SANTA FE, N.M. — Will history remember Mao Zedong's third wife, Jiang Qing, as a 20th-century Lady Macbeth, her hands dripping with blood?
Or will she be seen as a Chinese feminist, wronged by the many men — including Mao — with whom she had scarlet love affairs?
The new opera "Madame Mao" votes resoundingly for the Lady Macbeth version.
Composed by Bright Sheng, who grew up in China in the worst days of the Cultural Revolution dominated by Jiang Qing, and written by the British librettist Colin Graham, "Madame Mao" has her personally executing enemies and smothering Mao to death — two startling departures from the truth.
These scenes, in which she shot and strangled her enemies, then snuffed out Mao's life with a pillow as he lay dying, were terrifying moments in a somber story of Madame Mao's tempestuous life.
The question of how history will portray her is of more than passing interest. Some historical figures, and she definitely was one, have suffered from the way dramatists, writers, historians and opera composers have seen them.
One of the most obvious is the humpbacked Richard the Third, pictured by Shakespeare as more of a villain than he actually was. Another victim, the Italian composer Salieri, lives today in infamy because poets, writers and, more recently, movie and stage playwrights depicted him, unfairly, as the murderer of Mozart.
Similarly, China's notorious Empress Dowager, Tsu Hsi, was seen for more than a century as a cruel, insensitive ruler until modern-day scholarship unearthed the fact that her bad reputation sprang from the prejudiced reporting of British journalists who favored the overthrow of the imperial system.
Whatever happens to Madame Mao's image in the future, it cannot be denied that for ten years between 1966 and 1976, she was the termagant leader of the Cultural Revolution. She took revenge on those who had opposed her in the past and ordered the torture, imprisonment and execution of thousands of moderates in the Communist party.
The opera faithfully recorded her life through the use of two Madame Maos, one young, the other older. Other devices include flashbacks and scenes from Chinese opera.
Some in the audience questioned whether it fulfilled the strict norms of high opera. All agreed it was great theater, as gripping as the Broadway musical "Les Miserables," which also deals with a historic period.
One critic, Roxanne Witke, author of the 1977 "Comrade Chiang Ching" (Little Brown) disputed the opera's Lady Macbeth version. In a symposium the day after the opera's July 27 world premiere, she indicated that in long interviews with Jiang Qing she had found a more human and sensitive woman.
This was my experience, too. During the seven months I shared with her and Mao in Yenan, the communist cave capital of the 1940s, she was a soft-spoken housewife, pleasant and agreeable, bearing no resemblance to the scandalous woman she had been in Shanghai. In my subsequent reporting on the chaotic events of the Cultural Revolution, I discovered another woman — a fiery agitator bent on vengeance.
A second-rate stage actress, in real life she brilliantly played many parts, being all things to all men and women. Hence the confusion in assessing her.
At her 1981 trial for treason she rose to new heights, denouncing her accusers. Her suicide by hanging in prison, shown at the start of the opera, was the logical conclusion of a dramatic life.
The librettist, Colin Graham, in the same symposium, characterized the stage violence as more allegorical than real, poetic license which nonetheless conveyed the truth of her nature.
This was the opinion too of Deng Xiaoping, Mao's successor. He told me in a 1980 Beijing interview that though she had not personally killed anyone, she had ordered the deaths of thousands.
"Her crimes were without number," he said.
His bitterness was understandable. She had twice put him under house arrest.