Tan Dun – Water Passion after St. Matthew

• Theme: Suffering, rebirth, intercultural spirituality

• Musical Essence: A Passion work inspired by Bach, composed for vocal soloists, choir, orchestra, electronics, and water as a central instrument (bowls, splashes, dripping); combines Chinese vocal techniques, Tibetan throat singing, Christian text, and avant-garde sonic textures; composed for the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

The work begins not with an overture—but with water. Not symbolic water. Real water: droplets, bowls, ripples. Before words, before narrative, before religion—sensation. Tan Dun reminds us that the human is not born into language, but into texture, vibration, rhythm.

Nietzsche would immediately sense the philosophical daring: Here is a Passion that does not preach. It stages. It immerses. It awakens the body before the mind.

This is no sentimental Christianity. The Gospel text is fragmented, stretched, refracted. Christ here is not dogma. He is voice, gesture, breath in rhythm. The vocal soloists moan, whisper, chant, scream—not as characters, but as sonic vessels of human extremes.

“What were the greatest events of the past two thousand years? Not the birth of Christ, but the death of God.”

Tan Dun does not dispute this. Instead, he performs it. This Passion does not restore belief. It transfigures the Passion into a ritual of sensory witness. No doctrine. No savior. Only a communal act of aesthetic remembering.

And what of the water? Nietzsche would ask: Is this kitsch? A gesture toward the mystical East?

No. The water is not effect. It is metaphysics liquified. It is the Dionysian in Taoist form: mutable, fragile, ungraspable. It replaces Bach’s stable harmonic system with a medium that sings in slowness, in drops, in waves. And Nietzsche would say: Here is an art that does not construct meaning—but flows with it, without claiming it.

Tan Dun’s use of Chinese musical language is not exoticism. It is genealogy reversed. Just as Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy traced Western art back to the tension between Apollo and Dionysus, here Tan Dun recomposes that tension globally. The “Passion” becomes a crucifixion of fixed identity, and a resurrection of plural form.

When the choir intones fragmented Latin over percussive water rhythms, Nietzsche would hear not belief, but invocation. Not God as master, but sound as origin.

“We must remain true to the earth, and build our temples from the materials of becoming.”

Tan Dun has done exactly this. His temple is not stone. It is water, voice, and breath. It honors suffering—not with guilt or penance—but with a sonic ecology that holds pain and beauty in fragile balance.

In the final movement, the choir sings "Resurrexit", but not triumphantly. There is no Hallelujah. Only resonance. A tone that hangs. A drip that continues. No grand conclusion—only the world, made slightly more luminous through ritual sound.

Nietzsche would not kneel to this work. But he would listen, fully. And he would say: Here, perhaps, is the future of sacred art—not as creed, but as shared attentiveness; not as salvation, but as aesthetic stillness in a world that no longer believes—but still wants to feel.

This is not the return of God.

It is the resurrection of the sacred through form.

And Nietzsche would smile—not in reverence, but in affirmation: Yes. Let art be this.