The funeral of Yue Opera master Yuan Xuefen will be held in Shanghai tomorrow.
Yuan, one of the reformers who helped take Yue Opera from a simple eastern Zhejiang art form to become the No 2 opera style on the mainland, died at her Shanghai home on Saturday at the age of 89.
Former Shanghai Theatre Academy president Rong Guangrun, who knew Yuan well, said she was an 'iconic figure' in Yue Opera who had left a rich legacy for all traditional Chinese opera.
Born one of seven daughters in a farmer's family in Zhejiang's Sheng county, a cradle of Yue Opera, Yuan pursued an opera career despite strong opposition from her father. In 1938 she travelled to Shanghai to perform and broadened her horizons by watching films, especially from Europe and America.
Yuan adopted elements from film, drama, and Jiangsu's Kun Opera and introduced the roles of playwright, director, stage designer and costume designer to Yue Opera in the 1940s.
Yue Opera first appeared among farmers in eastern Zhejiang in the late 19th century and was mainly performed by men until the 1920s. At that time it was a comparatively simple, impromptu art known for its obscene content, which Yuan said she was too shy to sing, according to the Oriental Morning Post.
The reforms she introduced to Yue Opera were warmly received by Shanghai audiences and after the Sino-Japanese war broke out, some of her plays encouraged patriotic resistance. During the civil war between the Kuomintang and Communists, Yuan supported leftist writers and created a play based on a piece of work by the most famous of them, Lu Xun. That led to persecution of Yuan by the Kuomintang and she was even attacked by thugs.