moved several times, and finally arrived at the Nancheng Tianqiao East Big City Xiwan Foot Alley.
Xisibei Sanjo Cheng Yanqiu Former Residence, photo by Ding Ding
At this time, the Cheng family was already surrounded by disciples, relying on his mother to "sew poverty" to maintain the family's life. Seeing that life was unsustainable, Cheng Yanqiu begged his mother to let him learn drama. When Cheng Yanqiu was 6 years old, he was introduced by someone and threw himself into the art of Mr. Rong Diexian.
Cheng Yanqiu moved to the Rong House in Wei Dye Hutong to learn drama and spent more than seven years in this courtyard. After several years of study, Cheng Yanqiu's skills have greatly improved, but he has reached the period of reversing the warehouse and changing his voice at an age. If the voice is broken at this time, it will be difficult to recover, and it will be difficult for him to recover, and it is at this time that he meets Luo Gonggong.
Luo Luogong was a famous scholar in the late Qing Dynasty, he loved Peking Opera, was known as a "drama fool", and was familiar with many famous characters in the opera industry. He had long noticed Cheng Yanqiu and thought that Cheng Yanqiu was "a rare talent after Mei Lang", and Luo Gong took him out of Rong Dixian and arranged for Cheng Yanqiu's family to ask a famous doctor to examine Cheng Yanqiu's body and treat his throat. Luo Yangong personally taught Cheng Yanqiu's cultural learning, let him recite classical poems, practice calligraphy and painting, and accompany him to watch movies, so that Cheng Yanqiu could draw nourishment from other art forms.
In 1919, through the introduction of Luo Luogong, 15-year-old Cheng Yanqiu worshiped the 25-year-old Mei Lanfang as a teacher and became Mei Men's founding disciple. The following year, after Cheng Yanqiu's voice recovered, Luo Gonggong went around contacting him to perform. Cheng Yanqiu gradually grew up in cooperation with many famous characters and became a popular Danjiao rookie.
But Luo Luogong was very sober, and he reminded Cheng Yanqiu not to be blindly complacent and stop moving forward. He studied together with Cheng Yanqiu, explored a new path according to Cheng Yanqiu's unique voice and his own conditions, and gave full play to his artistic expertise. Together, they designed the singing voice, studied the performance, and in the continuous exploration, a new and unique art genre, the Cheng School, was initially formed.
After Cheng Yanqiu's income increased, he successively bought a house for his three brothers, while he still rented a house and moved many times. Until 1938, Cheng Yanqiu finally bought himself a property, which was an ordinary courtyard in Baozi Hutong, Xisibei. After a few repairs, he moved in. After that, except for a brief departure, Cheng Yanqiu did not move again, and this became the "ancestral residence of the Cheng family" where four generations of the Cheng family lived. Cheng Yanqiu bought No. 18 Baozi Hutong, which is now No. 39 Xisibei Santiao.
At the same time that Cheng Yanqiu moved into Baozihu, the Japanese Kou had already occupied Beiping. His intention was to stop the performance immediately. However, at that time, the life of the colleagues of the drama club was extremely embarrassing, and in order to maintain everyone's life, they had to continue to perform, but they never acted for the Japanese.
Once, the Japanese puppet authorities ordered the Liyuan Association to invite Cheng Yanqiu to participate in a charity performance to donate aircraft to the Japanese army. Cheng Yanqiu made it clear to the people who came: "I will never do anything about acting and buying planes to bomb Chinese, and the Japanese are not satisfied with asking them to come to me Cheng Someone, don't be difficult for the people who are doing things for you below!" Cheng Yanqiu's refusal infuriated the Japanese authorities, and various provocations and persecution ensued. One day, Cheng Yanqiu returned from acting in Shanghai and Shandong with the troupe. The pseudo-policemen ordered inspections at the train station, and without asking any questions, they poked and stabbed indiscriminately with bayonets, punctured tin play boxes and lobby drums, and damaged many costumes.
In the autumn of 1942, when Cheng Yanqiu returned from acting in Qingdao, he let his colleagues in the troupe go first, and returned to Beiping alone. At the Qianmen railway station, he was surrounded by four or five Japanese gendarmes and pseudo-policemen who wanted to take Cheng Yanqiu away. Cheng Yanqiu was furious and immediately threw his fists and feet, beating the people surrounding him to the point that his nose was blue and his face was swollen, and he was scattered. Cheng Yanqiu took advantage of the chaos and ran out of the station. His righteous act of fighting the ugly crowd alone at the railway station was soon circulated in the Beiping opera circle, and everyone clapped their hands and applauded.
Cheng Yanqiu knew that the enemy and hypocrisy would not give up. He decided to retire and work as a farmer in seclusion, not to cooperate with the Japanese, in order to preserve his national integrity.
He first endured the pain of cutting off love, and suspended and dissolved the Chinese Opera College that had been planned for many years to prevent the enemy from taking over and falling into the hands of the Japanese. Then he let out the wind, claiming that he was fat, sick, and no longer suitable for the stage. He also entrusted people to prescribe a diagnosis certificate in the German Hospital in Beiping: "Cheng Yanqiu was examined by the internal medicine department of this hospital, and his body was fat and inconvenient, and he should not perform on stage, and should rest." ”
He had gone to great lengths in choosing a place of seclusion, a place that could not be too close or too far from the city. Too close to the Eyes of the Japanese, with no freedom; too far away to take care of the family. After several inspections, qinglongqiao town was selected.
The town of Qinglongqiao is north of the Summer Palace, more than 30 miles from the city. In the Ming Dynasty's "Chang'an Ke dialect", it is recorded: "Five miles north of the Urn Mountain is the Qinglong Bridge, and the upper reaches of the Baifuyan in the Yuan Dynasty are also upstream." Its west passes through The Golden Mountain. Its northern diagonal boundary is Baiwang Mountain. ”
This is indeed a good place to enter the city close and escape from afar. So Cheng Yanqiu bought an ordinary farmhouse courtyard in the town's Tongtangmen Hutong, and there was a large wasteland in front of the courtyard facing the river. He bought more than 60 acres of farmland under the roots of the Black Mountain and lived a real farm life. He went to the fields to weed and cultivate the land, fertilized and watered, sowed and harvested seeds, did all kinds of farm work, read and practiced writing in his spare time, and improved his cultural accomplishment. He once wrote an inkblot indicating his intentions and pasted it on the gate: "Lotus hoe farming, Dumen Xie coming and going, attentive to pedestrians, early to do retreat thinking." ”
But the Japanese pseudo-police did not let him go. From time to time, they sent people to spy on him secretly, but seeing that he was living an authentic peasant life, there was nothing they could do.
On the night of March 19, 1944, more than a dozen Japanese gendarmes and pseudo-police officers suddenly broke into the Cheng Mansion in Baozi Hutong, rummaged through boxes and cabinets, and made a surprise inspection until the next morning. They did not find Cheng Yanqiu himself, nor did they find any evidence of anti-Japanese collaboration with the enemy, so they had to retreat in sorrow.
It was not until after the surrender of the Japanese Kou in 1945 that Cheng Yanqiu returned to the city, reorganized the Qiusheng Society, and went out of the mountains again. In addition to performing in Beiping, he also performed in Shanghai, causing a sensation everywhere he performed.
(Original title: Cheng Yan Autumn Rest Acting Rejection of Japanese Kou)
Source: Beijing Evening News Author: Chen Pu
Process Editor: l006
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