经历炼狱后的升华--回忆瞿希贤同志的几件往事

Reaching Sublimation After Experiencing Purgatory:Recollections of Comrade Qu Xixian's Stories

令人尊爱的前辈音乐家瞿希贤同志于2008年3月19日离我们而去了，终年89岁。她是在与病魔顽强地搏斗了几近十年后去世的，其经受的痛苦与孤单是常人难以承受的。因此，她的去世也是一种精神上和肉体的彻底解脱，我从心底对她说一句：“敬爱的瞿希贤同志，您走好！”

The highly respectable veteran musician Qu Xixian passed away on March 19,2008 at the age of 89.For dozens of years she had been fighting against illness and had suffered such great pain and loneliness that ordinary people can hardly bear.So in this sense,her death is something like spiritual relief,and for this I would say to her'Farewell,my dear Comrade Qu Xixian!'Our generation grew up with many of her songs.In the 1950's, some of her songs for children,such as'We Are the Flowers of Spring','Happy Evening Party'and'Song of Morning Exercise'be- came very popular among children in the newly-born People's Re- public of China,while her songs for masses'People in the World U- nite as One'and'Marching on the Road of Peace'were also wel- comed by children and were sung all over the country.So to me, she was a great musician with outstanding achievements.One thing often puzzled me:composers both in China and abroad were normal- ly all male,such as Bach,Mozart,Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in the west,and Huang Zi,Nie Er and Xian Xinghai in China.Qu Xixian, however,was such an exception that in some of her lofty and vigor- ous songs,she had an even broader heart than men. Qu Xixian was only 30 years old when the new republic was founded.During the very early years since then,she managed to com- pose her first published song'People in the World Unite as One'.She wrote an article for the October 1951 issue of the magazine People's Music to express her feelings on writing the song:'I see with my own eyes the liberation of Beijing,and the birth of the People's Republic of China.The dark,decadent and bloody reactionary regime has been overthrown by the people!Everything is so fresh,so bright,and so de- lighting!All I feel in my heart is:we win the victory!We win it!'This song is a direct disphy of such feeling:'victory flags flying high,and songs of people in thousands shaking the land'.This is the voice from the very bottom of the victors! With the success of'People in the World Unite as One',more songs came out,such as'We Want to Race with the Time','Marching on the Road of Peace'and'Cantata of Red Army Base',and each of them were so welcomed by the general public that Qu Xixian became famous almost over night,and she was listed as one of the most rep- resentative composers in the new China. There is something in common in these works:lofty and gallant tone,strong rhythms,and untamed passion,which made her one of the so-called'heroic-style'composers in the period.Many of her songs for children were also fervent and exciting,full of passion.It is really un- imaginable that such a quiet and slim female composer could write so heroic and powerful works.Or in other words,her songs can hardly match the image of her person,an honest and easy-going lady. Her greatest'hereic-style'song is'Proletariat in the World,U- nite'composed in 1963.The lyric was written by Guang Weiran,al- so the lyric writer of the'Yellow River Cantata'.The title came from Carl Marx and Frederick Engels's The Communist Manifesto,and is the book's main theme.The song is endowed with such passion of power and grandeur,and the music develops like surging in waves, higher and higher in the process,and it ends with provocative words which are almost earthshaking.'Proletariat in the World,Unite'is not only a summary of Qu Xixian's'heroic-style'song writings,but also a representative piece of music of that particular age. During the following period of the so-called'Cultural Revolu- tion',Qu Xixian suffered greatly in tragedy.All of her works were gone,including'Proletariat in the World,Unite'.Twenty years later, in March 1987,the Central Symphony Orchestra organized the Concert of Choral Works by Qu Xixian.On the programme there was no sign of the song'Proletariat in the World,Unite'.But during the encore at the end of the concert,the conductor Yan Liangkun suddenly raised his hands and conducted the choir to sing the song,and when the first sentence came out,the venue was imme- diately overwhelmed with thunderous applause from the audience.