Yuefu
Yuefu ( Chinese 樂府 / 乐府 - "Music Office, Music Office Song or Archaic Song") are song poems of Chinese literature that originated in the Han period . Its name comes from the music office, which was founded in 114 BC. BC under Han Wudi was founded back.
history
The task of the music office was to collect songs for sacred and courtly purposes, while the songs and ballads of the common people were also collected. First the anonymous yuefu were collected, but between 190 and 266 well-known poets appeared who gave the yuefu an individual note.
The Yuefu only became independent as texts towards the end of the Han period.
The melodies of the Yuefu can no longer be reconstructed today and only texts have been preserved. The collected song poems contain chants for sacrificial ceremonies and ancestral temples as well as chants for imperial banquets.
The music office was finally established in 6 BC. u. Currently closed by Emperor Han Aidi .
style
Western sinologists differentiate in Yuefu between sacred hymns and secular songs that speak about the needs and worries of the time.
The poems handed down as yuefu contain diverse and from a Confucian point of view unorthodox local traditions and testify to the more open atmosphere of the early Chinese Middle Ages compared to later times. In contrast to the Han-Fu , the theme of many Yuefu is no longer the glorification of the emperor's power, but the worries and needs of the individual. Religious Daoism also exerted an influence, as the Yuefu often ask the question of human mortality and eternity.
The metric of the Yuefu is different from the Han-Fu. They consist of three to seven characters per verse, and many yuefu have ballad characteristics . The ballads are a mixture of epic, lyrical and dramatic elements and use many formulaic expressions. The most famous ballad in the West is the Mulan Shi (木蘭詩). Then, during the Eastern Han period, yuefu were written in verse of five characters.
Cultural meaning
The Yuefu were of great importance for the development of later poetry in China, as the form, thematic and the topics of the Shi poems are based on them. The yuefu permeated the culture of the educated classes and the yuefu of the poets, in which they expressed their own thoughts, moods and feelings, were later distinguished from the anonymous yuefu of the music office.
The largest collection of Yuefu is the Yuefu Shiji ("Collection of Music Office Songs") compiled in the 12th century by Guo Maoqian.
literature
- Martin Gimm : "The Yueh-fu tsa-lu of Tuan An-chieh". Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1966.
- Wolfgang Kubin : History of Chinese Literature, Vol. 1: The Chinese Poetry. From the beginning to the end of the imperial era . KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-24541-6 .
- Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer : History of Chinese literature. The 3000 year development of the poetic, narrative and philosophical-religious literature of China from the beginning to the present . Scherz Verlag, Bern 1990, ISBN 3-502-16482-7 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Debon, Günther: Chinese poetry. History poetry theory. Brill Verlag, Leiden 1989, p. 384.