Download Kevin Laskey REL 352 Professor Pagels 5/17/10 Crucifixion by

Kevin Laskey
REL 352
Professor Pagels
5/17/10
Crucifixion by Choir
Musical Passion Settings in the 21st Century
For much of their history, musical settings of the Passion of Christ were never heard
outside the Church. They were devotional pieces meant to inspire spiritual contemplation rather
than to entertain. Polyphonic passion settings, where the entire text was set for a choir and
soloists, were very common in the 16th through 18th centuries; Johann Sebastian Bach wrote
possibly five passions (two of which survive and are performed today) and his son Carl Phillip
Emmanuel composed more than twenty.1 But after European art music moved out of the courts
and chapels and into public concert halls during the 19th century, the musical passion fell out of
favor. Certainly composers like Beethoven and Brahms wrote religious works like masses and
requiems, but not passions. The intensely devotional nature of Passion music made it ill suited
for these new secular performance spaces. However in the mid 20th century, modernist
composers like Frank Martin and Krzysztof Penderecki began to revisit the Passion, not as music
for a church service but music meant for the concert hall, blending religious texts and writhing
atonality. These works opened the door for other composers to create their own musical
interpretations of the passion outside the confines of Christian devotion, especially those born
into the wide-open musical landscape after World War II.
David Lang (b. 1957), James MacMillan (b. 1959) and Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960) are
three composers who have followed in the footsteps of Martin and Penderecki and have each
written a very different musical passion since the turn of the last century. In this paper, I will
analyze how the composers interpret the story of Jesus’s passion in terms of their use of source
1
“A Short History of the Passion,” Liner notes, St. John Passion, LSO Live, 2008.
material, additional texts, and the musical gestures that emphasize these different aspects. In
each composition, the composer’s musical choices articulate a personal religious experience with
the passion narrative and reflect different ways of communicating this experience in a secular
concert-hall setting.
James MacMillan’s St. John Passion – Christ Invades the Concert Hall
After bursting onto the international music scene with the success of his orchestral piece
The Confession of Isabel Gowdie, James MacMillan has become one of the United Kingdom’s
most visible composers. He has been commissioned by many renowned performance
organizations including the New York City Ballet and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and his
percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel (1992) has been performed over 350 times around the
world.2 A committed lay Dominican with strong socialist sympathies, MacMillan has written
many explicitly religious works throughout his career, from his Seven Last Words from the Cross
(1993) to his orchestral cycle Triduum (1997) to his series of masses.3 In November 2005, the
London Symphony Orchestra approached MacMillan with a commission to write a twentyminute piece in honor of conductor Sir Colin Davis on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.4
However, MacMillan had been pining to write a passion and Davis was taken with the idea; the
twenty-minute orchestral composition quickly ballooned into a 90-minute epic for orchestra, two
choirs, and baritone soloist.5
In his program note that accompanied the St. John Passion at its April 2008 premiere,
MacMillan explained that he chose to set the passion narrative from John’s gospel because of his
“James MacMillan (b. 1959),” Liner notes, St. John Passion, LSO Live, 2008.
Stephen Johnson, “James MacMillan,” Grove Music Online, 2003, www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
4
James MacMillan, “Conceived in Silence,” The Guardian, April 25, 2008,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/apr/25/classicalmusicandopera.
5
Ibid.
2
3
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familiarity with it, having heard it every Good Friday in the Catholic liturgy. 6 The work is
divided into nine vocal movements and an instrumental postlude, each one concentrating on a
different event in the passion. The narration is set for a small chorus whose music is both tonal
and austere, with melodic contours derived from Gregorian chant. This compositional choice is
throwback to the Responsorial Passions written during the Renaissance where the narration was
chanted and the other parts, including the words of Jesus, the crowd, and other characters, were
sung polyphonically.7 The responsorial model of MacMillan’s passion links it Christian
devotional music in a manner not present in previous concert passions. In this way, MacMillan’s
passion is less about setting the text to advance the story in a particular way, but setting to music
the whole religious experience of sitting through a Good Friday liturgy. The chant-like narration
establishes the piece’s sacred setting while the intensely contrasting music that underscores the
dialogue articulates the powerful emotional swings that congregation experiences throughout the
service. The St. John Passion is evangelical music in the most basic sense, sharing not only the
good news of Jesus to those outside the tradition, but the emotional potency of the accompanying
Christian ritual as well.
