[Photo/chncpa.org]

The opera version of 'Visitors on the Snow Mountain' will hit the National Centre of Performing Arts (NCPA) from December 24 to 28. In this new adaptation, award-winning Chinese female composer Lei Lei pays her respects to her father Lei Zhenbang, the music composer for the original 1963 movie of the same name.

The movie version was an immense hit in China with its unique Tajik ethnic style, telling a spy-against-spy story led by a frontier soldier trying to find his lost lover. The songs from the movie such as "Hua'er weishenme zheyang hong" (Why are the flowers so red) and "Huainian Zhanyou" (Remembering our comrade-in-arms) became extremely famous and are still frequently performed today.

Lei told the Global Times that she did not set out to surpass her father's music in Snow Mountain. Instead she took the six songs from the movie and adapted them into the opera. "The opera is the contribution of two generations and the Tajik people," she said.

Lei, famous for writing songs for popular TV dramas such as Longing and Stories of the Editorial Board during the 1990s, was commissioned by the NCPA in 2009 to compose for original operas Xishi and Zhaoshi Gu'er. For Snow Mountain, Lei's husband Yi Ming was commissioned to write the lyrics and script.