Original subtitles

Man in Black

No, no, stop thinking…

In 1949, I was 13 years old,

in Gansu, in my last year

at the Pingliang Catholic school.

The People’s Liberation Army came through our town.

We were poor, so I joined up.

One less mouth to feed at home.

So on September 18th, 1949

I joined the PLA.

No. 11 Cultural Troupe, 1st Field Army.

I was in the ranks from 1949 to 1957.

Eight years in all,

the last two in Beijing.

The new Central Military Commission had opened a school

for conductors of military music.

I was there 18 months, and having good grades

I was sent to Shanghai for teacher training,

to train other conductors.

I was there for 6 months.

There I met professors from the Shanghai Conservatory,

including my future teacher,

a conductor and pianist, who would later be shot,

Professor Lu Hong-en.

He taught me piano.

The army soon closed the school,

so, rather than go back to Beijing,

I applied to the Shanghai Conservatory.

The standard was high,

but I got in right away, with my new work,

Op. 1, Young Soldiers March.

I spent five years there, from 1957 to 1962.

For 3 years, I progressed politically,

actively working to build socialism

as a young cadre in the Youth League.

But then all that changed.

I wanted to work on technique.

That seemed crucial to me.

I began to grow apart from the Party,

I was tired of their preaching.

So from that moment,

we started to think differently.

They said, to compose music,

first and foremost you need correct thought.

and a knowledge of Marxism-Leninism.

Then you can plunge into the world.

Eat, live and work like the masses.

Technique comes later.

For me, without technique,

you can’t even start.

So I broke with the Party

and never joined.

There was no chance I would get my diploma.

The whole class condemned me for wrong thinking.

Banging on their desks, saying I'd end up a Rightist.

A nightmare!

So in those 5 years, I had changed completely.

That was when I wrote my first symphony,

the first movement.

I had studied with Professor Qu Wei,

who taught me a lot, I’ll always be grateful.

Truly.

After finishing the first movement

I joined the Radio Symphony Orchestra.

It wasn’t a creative place and I soon regretted joining.

But I had to stay, so I worked on my technique.

That was 1963.

I spent that year composing

the 2nd and 3rd movements of my 1st Symphony

and Yunnan Tone Poem. Six movements in all.

Two major works.

Later I heard I was the only graduate in China

to have written two major works.

As far as I know.

But I still wasn’t sure if I really had talent.

In October 1963, the Party asked us for feedback.

Speak up, they said. So I obliged,

with a two-hour speech.

I said, you’re doing politics, not art.

Well, they took it badly. They said I was anti-Party.

A lot of people agreed with me,

but the Party singled me out.

In six months,

they held ten criticism sessions

so everyone could attack me.

I was expelled from the Youth League,

from the Radio Orchestra, and finally from Beijing.

I left town in April 1964.

The Cultural Revolution began in 1966.

I was in Datong, in a sanatorium.

I’d had a breakdown.

I had nightmares,

I was screaming at night.

Delirious.

They sent me to that place, and 6 months later

the Cultural Revolution started.

So they hauled me out to be criticized.

When I got back, I saw posters everywhere,

“Down With Wang Xilin!”

It was awful.

I was terrified.

Dunce’s cap, slogans round my neck,

“struggle sessions”, I had it all.

That was 1966.

Then things seemed to calm down, so I joined some Red Guards

and was left in peace.

Then in '68

the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams

were back in action.

That year, the violence peaked.

The persecution was brutal.

In that year, I lost my teeth

and my hearing.

They came in the night,

Dragged us from village to village,

walking us miles between each beating.

Riding ahead on a horse and cart,

as we trudged along behind,

hands tied with ropes.

All day, sometimes,

carrying a sign saying “Counter-Revolutionary”.

As I walked, I thought,

I’m a convict, a political prisoner.

And I felt some pride.

Like a rebel, a Decembrist.

And I thought, one day

I’ll tell this story in a symphony.

That was how my 3rd Symphony came to me,

as a convict, being beaten and persecuted.

That was the origin of the prisoner figure

in the first movement.

In 1968 and 1969, I was in Datong.

The abuse continued through 1969.

They smashed all my teeth.

Then from 1970,

the propaganda teams stepped aside

and the army took over.

They saw I was a former soldier

and let me go.

