While Austria's Camerata Salzburg has been touring several
Chinese cities since September 22, Mozart fever will continue on the land of
China. In an exclusive interview with China.org.cn in late
September, Professor Zhu Yibing, a man who has been promoting
classic music tirelessly, told about the musical genius' reputation
and works in China.
This year is the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. There are
many celebration and commemoration activities held in China,
including concerts, seminars, music festivals and China Central
Television's 48-episode TV special The Mozart Code.
"Is music just a sound? No! Music has colors, music has
temperature, music has smells," said Zhu Yibing, a professor from
Central Conservatory of Music, drawing from 30 years of musical
study.
In his eyes, Mozart's music is longing for life's palette of
colors. "Mozart is a wild kid inside noble clothes. If you think
he's a calm, peaceful and graceful young man, you don't feel the
temperature of his works. The temperature is not explicit. The
clothes are most gorgeous, elegant and delicate, but the music
sounds modern and strange. Mozart's play is simple, but
demonstrates his feeling for beauty of life, nature, and the world.
He is a spirit of endless power. He's like a sun in music history,
way up there, so beautiful, and eternal. His music is filled with
longings and passions for life, with his teenage, youth and adult
years, with the way he lived his life, with the way he treated
people, and with his various tricks. " Zhu said.
"Mozart is the greatest pop musician at his time 250 years ago.
His music is so great that it could still be heard today. It's the
essence selected by history. More and more people love his works,
even Taiwan's pop group SHE started to sing Mozart." he
laughed.
Zhu compared classical music to cuisine, where people have to
sample different dishes to know their tastes and discover new ones.
Often taking his students to classical concerts, Zhu uses his
experiences to show that when an audience is slowly introduced to
something new, interest will rise, while a too sudden confrontation
to a huge music catalog will cause them to back away in fear.
"Mozart's symphonies are played most in China." Zhu told of
Mozart’s status in music education, but he suggested that in the
teaching process, people should feel more about the musician’s
inner being through the chamber music. "Take piano teaching for
example, people think his sonatina is easiest. Indeed, Mozart's
style is easiest and clearest, but you may still play Mozart when
you devote your whole life to music and become a master or a
professional. The simplicity of his music is an insurmountable
peak. It is the simplicity of his combination and passion for the
beauty of arts, performance and music. The simple beauty is the
purest beauty and the misunderstanding of his sonatina indicates
that our music teachers do not understand Mozart enough, said
Zhu.
Zhu's knowledge about music and musical education is unique as
shown in his thoughts that "Chinese people's standard to measure
arts is to see if one has great skills. But it's wrong. We have to
feel the soul of Mozart and the whole Western classic music with
our hearts. Chinese people work too hard, their skills have long
surpassed those Western performers, however, we still have great
gap. That is because we pay so much attention to skills and styles,
but ignore the feelings.”
"If you don't feel it, you don't understand Mozart," he
concluded.
(China.org.cn by Luo Xu and Zhang Rui, October 5, 2006)