China's culture ministry has banned public performances of Handel's Messiah and other major works of western religious music. Musicians and tour organisers have told The Daily Telegraph that a series of significant performances have been affected amid a tightening of political control over the arts and Christianity.
Among the victims are the Academy of Ancient Music, one of Britain's leading orchestral and choral groups, which was invited to sing The Messiah at the Beijing International Music Festival in October.
The performance will go ahead but has been made "by invitation only" to get round the ban.
Ironically, among the invitees are members of the Politburo and other senior government leaders.
The Sinfonica Orchestra di Roma has dropped plans to play Mozart's Requiem in the Sichuan earthquake zone in honour of the dead and to raise money for survivors.
It will play a programme of smaller, mostly non-religious works instead.
At least one other performance of The Messiah has been cancelled and one of Verdi's Requiem is under threat.
No-one was available from the ministry of culture to comment on the reasons for the ban.
But an official said: "It is not a black and white issue, and there is nothing written on paper or in the regulations.
"A smaller piece as part of a bigger programme might be OK, but a big work like Mozart's Requiem would definitely be out."
Although the official said the ban was longstanding policy, Western choral classics have been performed regularly in the last decade as China's cultural scene has opened up.
With a growing middle class, many of whose children learn western classical instruments, the big names of international music have followed business and sport in eyeing the Chinese market eagerly.
Until recently the government seemed to give its backing. The China Philharmonic Orchestra played Mozart's Requiem for the Pope in Rome earlier this year as proof of Beijing's sincerity in seeking to win the Vatican's diplomatic recognition.
But attitudes in the top leadership to religion and western culture in general are thought to be divided. Some regard an explosion in evangelical Christianity across the country as having social benefits, while others regard it as an alien threat to Communist Party control.
Stefano Palamidessi, the Rome orchestra's general manager, said he had been advised to drop Mozart's Requiem from an open-air performance in the main square in the city of Dujiangyan, part of a China-wide tour.
Dujiangyan, north of the Sichuan capital Chengdu, lost thousands to the quake.
Simon Fairclough, marketing director of the Academy of Ancient Music, said it had been the Beijing Festival's idea for them to perform The Messiah. A spokeswoman for the Festival said the presence of senior leaders had made it necessary to exclude the public.
Cai Jindong, a Chinese-born conductor and professor of music at Stanford University in the United States, was asked to drop a section from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, an arrangement of raucous Latin and German medieval songs, which he conducted in Shanghai in August.
He said he thought the reason was most likely the Icelandic singer Bjork, who embarrassed the leadership by linking her song Independence to Tibet at a concert in Shanghai before the Olympics. All performers were subsequently subject to much tighter checks.
"I don't know how many people in Shanghai know Latin," Mr Cai said. "But officials get into a position where they can't not say something."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/3108810/China-bans-Western-religious-music.html