Clearly I had to leave Datong as soon as possible,

I’d never survive another wave of beatings.

A theatre troupe in South-West Shanxi

invited me, and I left for Taiyuan,

where I conducted an opera,

Shajiabang, for the Shanxi Province

Peking Opera Troupe.

When they realised I could conduct,

we spoke privately.

I said, get me transferred,

I’ll go anywhere!

Don’t worry, they said, we’ll handle it.

That’s how I got out.

I knocked around Shanxi for a year, like a vagrant,

a stray dog,

sleeping in the porter’s lodge

at the opera house.

The dance and theatre troupes all knew what I could do,

but no-one would employ me.

I had to cower in fear like a dog!

I got a phobia for the colour red.

I talked in my sleep.

If I saw a portrait of a Party leader,

I’d start shaking.

Sometimes, just seeing anyone,

any human being…

For decades after that, I talked in my sleep.

Until now, these last two years,

with my wife by my side.

I’m 86 years old.

That treatment in my twenties

gave me nightmares for life.

And my elder sister.

She…

She lost her mind.

In 1957 she was a branded a Rightist,

sent to do 3 years’ hard labour in Xinjiang,

then released, but under constant surveillance.

When she died, she was still seeing ghosts.

My brother starved to death in 1961,

in the three-year “natural disaster”.

I’m the only one who survived.

So that 1968 experience of being a prisoner

inspired Procession,

the 1st movement of my 3rd Symphony in 1989.

I saw the Chinese people as a long line of prisoners

with no end in sight.

Then came Slaughterhouse and Madman’s Song.

I'd lost my mind!

Driven mad, like so many others,

some to suicide.

The terror of forced confessions.

A nightmare.

Denying yourself, over and over,

pleading, with no chance of forgiveness.

Filling endless thick notebooks

with confessions for them to inspect.

So I named the 3rd movement Madman’s Song.

My work is full of madmen.

Minds about to shatter.

In my 5th…

the theme is madness.

My 3rd has four movements.

The first expresses captivity.

I saw the Chinese people as a line of convicts,

A procession moving through a wilderness,

soundlessly,

in chains, their faces blurred and gray,

stepping silently through the desolate landscape.

Those images have never left me,

like the convict in the 1st movement.

For the 2nd movement,

I chose a scene of slaughter.

A major act of armed repression.

I was on the square that day.

Around 11, loudspeakers sounded the alert.

I took my bike and rode home.

So I wasn’t there to see it.

But I pictured the scene

and described it in my music.

The army advancing, and to either side,

ahead of the tanks,

people scattering, running.

As vividly as if I was standing there.

Later, I read Li Rui’s poems

describing the carnage,

exactly as I had imagined it.

My 2nd movement describes a bloodbath.

The 3rd is an adagio.

People have been driven mad.

A deathly silence.

Then the madman’s dreary song.

How would that sound? A madman has no songs.

His mind is gone.

He cries and bleeds in silence.

Snow falls from the sky without a sound.

Blood flows on the ground in silence.

All moving silently, snow and blood.

That's the scene.

As if you want to cry but tears won't come.

The madman sings,

a steady monotone.

That’s the 3rd movement.

Then the 4th…

A huge popular uprising.

The crowd is vast, seething,

a magnificent, pulsing wave…

I spoke twice to the crowd on the square.

They hoisted me up on a cart,

They passed me a bottle, it was empty,

they shouted, A toast, sir! To victory!

How intensely I felt the people breathe!

So the fourth movement is a grand crowd scene.

Yet in the end, it comes back to the prisoner.

Because I see no future.

As an author, I can’t give people false hope!

Paint a glorious future?

I don’t see one.

Sell people a fairy tale?

Never!

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. The Party was dead!

An earthshaking event!

Wonderful news!

No comment allowed in China.

Fine, I thought, I will speak in music.

I have my own view of history, of the twentieth century.

Different from the Government’s.

I can tell you.

Communism in the 20th century

starts as a passionate ideal, ardently desired,

and ends in a cruel, merciless betrayal.

That’s how I see it.

So when I started working on my 4th Symphony,

I could hardly tell them what it was about.

Impossible.

Could I call it “Untitled”?

They said, fine.

So for once, I was free.

No title, no constraints,

I could write what I liked.

It starts in a slow tempo.

Slow and solemn.

Just like the 3rd, but in a very different idiom.

