Generally speaking, the sentence patterns of Huangmei Opera's libretto can be divided into two types: one is irregular, including three, four, five, six and seven character long and short sentences; One is neat or basically neat seven character sentences and cross sentences. The former comes from folk songs and folk songs, so we can call it folk song style; The latter generally comes from folk rap, so we might as well call it rap style.
Folk song style (long and short sentences). Since it has no fixed pattern, it is mostly used to express the colorful dramas with a strong flavor of life, that is, "two dramas... three dramas". Sometimes it can also be used as an episode in the play. The former, such as Kanxiang, is basically a five character sentence; "Sending Silk" has five and seven characters; "Naohua Deng" includes three, four, five and seven character sentences. The latter, such as "Wugeng Tone" in "Tianxian Pai", "Combing Hair Tone" in "Chicken Blood Record", and "Big Lotus Falling" in "Turong Record". However, the folk song style is not absolute long and short sentences, because in addition to many irregular sentence patterns, there are also regular seven character sentence cross sentence lyrics, such as "Play Peony", "Play Dummy Mystery" and other small plays that sing "Caidiao" lyrics. Most of these lyrics come from "pastoral" and "lottery", which are also folk songs. Its neat sentence pattern is also the same as the rap style, so it is difficult to strictly distinguish the form of a certain libretto belongs to that one. So it is more practical to say "long and short sentences" rather than folk songs. For example, the [Wugeng Woven Silk Tone] in Tianxian Pai: One more is just enough to sleep, just enough to sleep. One more mosquito is called one more day. My brother, mosquitoes! You are calling in that compartment, and I am listening in this compartment. It hurts my family, it hurts my family, and the more I call it, the more I hurt my feelings. My mother asks her daughter, "What is it? What is it?" "The old mother sleeps, a lot of chatter, a lot of chatter, a mosquito called a day."
The libretto of this song has three, four, five, six and seven words. The origin of the Wugeng tune is very early. It is well documented that there were similar Wugeng tunes everywhere in China in the Ming Dynasty. The closest one is the [Wugeng Song] in Guan Yunchang's Candle Waiting for the Day in the Ming Dynasty's version of Cilin Yizhi. I recorded one of them:
At one more point, I was sleeping when I heard the yelling of the yellow dog, which made me feel sad and lovesick. It was cold at night. Xiao Na asked to play with her? Dogs bark, dogs bark, until dawn. When the kettle drips and everyone is sentimental, how can we not make people sad and tear free.
Next is the cricket chirping at the third watch, the crow chirping at the fifth watch, and the two paragraphs of the second watch and the fourth watch are supposed to be deleted for the editor. It is obvious that the [Wugeng Woven Silk Tone] in Tianxian Pai has a clear inheritance relationship with Qingyang Opera. It shows that the mobility and inheritance of folk oral literature is very large. At the same time, it has always been interdependent with folk opera, and has formed an indissoluble bond.
