The Butterfly Lovers Concerto

• Chen and He co-composed this concerto in 1958-9, when they were both students at the Shanghai Conservatory.¹
• In this concerto, the violin writing is often reminiscent of a Chinese two string fiddle or erhu.²
• The concerto also infuses the melodic style of yueju (a variety of Chinese opera) into the format of a Western-style violin concerto.³

“But, I asked, who am I studying this for? Am I going to play Bach and Beethoven for the peasants? … I ask if they understand, they all say no. But they love to hear yueju! … So this influenced our thinking — how could we use folk music with the violin? How could we nationalize the violin?”

He Zhanhao (interviewed in 2000), on his inspiration to use the style of yueju in the Butterfly Lovers Concerto.⁴

• The concerto premiered in May of 1959, at the Lyceum Theatre in Shanghai, performed by the Shanghai Conservatory Symphony Orchestra. Fan Chengwu was the conductor and Yu Lina was the soloist.⁵
• The concerto is in one movement with three sections. It is a work of program music based on the Tang Dynasty (9th or 10th century) folk tale of the Butterfly Lovers. The story is sometimes called “Liang Zhu,” after the names of the couple in the story (the boy Liang and the girl Zhu)⁶
  • The folk tale follows star-crossed lovers Liang and Zhu, who are separated when Zhu’s family forces her to enter an arranged marriage. The lovers are reunited in death when they are reborn as a pair of butterflies.
  • You can find a full summary of the story, as it is told in each movement, here.

1.  Liner notes to “Chen/He: Butterfly Lovers Concerto (The),” Takako Nishizaki, Shanghai Conservatory Symphony, Cheng-wu Fan, Naxos 82031, CD, 1992.
2. Ibid.
3.  “The Butterfly Lovers, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra,” New York Philharmonic, accessed February 19, 2021, https://nyphil.org/~/media/pdfs/program-notes/1920/Chen-Gang-HE-Zhanhao-The-Butterfly-Lovers-Violin-Concerto.pdf. 
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.