刘德海 Liu Dehai: Master of Pipa
- Paul Easton
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
刘德海Liu Dehai, the celebrated pipa virtuoso, stands as an outstanding representative of performers who rose to prominence in China in the late 1950s. His playing emanates pure articulation, beautiful tone color and consummate technique, characterized by refinement and subtlety. His renditions of contemplative works are delicate and touching, while martial pieces surge with passion, delivering powerful artistic appeal that leaves a lasting impression on audiences. Hailed as a master of the pipa and a national treasure, he earned extraordinary renown at home and abroad.
Born in Shanghai in 1937, Liu Dehai’s ancestral home was Cang County, Hebei Province. Beginning in middle school, he was deeply passionate about folk music and displayed remarkable musical talent. At the age of thirteen, he began learning erhu, dizi and among other instruments, and joined the amateur folk music ensemble of Shanghai People’s Broadcasting Station.
In 1954, he began his pipa studies under Lin Shicheng, the distinguished pipa performer and inheritor of the Pudong School. After receiving his university examination results, he originally intended to pursue mathematics when his pipa teacher informed him that the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing was holding admissions examinations, persuading him to enter the examination hall once again.
In 1957, Liu Dehai was admitted to the Central Conservatory of Music, majoring in pipa. During his first year of university, he was deeply distressed. He knew nothing of music theory and had never studied staff notation. Everything felt alien to him, as many of his classmates had progressed directly from the conservatory’s affiliated middle school. Their hands danced across the keyboard, and they spoke fluently on theoretical topics. Liu Dehai felt the gap separating them was insurmountable.
To ease his frustration, he bought textbooks to teach himself advanced mathematics and purchased components to assemble radios. He even contemplated dropping out of music school entirely. Then, an incidental incident stirred him deeply, and he swore to master music theory and all his professional courses.
One afternoon during a sports break, Liu Dehai returned to a classroom to drink water. Only one other student was present, a fellow musician who had also come from another province. Noticing the classmate staring blankly at the blackboard, Liu Dehai asked: “What are you doing?” Slowly the student turned his gaze away from the board and faced Liu Dehai, who saw tears welling up in his eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Liu Dehai asked. Without uttering a word, the classmate picked up chalk and wrote a large single character firmly on the blackboard covered with musical notation: inferior. He then turned to Liu Dehai and said: “They received musical training from childhood. We can never catch up. We should admit defeat.”
Liu Dehai’s pride was wounded. He turned, grabbed a piece of red chalk, and drew a thick cross over the character “inferior”. He declared resolutely: “I refuse to surrender!” From that moment, Liu Dehai embarked on an arduous regimen. He practiced the pipa seven to eight hours every day. If practice rooms were occupied, he practiced in the corridor. If it was after hours, he stuffed towels beneath the strings to practice silently. Sometimes he simply slept in his clothes inside the practice room.
This purgatorial period changed many things in his life. It erased his classmates’ prejudice against students coming from outside the conservatory system, it transformed Liu Dehai’s own understanding of the pipa, but most importantly, it secured a place in China’s musical history for an indomitable pipa performer.
Building upon the performance techniques of the Pudong School, he drew widely from diverse traditions. He later sought instruction from Cao Anhe of the Chongming School, Sun Yude of the Shanghai Wang School, Yang Dajun of the Zhu Ying School and other masters. Absorbing strengths from multiple schools, he greatly advanced the fundamental techniques of pipa performance and cultivated profound literacy in traditional music.
Building on the foundation of conventional pipa techniques, he introduced numerous innovative approaches to performance method and musical interpretation according to the content of compositions.
One major technical breakthrough was his liberation the left thumb. In traditional pipa technique, the left thumb was never used to on the strings. By doing so, he was able to reduce frequent position shifts, enhancing melodic fluency, increased playing speed, expanding the expressive range of the pipa. He also transformed the traditional tremolo technique, enabling thee index, middle, ring and little finger of the right hand to execute independent tremolo strokes, generating subtle variations in timbre and tone quality.
Over his long career, Liu Dehai commanded an extensive repertoire, encompassing many ancient classics of which he made his own arrangements. Whenever audiences hear his interpretations of Five Heroes on Langya Mountain, Lord Chu Retires his Armor, Ambush from All Sides and other works, it feels as though he narrates historical tales through the pipa. His narrative performance were clear and vivid, effortlessly drawing listeners into the many scenes of these epic tales. And in following the improvisatory tradition of the pipa, though he did write an official arrangment of Ambush on all Sides, sledom, if ever, did he perform it the same way twice. Audiences marveled at the sublime mastery of his craft.
To popularize traditional music, Liu Dehai arranged numerous classic and popular songs for pipa solo, and also composed a wealth of philosophically rich pipa works, many of which advanced and modernized the voice of the pipa, while creating many new techniques in the process.
He travelled to more than thirty countries and regions for performances and academic lectures. He conducted fruitful experiments combining the pipa with symphonic orchestras and made important contributions, opening new horizons for the pipa in international cultural exchange.
Among his many international achievements, between 1978 and 1981 he collaborated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the West Berlin Symphony Orchestra, and the renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa, performing his pipa concerto Little Sisters on the Grassland in Beijing, the United States and Frankfurt. The concerts were warmly received by Chinese and international audiences alike, marking a glorious chapter in the confluence of Chinese and Western music.
Rigorous professional training, decades of stage experience, teaching practice and broad life experience endowed Liu Dehai with profound musical insight, enabling him to interpret the inner meaning of musical works with exceptional mastery, reaching the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment.
He served as a professor at the China Conservatory of Music, Member of the Standing Council of the Chinese Musicians Association and Deputy Director of its Performing Arts Committee, Member of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, as well as Pipa Soloist and Principal Pipa of the Central Philharmonic Orchestra.
Liu Dehai’s legacy lives on today through his contributions to the instruments repertoire, expansion of techniques, and the seemingly endless number of students who he imbued with a lifelong passion for the instrument.
It would be doing a dis-service to the great master to try and confine his life's achievements into anything short of a fully published biography. Additionally, since he was teacher to nearly every major pipa player spanning generations, many pieces have been written about him and his work by his former students, colleagues and friends, meriting his own category of study and cataloging, wiht this short biography serving as a brief introduction to his life's work.
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