Tune: “Heaven-Cleansed Sands” Autumn Thoughts
Ma Chih-yüan (1250?–1323?)
Withered wisteria, old tree, darkling crows—
Little bridge over flowing water by someone’s house—
Emaciated horse on an ancient road in the western wind—
Evening sun setting in the west—
Broken-hearted man on the horizon.
Translated by Victor H. Mair
With this epochally memorable piece (note that it lacks a single verb), we can mark the shift from the lyric (tz’u) to the aria (ch’ü). Although other poets were writing arias before him (see selections 105 and 106), it was from Ma Chih-yüan that dominance of the new genre began.
The aria in many respects is similar to the lyric but employs a separate corpus of tunes and is used to express different sentiments. As with the lyric, aria verses are written to song music. Distinctively a product of the period of Mongol rule in China, the aria undoubtedly owes much to the specific political and cultural configuration of that era. The aria, for example, typically employs more colloquial expressions than even the most earthy of the lyrics, yet the form remains hospitable to both literary and vernacular phrase and structure. The subject matter of the aria is diverse, but lovesongs probably preponderate, as with the lyric. The full range of the arias contain nearly every literary device found in the historical arsenal of Chinese verse.
Several arias are sometimes grouped together in sets or suites, with all the tunes in a given suite belonging to the same mode or key. Altogether, there are some five hundred known tune titles which were part of the public domain and to which arias were composed. Arias range in length from pithy twenty-character gems to long, narrative confections of ten or twelve songs in a suite. They were the favored form of entertainment for the age, whether sung by themselves or incorporated into the flourishing musical dramas (see selection 216). Perhaps because of their show-business history, however, they were much underrated by Chinese literary scholars until the beginning of the twentieth century.
Ma Chih-yüan, a native of Ta-tu (modern-day Peking), is generally recognized as the most distinguished author of arias and aria sequences and an outstanding playwright. His most famous dramatic work, Autumn in the Han Palace (Han kung ch’iu), tells of the forced marriage of a Han dynasty court beauty to a Tatar chieftain as part of a diplomatic maneuver. His other plays are mostly about Taoism and reclusion.