A 5,000-year-old legend of unfulfilled eternal love between the earthly and celestial became a modern musical theater work through the talents of Bright Sheng and librettist Henry David Hwang.

It is this story and its development from a chamber piece into “The Silver River”—an opera fusing eastern and western music with song, speech and movement—that Sheng will present in his Distinguished University Professor Lecture, 4 p.m. April 6 in Rackham Amphitheatre. Sheng is the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Music Composition.

“While tragic love stories have always occupied a unique place in Asian culture,” Sheng and Hwang write in a program for the work, “the popularity and longevity of this particular folk myth is especially significant. It reflects the traditional vision of a happy family life between a male farmer and female weaver, as well as a repressed longing amidst the arranged marriages of old Chinese society for a self-chosen love.”

It is a metaphorical story of the mythical river, known to Westerners as the Milky Way, where lovers meet once a year late at night on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar. The meeting of the celestial and earthly is made possible by a bridge across the Silver River created by all the magpies in the world with their overlapped wings—a Chinese Valentine’s Day, the composer and librettist say. As in most romantic myths, the artists say, “it celebrates the dream of a perfect love struggling to survive in, our imperfect world.”

The original poem of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), upon which “The Silver River” is based, has been the inspiration of many Chinese poets, musicians, scholars, playwrights, artists and authors. It is no surprise, then, that this work was co-commissioned by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Chamber Music Northwest and the Performing Arts Center of Orange County, California. It premiered at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in 1997, and was reworked in 1999 with a new stage production by Ong Keng Sen.

Among his many commissions and awards, composer, conductor and pianist Sheng received a special commission from the White House in 1999 to create a work for a state dinner hosted by the president in honor of Chinese Premiere Zhou Rongji. In October 2001 Sheng was named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and began the new millennium with premieres of an orchestral work called “Nanking! Nanking!” in memory of the Rape of Nanking, and “Red Silk Dance,” a piano concerto commissioned by the Boston Symphony premiered with Emanual Ax as the soloist and Robert Spano as conductor.

Born in December 1955 in Shanghai, Sheng started piano study with his mother at the age of 4. During the Cultural Revolution he worked as a pianist and percussionist in a folk music and dance troupe in Qinghai Province for seven years near the Tibetan border, where he also studied and collected folk music. In 1978, when universities reopened after the Cultural Revolution, he was one of the first students accepted by Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he earned his undergraduate degree in music composition. He moved to New York in l982 and attended Queens College and Columbia University.

His full-length opera based on the story of Madame Mao premiered in 2003 at the Santa Fe Opera.

The Distinguished University Professorships, created in 1947, provide recipients maximum freedom to pursue scholarly and teaching efforts to contribute to the University and the nation.