Fresh flowers surrounded a five-meter tall portrait in the lobby of the Forbidden City Concert Hall last Sunday evening in Beijing.
Also surrounded by flowers was a conductor's podium, upon which was placed a number of music scores and a baton that had obviously weathered years of usage.
The concert-goers added their own flowers to the pile to pay their tribute to Li Delun, the man in the portrait who has been recognized as the father of New China's symphony orchestras.
The concert, presented by China National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its artistic director Tang Muhai, was dedicated to Li Delun's 55-year career as a musician and a conductor.
Li, 84, was the founder and chief conductor of the orchestra's former incarnation, the Central Symphony Orchestra. Confined to hospital for the past two years because of kidney failure, Li listened to the live broadcast on local Beijing Music Radio from his bed.
"He followed every note of the concert numbers, with his eyes half closed and his fingers moving to every par," said Chen Xiong, a Beijing-based freelance photographer, who was with Li Delun in his hospital ward on Sunday night.
For the past two years, Li had kept his easy manner during his battles against illness.
He kept telling nurses stories from classical Chinese novels and teaching them poems from the Tang (AD 618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties.
When visitors came, he would reminisce about his earlier life as an ardent music student and how he co-founded the Chinese Youths' Orchestra with his friends in Shanghai in 1942.
He studied cello and music theory under three Russian teachers at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.
His choice to major in music caused much frustration for his parents, who feared it would not lead to regular employment.
However, music became Li's career. Upon his graduation in 1946, he went to Yan'an, the alluring revolutionary base, where Communist Party's headquarters were based from 1935 to 1948.
He still recalls the days when he and his colleagues established Yan'an's first symphony orchestra that included a brass section.
The day he entered Beijing with the People's Liberation Army in January 1949, Li and the other orchestra members from Yan'an went to Tsinghua University to perform a concert. Mozart's Serenade was among the numbers.
"Our costumes were rather dirty, but our instruments were shiny," Li said.
In 1953, Li went to study conducting under Professor Nickolai Anosov at the Moscow Conservatory. Anosov said Li was one of his four most outstanding students.
Li's graduation concert in 1957, featured Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 6 and Brahms' Symphony No 1.
He returned to China in 1957 to conduct Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 6 in his first concert as the conductor of the Central Symphony Orchestra.
Even though he held a prominent position with a prominent national orchestra, Li soon discovered that his music career, like Tchaikovsky's "Pathetic," would be filled with much melancholy.
"He wasn't able to conduct the pieces he loved as political movements followed one after another," Li Jue, Li Delun's wife, said.
Despite the political upheavals, Li remained optimistic and committed to music.
In 1977, right after the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) ended, Li picked up the baton again to conduct Beethoven's Symphony No 5, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the great composer's death.
Li came to world-renown in 1979 after he appeared in the award-winning documentary "From Mao to Mozart - Isaac Stern in China." Li was Stern's translator and concert partner.
Prior to the making of the documentary, Li had lost a kidney in a major operation to prevent the spread of cancer. He was further stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage that began to affect his physical movements and eyesight.
Li has always been a fighter, however, and has continued to promote classical music in society.
Over the past 20 years, he has witnessed the ups and downs of classical music in China.
In the early 1980s, he and his colleagues organized weekend concerts and festivals featuring Beethoven's nine symphonies and other classical pieces.
However, pop music that entered the Chinese mainland from Hong Kong and Taiwan soon lured away many youngsters from classical music and there was a dramatic drop in ticket sales for classical music concerts.
Many musicians within the Central Symphony Orchestra and other classical music orchestras talked about the need to change with the times.
Though criticized as a "conservative," Li held onto his belief that classical music was the lifeline of the orchestra.
To cultivate more classical music fans, Li, after retirement from the Central Symphony Orchestra, shuttled between colleges, universities, factories and other institutions to give lectures on music.
His lobbying prevented the Beijing Symphony Orchestra from being disbanded in 1990.
It is now very active in music circles in Beijing.
Li made his last concert appearance on November 19, 1999, on a reunion performance with Isaac Stern.
Li had originally intended to conduct the Sunday concert.
"We told him in winter that we'd like him to conduct the orchestra again when spring comes," said Tang Muhai. "I promised that I would make full preparations."
Li was regretful about not being able to conduct the concert, Chen Xiong said.
However, his legacy of promoting classical music will be continued by the establishment of a fund from ticket sales from Sunday's concert.
"I have done what I should do over the years," Li said. "In comparison to what the pioneering Chinese musicians did since the 1920s, I have done very little.
"To me, popularizing classical music is not for the sake of music alone. It is for elevating the spirit of society. It will not be done by a few people alone."
(China Daily 03/27/2001)
