Two and a half hours later, Zheng Xiaoying waved her baton and wrapped up the performance, her third Rigoletto since August. The 94-year-old, China's first female conductor, took off her glasses and turned around to face the audience and accept their cheers and applause.

It took nearly a year to prepare the show, which was co-produced by the Zheng Xiaoying Opera Center and the Fujian Opera and Dance Drama Theater. But the positive feedback from the audience made the tiring experience worthwhile, Zheng said after the performance.

"When I was conducting the orchestra, I occasionally glimpsed at the stage. I enjoyed the show thanks to the excellent work of the performers," she said, describing it as a party and a musician's dream.

"People always ask me, 'What motivates you?' But I'm not motivated by external factors," she told Beijing Review. "I want to make every effort to meet the audience's expectations. It's like pushing a cart on the journey that is my life. And I will keep pushing. Right to the end."

A maestro in the making 

Born into a literary family in Shanghai, Zheng started playing the piano at the age of 6. Although she once expected to become a doctor, she eventually decided to study music and later devoted herself to the revolution led by the Communist Party of China.

In those days, the revolutionary army would get together and sing songs. Because of her superior musical ability, Zheng was chosen to be their "conductor." No one knew this young lady would in fact grow up to become a professional, and successful, conductor.

In 1954, five years after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zheng was recommended to the Central Conservatory of Music to study composition. In her second year there, N. Dumashev came to China, the first music expert from the Soviet Union to come to China to teach.

Dumashev soon realized that Chinese music colleges didn't have conducting departments and proposed to develop conducting education. Zheng was later chosen to follow in his footsteps and took up the art of conducting.

Conductors should lead orchestras, so they should be technically competent, listen to and solve problems in the music, and bring the ensemble together to accept and apply their artistic views. Zheng likes the job. "I prefer conducting to composing," she said.

In 1960, Zheng went to the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory to study opera and symphony conducting. Two years later, she conducted an opera in Moscow at the age of 33, a feat that marked a milestone in her life. This has made her the first Chinese conductor to perform at a foreign opera house.

Being a female conductor is a challenging job. The 2018 Dutch movie De Dirigent, which translates as The Conductor, based on the life of American female conductor Antonia Brico, shows the difficulties faced by women pursuing a career in conducting.

In 1987, Zheng met Brico, then in her 80s, in the United States. A twinkle in her eye, she asked Zheng a sharp question: "Do the Chinese discriminate against female conductors?"

"I was chief conductor of the National Opera of China and am a professor at the Central Conservatory of Music," Zheng replied. "Thanks to the guidance of my colleagues and predecessors, I've been able to get this far."

"You are lucky," her peer said.

A cultural ambassador 

As a renowned conductor, deciphering Chinese music for the world and Western works for the Chinese has been Zheng's lifelong mission.

With her efforts, a number of foreign operas have been adapted to standard Chinese. "It isn't something I started," Zheng continued. "I'm just reviving it."

In the 1950s, Chinese artists were already working on introducing foreign operas to the Chinese audience. In 1979, France sent a team of experts to teach Zheng and her colleagues how to rehearse French composer Georges Bizet's romantic tale Carmen with a twist. The experts suggested their Chinese counterparts acquire well translated standard Chinese scripts.

People who set translated works to music must be experts in both the Chinese language and opera music. The team worked on the opera for three days. After the lyrics were finished, they changed the parts that did not flow well according to the performers' suggestions based on rehearsals.

Her experience with Carmen encouraged her to translate more works into Chinese, such as Rigoletto and Verdi's other masterpiece, La Traviata, as well as Italian composer Giacomo Puccini's three-act opera Tosca, which is about political intrigue and romance in the days of the Napoleonic Wars (1800-15).

We can keep the original content in our performance but what is more important is to help viewers appreciate the beauty of Western opera through Chinese lyrics, Zheng, who also serves as the artistic director of the Zheng Xiaoying Opera Center, said. "Only when the vocals are in line with the rhythm can one produce a real opera. Music can touch people—through feelings."

In addition to introducing foreign operas to China, the conductor has promoted Chinese works to international audiences. One Chinese work conducted by her has traveled to 12 countries and been performed 77 times, setting a record in Chinese large-scale symphony.

The work, The Echoes of Hakka Earth Buildings, is an original Chinese symphony about the Hakka people's history and lives, which integrates Western composition and Chinese folk music. The Hakka are a subgroup of the Han Chinese ethnicity and are mainly based in south China.

In 2000, the symphony she conducted debuted at a sports center in Longyan, a cradle of Hakka culture and home to many tulou—the earthen rural dwellings of Hakka people in Fujian Province.

The symphony was performed at the Berliner Philharmonie, before top symphony experts with "picky" ears. "We were an unknown Chinese orchestra performing in front of the masters. But we had to be confident because they had no idea of our competence," she said.

"I was touched and proud to see the German audience singing along in the Hakka dialect. In the past, it had been us singing their Ode to Joy in our broken German." "It is like sowing a seed from the West in the fertile soil of the East, which then grows into a beautiful flower," Zheng said.

To help audiences better understand the music pieces, she developed the so-called Zheng Xiaoying model, meaning she would give a 20-minute lecture on the musical pieces about to be heard before the start of a performance.

A conductor's social responsibility is not something on the global music critic's radar, but, as far as Zheng is concerned, "I do care about outreach and education."

(Print Edition Title: Setting the Tempo) 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon 

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