Damndest thing: I am totally unable to find who actually wrote this. It's nowhere on the opera's wikipedia page or any other page, as far as I can see, nor is it listed anywhere in the credits. If you look for "Farewell My Concubine composer," you'll get Zhoa Jiping, who wrote the score for the (non-musical) film; if you look for "Farewell My Concubine opera composer," you'll get Xiao Bai, who wrote a contemporary Western-style opera on the subject, but this one? It is a mystery. Are we just meant to take it as a given that any older opera in this style is going to be anonymous? Hard to say.
So this takes place in ancient China, as perhaps all of these do. After the fall of the Qin Dynasy (200-ish BC), there's a struggle between the Han and the Chu. The Chu emperor Xiang Yu is tricked into attacking the Han by a supposed Han defector (in spite of Yu Ji, the concubine in question, warning against it) but he's actually a double agent, and the Chu are outmaneuvered. And that's a not all; the Han also use the most diabolical weapon imaginable: folk music. The idea is that if the Han are heard singing Chu folk songs, they'll assume that the Chu people have defected and thus be demoralized. So things go from bad to worse, and Yu Ji suggests that Xiang Yu should run to try to regroup while she stays and commits suicide, as she'd slow him down; he refuses but she kills herself anyway, and rather than be captured, he does the same. And that...is that!
I'm trying. I'm really trying. In particular, the dan singing from Yu Ji sounds immediately hilarious to me. That's not, obviously, because there's something intrinsically ludicrous about it it's just because of my ingrained sensibilities. But you don't have to just accept that: I did my best to suppress my instincts and hear it as a culturally neutral observer (as if such a thing were possible). And this did work, to the extent that I stopped finding it funny, but we haven't quite gotten to the point where I really appreciated it. Is the thing. And that's true of this whole art form, I think. If you know what it sounds like, you know what it sounds like.
This certainly looks good, I'll tell you that much for free. It was filmed (in 2014) in 3-D, and it's obvious that a lot of money was lavished on it. The background CG can be a little cheesy at times, but the colorful costumes look really good, and the movement is clearly done in such a way as to take best advantage of the 3-D. I'm sure it would be really breathtaking if you saw it as intended (it bums me out, not a lot but a little, that the most recent 3-D movie fad has died down), and even otherwise, it looks great.
But to me, the drama just isn't there. It's probably--definitely--ludicrous to imagine that I could have a reasonable grasp on this whole artform after seeing two (2) examples of it. It took way more than that for me to appreciate Western opera, and that's a lot less alien to my sensibilities. Still, if I want to have any hope of appreciating Chinese opera (as compared to Western-style Chinese opera, which is much easier), I'll need to watch a lot more, and I kind of don't think that's possible right now.
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