A Study Of Three Passions In The 20^th Century: Spiritual Connotation And Musical Construction

Passion(music)is an ancient music form.It could be dating back to the 9th century AD.Passion takes the story of the crucifixion of Jesus in the Bible as the script,and expresses the virtues of benevolence,sacrifice,and redemption in the story through different characters.Passion has been sublimated in Bach's hands after centuries of development.The combination of Chorale and oratorio makes Passion acquire a deep "meditation" feature,which also makes this musical form gradually sublime into a "genre".In 2000,to commemorate the 250 th anniversary of Bach's death,the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart,Germany commissioned Wolfgang Rihm,Tan Dun,Osvaldo Golijov and Sofia Gubaidulina to write four contemporary passions.This thesis selects three of them as the object of analysis.Through the historical analysis of the ancient genre,and the interpretation of Bach's contemplative sublimation,it demonstrates the inheritance of classics and the innovation of forms in the creation of Passion in the twentieth century.And further research on the "Spirit of Passion" shows the divinity and humanity of Passion from different cultural perspectives in the twentieth century.The first chapters of this paper sort out the meaning of Passion in Chinese and Western contexts,the development history of the genre,and Bach's important contribution to the sublimation of Passion.The second,third,and fourth chapters of this paper are all analyses of three works of contemporary Passion.The second chapter expounds Rihm's "dualistic" understanding of the suffering spirit.The third chapter discusses that Tan Dun,through the three classical Chinese philosophical cultures of "Confucianism,Taoism and Buddhism",shows the world the spirit of "dedication,sacrifice and redemption" in the perspective of Chinese composers.The fourth chapter discusses the significance of suffering,redemption and sacrifice in modern society from the perspective of a composer who grew up in the culture of Eastern Europe,Jewish,Latin America and North America.The firth chapter of this paper conducts a comparative study of three Passions.It discusses the evolution of Passion's form in the contemporary music.It elaborated three characteristics of these three contemporary Passions.First,they were all trying to get rid of the constraints of classics.Second,the spirit of Passion indicates a reconciliation between divinity and human nature.Third,it emphasizes the significance of meditation from Passion for the development of human civilization.In the conclusion part,it reviews the core concept of the whole study,"Spirit of Passion".It expounds the characteristics of the "Spirit of Passion" expressed in three pieces of Passion works: "Sublimation of Tragedy","Reflection on Sacrifice",and "Relief from Suffering".In the end of this study,it discusses the way of defining "the spirit of suffering".