The Department of (Western) Opera at the CAD was established in 1949, becoming one of the first majors in opera performance set in art institutes after the founding of the PRC. The famous opera ‘The White-haired Girl’ was staged as early as in 1950. In 1952, the Opera and Dance Theatre Troupe of the CAD performed such plays as ‘The White-haired Girl’, ‘Brother and Sister Reclaiming Wasteland’, ‘Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang’, ‘Marriage of Xiao Erhei’, ‘Fighting the Invaders’, and ‘The Long March’, which made significant contributions to the New Opera Movement. After the Reform and Opening-up, in 1984, the Academy started an opera class under the Department of Acting, offering courses such as vocal music, speech, physique, acting and rehearsal. The class has supplied the country with a large number of opera professionals. In 2012, the Department of Western Opera was officially restored.

The Department now offers a course in acting especially for (western) opera. It is the mission of the Department to train the students to be perfect singers in the first place and skillful actors as well in operas, who should be able to independently and accurately represent the image of a character in a play. Based on the CAD’s goal to build itself to be a world-class art institute with distinctive characteristics, the Department of Western Opera values the hiring of teachers with rich practical experience in art and professional knowledge in opera. Now the Department boasts a strong faculty team that consists of young and middle-aged professionals graduated from top art colleges in China and abroad. There are 22 faculty members in the Department, including 21 Chinese teachers, 1 specially-appointed foreign professor, and 1 secretary in charge of teaching affairs.

There are 3 teaching and research sections in the Department respectively for vocal music, piano, and general education. More than 20 undergraduate professional modules are taught, including: 1. the category of vocal music (Vocal Music, Ensemble, Chorus, 4 language modules in German, Italian, French, And Russian, and Music Appreciation); 2. the category of piano and basic music theory (Piano Accompaniment, Piano as Minor, Music Theory, Solfeggio, Harmony, Musical Form Analysis, History of Chinese, and Foreign Music); and 3. the category of acting (Acting, Speech, Physique, Makeup, and Opera Rehearsal). The Department are offering and improving its modules for postgraduates, including Vocal Music, Piano Accompaniment, Acting, Advanced Sight Singing, Opera Theory, Opera Rehearsal and other professional modules. In recent years, the Department has successfully produced a number of opera repertoires for undergraduates, such as ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, ‘The Schoolmistresses in the Mountain Village’, ‘La Finta Giardiniera’, ‘The Magic Flute’, ‘Classics of Western Opera’, and ‘La Traviata’.

We work to train our students to master solid and comprehensive skills in opera singing and acting, and to be able to independently create images for opera stage. They are expected to, after finishing their basic studies (of Western classic operas, to name one subject), be capable of representing Chinese opera stories and singing Chinese opera songs. We follow the laws of opera creation, and continuously improve the quality of opera production and performance. Based on the broader definition of ‘drama’, we will build on opera culture to construct a unique and distinctive system for opera education for cultivating high-level, advanced, top-notch and all-round professionals for the party and the country.