Manifestation of national culture in Chinese classical music on the example of the opera «The White-haired Girl» (1945)

The subject of this study is the process of reflecting elements of national culture in Chinese opera, using the classic work «The White-haired Girl» as an example. The focus is on the way traditional artistic forms – folk song melodies, performance techniques of the traditional Chinese theater xiqu, and the sound of folk instruments – are combined with the Western operatic form adopted by China at the end of the 19th century. The author examines how these elements, consciously transformed within a professional context, contribute to the expression of national identity within the academic operatic genre. Special attention is paid to the phenomenon of folklorism, understood not as mere quotation of folklore, but as a deep artistic reworking and reinterpretation of traditional material. Thus, the subject of the study is not only the opera «The White-haired Girl» itself, but also the cultural devices that allow folk tradition to exist organically in a modern stage format. The study is based on an interdisciplinary synthesis of historical-cultural analysis, musicological examination of opera fragments, as well as sociocultural and folkloristic approaches. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the interdisciplinary synthesis of sociocultural and folkloristic approaches applied to the analysis of the incorporation of Chinese folk melodies into the Western operatic form. Unlike previous studies, which considered either only musicological aspects or exclusively the cultural context, this approach reveals a two-way process: how folk material, under the influence of professional compositional technique, acquires new qualities while retaining its ethnic recognizability. The analysis establishes that the opera «The White-haired Girl» serves as a vivid example of the successful embodiment of folk tradition in modern academic theater. The conclusions emphasize that Chinese folk music and the traditional xiqu theater are the foundation for the formation of a unique national operatic language, and that folklorism acts as the key method that transforms authentic material into a basis for creating original stage works that preserve cultural identity.