Lyrical souls turn ancient Chinese poetry into song

Chinese folk singer Gong Linna and her husband, Robert Zollitsch, perform at a concert in Beijing, where they reinterpret Chinese ancient poems with music.[Photo by Wang Xuhua/CFP]

A musician couple is turning ancient Chinese poetry into songs, Chen Nan reports.

The Austrian composer Franz Schubert was a pioneer of turning poems into music.

A similar line is now being followed in China by German composer Robert Zollitsch, who is working on poetry of two dynasties - Tang (AD 618-907) and Song (960-1279).

It is expected to both enliven Chinese music and bring back classical poems to a modern society.

"We want to use music to get those poems across to the contemporary scene, and (take them) to people from different cultures," says Zollitsch, 48.

Along with his wife, Gong Linna, a Chinese folk singer known for her powerful voice and dramatic facial expressions, Zollitsch has used such experiments in their latest album, Tang Song Dong Xi.

With Gong singing and Zollitsch composing, they used more than 15 Chinese poems from ancient poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu and Bai Juyi as lyrics.

The new album comprises two CDs.

Tang Song, referring to the two Chinese dynasties, sees Chinese and Western instruments played together, and the other CD, Dong Xi, a Chinese wordplay indicating the East and the West as well as the Chinese phrase meaning "the thing", has pop and electronic music in the songs.

The first song of the album is Jing Ye Si, or Thoughts on A Quiet Night, taken from the famous poem of the same title by Li Bai (AD 701-762).

Zollitsch says he has read the poem since the 1990s and so far has seen more than 300 translations of it.

"Though I am a foreigner, I can share the sentiments of the poem," says Zollitsch, adding that Austrian composer Gustav Mahler also used poems by Chinese poets like Li Bai, Meng Haoran and Wang Wei, as text sources in composing The Song of the Earth. "It's mutual human emotion, which is told through music."

For Gong, who, like many Chinese, learned the poems in school, she didn't understand the poem until she left home. The 39-year-old singer had moved with Zollitsch to Berlin in 2004 and returned to China in 2009.

She says, she connected with Li's poetry the most when she felt homesick while in Germany.

Instead of using her trademark high-pitched voice to impress listeners, she depicted the poems with her storytelling skills.