Song of the Lute Player/琵琶行 (song based on the eponymous poem)

Recently banished from the capital city of Tang dynasty (June 18, 618--June 4, 907) China, the poet BAI Juyi (白居易,772-846) was seeing off his friends by the riverbank on an autumn night. There, in a remote city almost devoid of proper music, he had a romantic encounter with a pipa (Chinese lute) player, who used to be a prima donna in the capital during her youth.

On hearing the touching pipa tune and the tragic life story in her fading years, BAI, the poet, likened her misfortunes to his own demotion after his loss of imperial favor. (There could have been a resonance among the poet, the pipa artist, and Grizabella of the musical Cats, who sang "Memory. All alone in the moonlight/I can smile at the old days/Life was beautiful then/I remember the time I knew what happiness was/Let the memory live again.")

He promised her a "Song of the Lute Player" (琵琶行, which turns out to be one of the most read long poems in the Chinese language) to immortalize such a maudlin night by the riverbank.

Here is a song that I wrote, based on the words of BAI Juyi's poem "Song of the Lute Player". It is a quartet of flute (representing the poet), violin (the pipa artist), steel string guitar (the pipa) and harp (the boat in the river water). As the story unfolds, different parts play the tune at higher or lower keys.

The poem-based pictures were drawn by the late artist FANG Rending (方人定,1901-1975) and are widely circulated on and off the Internet. The English version of the poem was due to Prof. XU Yuanzhong (許淵沖, b.1921), who translated an anthology of 300 Tang dynasty poems from Chinese into English.

[As a side note, the poet BAI Juyi is well known for his poetry that shows sympathy for women in misfortune, either of humble or noble origin. In parallel to the "Song of the Lute Player", BAI has written another long poem "Song of Forever Sorrow" (長恨歌) to account for a sad love story in the imperial palace of Tang dynasty China, which in turn, would partly inspire the world's (arguably) first full-length novel: Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" (written ca. 1000 in Japanese).]

This is a vocal version. An instrumental version of the same song is also available on my channel as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLVSFQyGuJ0

Category:

Music

Tags:

• poetry
• music
• Chinese
• classic
• pipa
• lute
• 白居易
• 琵琶行
• Song
• of
• the
• Lute
• Player
• Bai Juyi
• Po Chü-i
• flute
• violin