Exploration stage: (1919-1944) The new operas were either influenced by the new culture of the May Fourth Movement or adapted to the needs of the patriotic struggle against imperialism. The former, such as Lai Jinhui's children's operas "The Sparrow and the Child", "The Grape Fairy", and "The Little Painter", made useful contributions to the promotion of science and democracy, as well as the popularization and nationalization of art forms. The latter, such as Nie Er's The Tempest on the Yangzi River, Xiang Xiang's Rural Song, and Xian Xinghai's The Great Production of the People and the Military, have all made valuable attempts to reflect the content of the revolutionary struggle of the masses, to learn from the experience of Western operas, and to nationalize the art form.
Foundation Stage: (1944----1955) It started with the new rice-planting song movement after the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium. That is, a large number of rice-planting songs, such as: "Brother and Sister Open the Land" and "Husband and Wife Know How to Read and Write" opened up the right path for the creation of new operas. After that, "The White-haired Girl", "Liu Hulan" and "Chiba River" were successful again. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, it further explored the experience of creating new operas. The Little Two Black Marriages, Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang, and Song of the Grassland came out one after another.
In-depth exploration stage: (1956---) is to follow the "let a hundred flowers blossom, a hundred birds contend" policy, to further boldly explore the creative experience of the new opera. The new opera has three broad creative paths. First, close to the creative path of the opera, such as: "Red Coral", "Red Haze"; Second, basically adhere to the "White Hair Girl" creative path, such as: "Honghu Red Guard", "Sister Jiang"; Third, the musical language and style of the music are built on the basis of folk music in the musical form of the creation of techniques and draw on the experience of the creative path of the Western Opera, such as: "Aiguili" and so on.
Ten years of turmoil stopped the creation of new operas, and after 1976, new operas made new breakthroughs, such as "The Hurt Locker", "The Heart of Grass" and "The Hundredth Bride".
The pioneer of Chinese opera creation in the twentieth century was Li Jinhui, who created 12 children's operas, including "Sparrow and Child" and "Little Painter," which had a great impact on China at the time and set a precedent for Chinese opera creation. 1934 Nie Er and Tian Han launched "The Tempest on the Yangzi River," a "drama plus singing" approach that later became a popular favorite. This practice of "drama plus singing" later became a more common form of opera structure. From the mid-1930s, some professional composers in Shanghai and Chongqing explored different ways of creating national operas, and works such as Xishi (Chen Gexin, 1935), Peach Blossom Garden (Chen Tianhe, 1939), Song of Shanghai (Zhang Hao, 1939), Song of the Earth (Qian Renkang, 1940), and Song of the Desert (Wang Luobin, 1942) appeared, which most of them drew on the experience of Western grand opera compositions and sought to solve the problem of musical dramatization. Among these works, Huang Yuanluo's Qiu Zi was the most influential and highly accomplished. In Yan'an, there were also two works, "Rural Song" (composed by Xiangshi and others) and "March of the Soldiers and Citizens" (composed by Xinghai). Soon after, on the basis of the Yan'an rice-planting song movement, the rice-planting song operas "Brother and Sister Open the Wilderness" (composed by An Bo) and "Husband and Wife Learn to Read and Write" (composed by Ma Ke) were produced, and this kind of square song-and-dance operas, which were full of songs and dances and were novel and lively, changed the direction of the development of the art of opera in China, and directly nurtured the birth of a large-scale opera, "The White Haired Maiden" (composed by Ma Ke and other composers). White-haired Girl" is a milestone work in the history of Chinese opera, which marks that Chinese opera has finally found its own unique development path and formed its own distinctive aesthetic character. After "The White-haired Girl", there appeared "Liu Hulan" (composed by Luo Zongxian and others), "Red Leaf River" (composed by Liang Hanguang) and other excellent plays. Later, opera historians referred to the successive appearance of outstanding plays from "Sisters and Brothers" to "The White-haired Girl", "Liu Hulan" and "The River of Red Leaves" within a short period of time as the "First Opera Climax".
People's **** and seventeen years after the founding of the country, China's opera creation in the creative thinking to form a few different ways: one is to inherit the tradition of opera, the representative repertoire of "Xiao Erhei Marriage" (composed by Marco, etc.), "Red Cloud" (composed by Zhang Rui), "Red Coral" (composed by Wang Xiren, Hu Shiping), "Sinus Grievance" (composed by Chen Zi and other compositions); one is to take the folk song and dance opera, ditty opera or Lai's children's song and dance drama. One is to create a new type of song and dance drama using folk song and dance dramas, minstrel shows, or Li's children's song and dance dramas as a frame of reference, represented by Liu Sanjie; one is to use drama and singing as its own structural model, represented by Starlight, Starlight (composed by Fu Gengchen and Hu Yi), which appeared after the Cultural Revolution; and one is to use the traditional Western grand opera as a frame of reference, represented by Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang (composed by Wang Xiren and Hu Shiping); and one is to use a traditional western grand opera as a frame of reference. Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang" (composed by Liang Hanguang), "Song of the Grassland" (composed by Luo Zongxian), "Wangfu Yun" (composed by Zheng Lucheng), "Aiguli" (composed by Shifu and Ushimanjiang); the last is to use the experience of the creation of "The White Haired Maiden" as a reference system, and to adhere to the concepts and methods of the content of the needs of the starting point for all the artistic conception, neither subjected to, nor rejected any of the methods, as long as the content needs, can take both Western opera techniques, and Western opera techniques, can be used as well. As long as the content requires, it can also take western opera techniques, plate accent techniques or drama singing techniques. This mode of creation has two masterpieces of opera - Honghu Red Guard (composed by Zhang Jing'an and Ouyang Qianshu) and Jiang Sister (composed by Yang Ming, Jiang Chunyang and Jinsha), which proves that it has made outstanding achievements.
To the new period, due to the changes in the environment of the opera and the development of artistic concepts and operatic interests, there was a clear trend of polarization in the creation of operas:
One is the trend of elegance, i.e., to continue to dig deeper and deeper along the direction of the serious grand opera, and to take the comprehensive aesthetics of the opera to achieve an integrated and balanced at a higher level of aesthetics as a major goal of artistic exploration. The early results of this exploration are "The God of Flower Protection" (by Huang Anlun), "The Hurt Locker" (by Shi Guangnan), followed by "The Wilderness" (by Jin Xiangquan), "A Long Whistle in the Sky" (by Xiao Bai), "Arirang" (by Cui Sanming, etc.), and "The Return" (by Xu Zhanyai), and then, after the nineties, "Marco Polo" (by Wang Shiguang), "An Shigengen" (by Liu Zhenqiu), and "King of the Chu Barons" (by Jin Xiangquan), Sun Wu (by Cui Xin), Zhang Qian, Cang Yuan (by Xu Zhanhai and others), Eagle (by Liu Xijin), and Ami Girl (by Shi Fu). In terms of its ideology, artistry and opera synthesis of the beauty of the high-level camp Mang theory, "The Wilderness", "Cangyuan", "Zhangqian" can be regarded as the peak of the new period of serious grand opera creation.
The other is the trend of secularization, that is, to take the American Broadway musicals as a frame of reference, to explore the way to develop our own popular musicals in China. The earliest achievements in this regard were "Our Modern Youth" (by Liu Zhenqiu), "The Years of the Wind" (by Shang Yi) and "The Legend of Friendship and Love" (by Tsui Hark) in the early 1980s, and since then this kind of exploration has been going on throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with no fewer than a hundred new plays performed, but with few successes.