Uploaded January 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago

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Lan Huahua 蓝花花 arranged for Solo Piano 钢琴独奏 by Wang Lisan 汪 立 三 is an ancient Chinese folk song originated in the Shaanxi Province 陕西省. The composition for Solo Piano 钢琴独奏 was written in 1953.

It can be traced back to as early as the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 A.D.). It tells a story about a young lady named Lan Huahua 蓝花花 (English: Blue Flower/Orchid Flower) who resisted an arranged marriage forced upon her and eventually ran away and reunited with her original lover.

In 1953 Wang Lisan 汪 立 三 wrote Lan Hua Hua 蓝花花, a piece that is based on a folk song and designed as a dramatic narrative. Its harmonics, which had already been significantly expanded, found its way into Europe and was considered a pioneering work in the development of Chinese piano music.

There is a beautiful vocal version of Lan Huahua 蓝花花 that I can recommend: youtu.be/aIc-KzFbE_E

Wang Li-san (Chinese 汪立三, born March 24, 1933 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, Republic of China; † July 6, 2013 in Shanghai, People's Republic of China) was a Chinese composer.

Life

Wang grew up in Qianwei, Sichuan Province. In the Second Sino-Japanese War, his family fled with him to Chengdu in 1937 before the invasion of the Japanese troops. With the support of his parents, he became interested in music and art of his country at an early age, but also in Chinese opera, calligraphy and Taoist philosophy. In addition to local forms of folk music, his early influences included the songs of Chao Yuen Ren (1892– 1982), Huang Zi (1904–1938), Xian Xinghai (1905–1945) and Nie Er (1912–1935). At the same time he got to know the works of classical European composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Claude Debussy through recordings. In addition, he was influenced by the writings of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) and Wang Guangqi (1892–1936).

In 1948, Wang took piano and violin lessons from He Huixian and Zhang Jishi at the Hubei University of the Arts in Wuhan. After a stopover in 1950 as a piano teacher in Tianjin he moved to the Shanghai Conservatory in 1951, where he studied composition with Ding Shan-de, Sang Tong (1923–2012) and the Russian Fyodor Grigoryevich Arsamanow (1925–1995), as well with Chen Mingzhi (1925–2009) and Qian Renkang (1914–2013). Under the university director He Lüting, both Chinese and Western classical music were taught there. Wang belonged to a group of young composers who, in the wake of Claude Debussy and Béla Bartók, but also Modest Mussorgski and Sergei Prokofjew were pushing the boundaries of tonality and striving to develop the Chinese pentatonic scale. With this Spirit he came increasingly into conflict with the party doctrine, which at that time began to fight more and more Western influences. Wang's first compositions included the piano pieces Lan Hua Hua (1953) and Sonatina (1957)

In April 1957 he critically examined the orchestral music of Xian Xinghai, who had composed the cantata on the Yellow River, which Mao Zedong loved, in the magazine Folk Music (Renmin yinyue). On the occasion of this article, Wang was branded a deviator, expelled from the university and in 1959 exiled to the northeast to do forced labor on the countryside with the Hejiang Reclamation Bureau's Art Troupe. After the group was disbanded in 1962/63, he was transferred to the music department of the Harbin Academy of Arts in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, and was able to work there as a teacher. During the Cultural Revolution from 1966, he was again given sanctions. He had to give up his apprenticeship again and could only take it up again in 1972. In 1979 he was appointed visiting professor at the Harbin Academy of Arts and in 1986 professor. Until 1996 he was also head of the institute, a time in which he worked primarily as a pedagogue, university lecturer and scientist and hardly got to composing. As a representative of Chinese music, he was also sent to international exchange meetings in 1987 in Stuttgart, in 1988 in New York and in 1990 in Hong Kong. He retired in 2002 and returned to Shanghai; despite suffering a stroke in 2003, he continued to compose until 2007, and passed away in July 2013.

Work

Wang also left behind individual orchestral and vocal works, but he mainly wrote works for piano. In his pieces he often referred to folk songs, dances and local theater and opera traditions, which he processed with modern western composition techniques. One of the earliest surviving works is A Miniature - Impression of a Dulcimer, created in 1950/51, still very much influenced by pentatonic structures and inspired by the sound of the Sichuan dulcimer. The sonatina from 1957, which he was not able to publish until 1981, and the poem composed before 1959 showed how far Wang had strayed from the party-conform music norm. During the exile, only a few, more adapted works such as We Are Walking Along the Broad Road (1964) were created. In 1977 he wrote the ballad „Song of the Guerrilla, a tribute“.

#Lanhuahua #蓝花花 #汪立三