KAO MING

born c. 1305, Yungchia , China died c. 1370, Ning-hai, Chekiang province Pinyin Gao Ming, courtesy name (tzu) Kao Tse-ch'eng Chinese poet and playwright whose sole surviving opera, P'i-p'a chi (Lute Story), set the tenor of Ming-dynasty drama. Quitting a frustrating official career under the Mongol regime in 1356, Kao found a new vocation in the theatre. As a southerner, he shunned the fashionable tsa-ch, or variety theatre, which was flourishing in the north under Mongol patronage, and instead wrote for the nan-hsi, or southern drama, an operatic folk theatre associated with the former Sung capital of Hang-chou. His opera P'i-p'a chi, completed about 1367, won the favour of the founding Ming emperor and enjoyed sufficient popularity to restore this regional theatre to national stature. A moralistic tragicomedy, the opera tells how a devoted wife, Chao Wu-niang, wanders as an itinerant lute player to find her husband, Ts'ai Yung, an ambitious scholar who has abandoned her in quest of fame at court. The work won renown for both its libretto, which elevated the popular operatic verse into a polished poetic medium, and the melodiousness of its romantic southern music.