Workshop 2: Liturgy and Aesthetics (16th June 2007)
The second workshop focuses on two complexes dealing with medieval rituals that are both deeply rooted in the earliest transmitted Western liturgy: the so-called Liturgical Drama on the one hand, and choral settings of the passion narrative according to John on the other. The earliest, tenth century examples for the former evolve around the visitation of Jesus’s grave on Easter morning in the context of the Easter liturgy, with later examples taking up themes connected to other parts of the liturgical calendar, whereas the latter has its origin in the singing of John’s passion account as an integral part of the medieval Good Friday Mass.
Despite their rootedness in medieval liturgy both these genres represent examples where Christian rituals appear to have been subjected to artistic appropriation. Both genres underwent a rich development - liturgical drama primarily through the Middle Ages, the Passion compositions in particular since the Renaissance - and both are traditionally perceived as characterised by a tension between their liturgical origin and aesthetic considerations.
The material for Passion Representations in Liturgical Drama provides three instances from the twelfth century to c. 1600 of how the Passion of Christ was ‘dramatised’. This is intended to illustrate the ways in which these dramatisations bring forth questions about how the underlying ritual and its aesthetic discourse are transformed.
The Rore/Pärt theme is considered as a strong example as to how a highly artificial setting of the liturgical Passion narrative, such as Rore’s composition, carries out the tension between aesthetic sophistication and religious meaning, and how these tensions are transformed and indeed preserved or reinterpreted by a contemporary work such as Pärt’s St John Passion.
As in the first workshop, these two themes could be discussed separately and/or with mutual reference to each other.