Very interesting!

So first, a great disaster!

followed by total collapse.

That was the outline of my 4th Symphony.

The problems started at the premiere.

It was a commission,

with some government funding.

Not much, 70,000 yuan.

So I got down to work.

In rehearsals,

I said it was untitled but they asked

what it was about.

I shouldn’t have answered. I said,

the 20th century is behind us.

It has seen historic events.

Two world wars.

Millions dead.

But also, huge strides in science and technology.

For me, however,

the most significant event of the 20th century

was the passionate ideal of Communism

and its cruel betrayal.

Burning desire, then ruthless rejection.

Everyone clapped!

Of course my remarks were reported.

And I was instantly blacklisted.

I was summoned before management

and reprimanded.

Wang Xilin, they said,

your work clearly violates the Four Primary Goals!

The project is cancelled!

Comply or face arrest!

Why write the piano concerto?

Out of sheer fury!

I objected to the Yellow River Concerto,

a creation of the Gang of Four,

that adapted, or rather disfigured Xian Xinghai's cantata,

That was a tribute to the anti-Japanese resistance.

A beautiful work.

The winds that roar… Beautiful.

They turned it into a hymn to Mao!

The 4th movement merged The East is Red

and the Internationale in a heroic march.

all solely to the glory of Mao Zedong!

Nothing left of the original.

That concerto is played worldwide

by many different pianists.

I had to counter it.

That was my first goal.

My second goal was to rehabilitate Lu Hong-en,

my former piano teacher, shot by the Party in 1968.

I studied with him in Shanghai before entering the Conservatory

I was just 19 or 20.

We stayed in touch,

I attended his concerts.

They killed him in 1968.

Death by firing squad

after a grand public trial on People’s Square.

But that devastating news never reached me.

In 1968 I was still confined.

I only learned the details decades later.

I wanted to write a concerto in his honour.

I knew as early as 1971, but was afraid to compose anything.

And I only learned the details in 2004.

So my decision

was spurred by that, and by the Yellow River piece.

Two goals.

How could I describe Lu Hong-en?

He was solid, unyielding.

They beat him in prison,

dislocated his jaw.

He was 49 when they shot him.

A conductor,

and typical of that circle of Shanghai intellectuals

who were all shot in those years.

Another reason for my choice, in those years

16 Conservatory professors committed suicide.

Gu Shengyin, the famous pianist,

turned on the gas, together with his family.

Li Cuizhen also gassed himself.

The Yangs, Zhao Xuesen’s parents.

They all took their own lives.

I knew many of them personally.

What about torture?

The worst of all was branding with a red-hot iron.

The smoke from the burning flesh!

I used high violin trebles for the sizzling sound,

then the rattle of a xylophone

for the smoke.

And a tuba. Wood and brass

evoke a billowing cloud.

It took me six months

trying out different materials,

to simulate that burning of flesh in music.

That’s the ‘disaster’ sequence of my 4th Symphony.

I had to portray other tortures, too.

The beating of Lu Hong-en.

What could express that?

The experience of being beaten?

I thought of the Peking opera Wild Boar Forest,

There’s a character, Lin Chong,

who is flogged in his jail cell.

I used Peking Opera percussion effects,

It worked perfectly!

I was able to create a modern sound form

to render the violence Lu suffered in prison.

I wanted to show the prison bars.

The iron cage!

I used the same effect

as for the shackles,

bass notes on the piano.

All that

to picture the horror of being chained in a cage.

How do you know me?

You knew my father too?

– I knew your father, yes,

as I have always known you.

But the vengeance that I seek

has other causes too.

My soul still bears the scars

of many ancient blows,

some dealt by other men,

and some by my own hand.

– Avenger, do you feel

the orphan's and the widow’s pain?

– Compassion,

justice,

all those ideals,

that guided us of old

are nothing now but base

degraded tokens bought and sold.

The vengeance that I seek

has other causes too.

My soul still bears the scars

of many ancient blows,

some dealt by other men,

and some by my own hand.

For love, for love

For love, for love, hey ho!

The blue sword fell on the avenger and his foe!

Tyrant follows tyrant,

how many shall we see upon the throne?

One loved the sword

and he was not alone.

Two men were wronged, two heads for one,

Another bloody tyrant was brought low!

English subtitles: Robin Setton