# He Made the Violin Speak Chinese—Remembering Chen Gang, Composer of The Butterfly Lovers

### The man who helped write The Butterfly Lovers has passed away.

At 4:50 a.m. on July 18, 2026, the renowned composer and Shanghai Conservatory of Music professor Chen Gang died of illness in Shanghai, aged 91.

As the news arrived, a familiar melody seemed to sound once more from afar.

The flute gently ripples the surface of the water. The violin takes up that tender, restrained theme, and a pair of butterflies rises once again from the strings. This time, however, we are bidding farewell through the music to one of the people who wrote it.

Chen Gang was born in Shanghai in 1935 and began studying music with his father, Chen Gexin, as a child.

He joined the army at 14 and wrote his first composition at 15. In 1955, he entered the composition department of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, studying with musicians including Ding Shande and Sang Tong. In 1959, before graduating, he collaborated with He Zhanhao to complete the violin concerto *Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai*, known as *The Butterfly Lovers*. He was just 24 that year.

![](https://static.lianmuse.com/image/blog/3a0bd94e479bff999f9d45e431ddc150.jpg)

Over the following decades, he composed works including *The Golden Furnace*, *Morning in the Miao Mountains*, *Sunshine over Tashkurgan*, and *Wang Zhaojun*, all of which became deeply embedded in China’s musical memory.

By 2025, Chen Gang was 90, yet he had not stopped composing. He presented a new symphonic work, *Blossoms*, looking back on Shanghai through music and sustaining the creative passion that had burned throughout his life.

He wrote *The Butterfly Lovers* at 24, and *Blossoms* at 90.

From youth to old age, he kept searching for a sound that belonged to China and could also be heard by the world.

### The evening The Butterfly Lovers was born

Violy previously [interviewed the renowned violinist Yu Lina, who gave the premiere of The Butterfly Lovers](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzUxMjU5ODMyMg==&mid=2247490810&idx=1&sn=bd7cc60a92c691db385ea2e0a716822e&scene=21#wechat_redirect).

In Violy’s account of that interview, Yu remembered that evening in 1959 and the shared efforts of a group of young Chinese musicians exploring how to make a Western instrument speak Chinese.

> Translator’s note: The original article repeatedly describes the premiere as taking place in the evening. A historical account by music scholar Guo Kejian, published in *China Art News* on the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles website, places it at 3 p.m. on May 27, 1959. The date is unchanged; the original’s evening wording is retained here with this clarification. [Historical account](https://m.cflac.org.cn/yl/202607/t20260724_1368297.html).

In the 1950s, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music established an experimental group dedicated to developing a Chinese national school of violin playing. The young musicians faced a simple but pressing question: how could the violin, an instrument from the West, speak in a way that Chinese listeners could understand and connect with?

He Zhanhao had worked in a Yue opera company’s orchestra and knew the vocal style of Yue opera and the character of music from Jiangnan, the region south of the lower Yangtze River. Chen Gang had received systematic professional training in composition and understood musical form, harmony, and orchestration. One brought the living tradition of Yue opera; the other gave its melodies a complete symphonic structure. Their collaboration gave *The Butterfly Lovers* its distinctive form.

As the composers wrote each passage, Yu Lina and her fellow students copied it out by hand and tried playing it, then the music was revised in response to what they heard. They studied Yue opera singing and erhu playing techniques, repeatedly exploring slides, vibrato, and musical breathing on the violin. They wanted this Western instrument to do more than play a Chinese melody: they wanted it to embody the expressive spirit of Chinese opera.

On May 27, 1959, *The Butterfly Lovers* premiered at Shanghai’s Lyceum Theatre, with Yu Lina as the violin soloist.

The final sounds of the piece were very soft.

In the account recalled in Violy’s article, when the closing passage ended, applause did not immediately follow. Yu Lina’s heart leapt with apprehension.

Then, after a moment, applause suddenly erupted from the audience and continued for a long time. He Zhanhao and Chen Gang were invited onto the stage. The performers took bow after bow, but the audience still would not leave. Since this was a concert of new works, no encore had been prepared. In the end, the musicians could only play *The Butterfly Lovers* again.

That evening, the melody truly moved its listeners.

![](https://static.lianmuse.com/image/blog/71a2ab7f1fb86304b59942b74112e208.jpg)

(From left: He Zhanhao, Chen Gang, and Yu Lina.)

Soon afterward, a recording of *The Butterfly Lovers* reached listeners across China through radio broadcasts. For many, it was the first realization that a violin could sing in the familiar accents of home; that symphonic music belonged not only to distant Western concert halls but could also tell the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, expressing Chinese experiences of love, parting, resistance, and longing.

A youthful work written, copied, tested, and revised on a college campus went on to endure for more than sixty years, becoming one of the most moving voices in Chinese music.

### What The Butterfly Lovers means to China

The significance of *The Butterfly Lovers* has never been limited to a love story set to a beautiful melody.

It answered an important question: can we use an art form shared around the world to express emotions and aesthetics that are distinctly Chinese?

The original tribute quotes Chen Gang as saying, “Symphonic music is not about telling stories; it is about expressing the spirit.”

In his view, *The Butterfly Lovers* did not simply place a folk legend inside a Western concerto framework. Through love, struggle, and transformation into butterflies, it distilled a human spirit: the longing for freedom, resistance to fate, and an unwavering pursuit of beauty.

The tribute also recalls a Shanghai Conservatory of Music article from March 2026 that recorded Chen Gang’s understanding of *The Butterfly Lovers*: listeners heard a love story, while he heard the Chinese spirit of “perseverance and the pursuit of beauty.” Reading those words again a few months later is especially moving.

![](https://static.lianmuse.com/image/blog/2f83f75f12653564ef0de7372c250290.jpg)

*The Butterfly Lovers* has endured not only because it is beautiful to hear, but because it has roots. The vocal style of Yue opera, the rhythms of Chinese opera, the subtlety of Jiangnan culture, and the depth of feeling and resilience with which Chinese people face love and fate all take life on its strings.

It also tells generations of children learning music that developing a national musical voice is not a matter of placing a few traditional symbols on the surface of a work. It means understanding where one’s culture comes from and how one’s emotions arise, then expressing them with honesty and creativity.

This is an important part of the legacy Chen Gang left to Chinese music.

Today, one of the people who helped write the lovers’ transformation into butterflies into the violin’s strings has departed.

But the butterflies will never take their final bow.

Whenever the introduction sounds again, whenever a young performer plays that familiar love theme, whenever a violin strives to speak in a language that belongs to China, Chen Gang lives on in his music.

Thank you, Mr. Chen Gang.

Thank you, together with He Zhanhao, Yu Lina, and that generation of young musicians, for enabling a violin from the West to sing in the accents of China. Thank you for turning love and parting, struggle and hope into melodies that people around the world can understand.

May the music endure, and may your memory live forever.

**Rest in peace, Mr. Chen Gang.**

**With deepest condolences from all of us at the Violy app**

**July 18, 2026**

[Original Chinese article](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzUxMjU5ODMyMg==&mid=2247507602&idx=1&sn=482e29482ba8a5a6bcd7a68c4c2ac9c7&chksm=f96096cfce171fd91064beeca7aa1e35eba4170634faa9e9e6f632b9dcc893632e5b0759ad71#rd)