One of the ideas we are entertaining for the Moon Festival celebration coming up in September is to have the kids break up into groups and perform skits of various Chinese myths and stories.

One of the most famous is the legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, often abbreviated as Liang Zhu, and it is considered the Chinese Romeo & Juliet. “Liang zhu” means “butterfly” in Chinese, so the English translation is “Butterfly lovers.”

Long story short: Zhu is a brilliant young girl and pretends to be a man in order to attend school, where she and her classmate Liang fall deeply in love. When she finally reveals her true identity as a woman, they prepare to get married, but her parents have already arranged her engagement to another man. Liang dies of a broken heart, and Zhu commits suicide. The two are reincarnated as a pair of butterflies (hence “liang zhu”).

Due to the nature of the ending, I preliminarily decided against the inclusion of this in the Moon Festival skits. However, I wanted to post about it because not only is it a famous legend, but in 1959 it was adapted into a violin concerto that is now extremely famous both in and outside of China. This is easily one of my favorite works of music. I used to play both piano and flute, so I learned the piano solo arrangement as well as the flute part in the original orchestral arrangement.

This is a breathtakingly beautiful piece, listening to it instantly brings all kinds of emotions for me, this is one of the pieces I grew up listening to (and playing!). Please share this with your children, especially if they play instruments!

I would be happy to send an MP3 to whoever would like to download the song to listen to. I can also scrounge up the piano arrangement if anyone would like a scan! (It is intermediate/advanced skill level though, so someone playing for 1-2 years probably shouldn’t attempt it, will get discouraged :P)

Email me or drop a comment if interested in MP3 or sheet music!