MacMillan strengthens the evangelical aspects of his work through the interpolation of
texts outside the gospel narrative, in the tradition of J.S. Bach. Throughout the nine movements,
usually at the end, MacMillan adds short Latin texts, mostly derived from Catholic prayers
recited during Holy Week, that act as reflections on the events of the particular section.8 On top
James MacMillan, “St. John Passion,” Program Note, St. John Passion, LSO Live, 2008.
“A Short History of the Passion.”
8
Movement 1 (Jesus’s Arrest) ends with Jesus’s blessing of the bread and wine during the last supper as depicted in
the Catholic Eucharistic prayer. The second movement, which recounts Peter’s denial of Jesus, ends with “You are
Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” The third movement (Jesus before Pilate) ends with the Tenebrae
responsory “Judas Mercator Pessimus.” Movement 4 (Jesus is Condemned to Death) ends with the Crucifixus from
the Nicene creed. Movement 5 (Crucifixion) closes with the Tenebrae responsory. “Astiterunt regest terrare.” The
sixth movement (Christ’s Garments Divided) ends with the “Timor Mortis Conturbat” responsory from the Catholic
Office of the Dead. The seventh movement (Jesus and his Mother) interpolates portions of the Stabat Mater. The
6
7
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of these small additions though, MacMillan devotes an entire movement to the Improperia, or
Reproaches, a set of prayers recited during the veneration of the cross during Good Friday
liturgy.9 This text interpolation is an audacious and potentially controversial move on
MacMillan’s part. The Reproaches, based on verses from the Old Testament prophets Micah and
Ezra,10 portray a divine and angry Jesus recounting all of the wondrous deeds God has done for
His people, such as the Exodus from Egypt and the miracle of manna in the desert, and exhorting
them to answer to their own actions that led to the crucifixion. Jesus’s exhortations, combined
with the Gospel of John’s blaming of the Jews for Jesus’s death, could be seen as anti-Semitic
and turn listeners away. But what is even more difficult about the interpolation is the
confrontational nature of its setting.
MacMillan sets the prayer for the Baritone soloist (the role of Christ) in English and a
large choir to sing the Greek and Latin responses. The music is both jagged and fitfully
dissonant. The brass punch out thick chords at irregular intervals while the strings add eerie sul
ponticello (bowing the instrument on the bridge) effects underneath. The Christ solo part, which
in earlier sections was noted for smooth, vaguely Middle Eastern melismas, now jumps all over
the place, the wide melodic contours expressing divine fury. It is the emotional climax of the
piece, as the music never reaches the same fever pitch during the final two movements. The
aggression of the music, combined with Jesus’s repeated command, “Answer me,” places the
audience on trial. The whole experience is meant to be uncomfortable and guilt-inducing, just
like the praying of the Improperia itself. However, it is a bit peculiar that the cerebral and
entire eighth movement is an interpolation of the Improperia. The ninth and final vocal movement (The death of
Jesus) begins with “Christus Factus Est,” a prayer usually recited on Holy Thursday.
9
Hugh S. Pyper, “Crucifixion in the Concert Hall: Secular and Sacred in James MacMillan’s Passion of St. John,”
Literature and Theology, vol. 23, no. 3, August 2009, 348.
10
Ibid, 349.
Laskey 4
detached Jesus of John’s gospel that addresses his mother simply as woman addresses the
audience so passionately in MacMillan’s piece.
The intense pathos that MacMillan injects into John’s cool-headed Jesus reflects his own
personal involvement with Catholicism in the public square. In both speeches and interviews,
MacMillan has been very outspoken about his position as a devout religious person in a very
secular arts scene. In a 2008 lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects, MacMillan noted
that injecting spirituality into music is one of the biggest counter-cultural moves a composer can
make.11 However, while other modern Christian composers, like Olivier Messiaen in particular,
have tried to translate the transcendent and bedazzling images of Christian religious experience,
MacMillan imbues his music with a messy spirituality, rooted in daily experience.12, 13 It is not
enough for MacMillan to portray images of the divine; he presents concrete experiences of the
Christian spiritual life as well, with the emotional see-saws from guilt to bliss. MacMillan does
not use music to clarify St. John’s own theological message, but to transform it into MacMillan’s
own spiritual experience. The righteous anger from the Jesus of Mark’s gospel that MacMillan
brings to John’s Jesus is an analog to the righteous anger MacMillan feels regarding the
reception of his religious work in the secular classical music community. Just as Jesus angrily
invaded the temple in Jerusalem to drive out the moneychangers, MacMillan invades the concert
hall with an aggressively religious piece to challenge the notion of what the sacred means in a
secular space.
Martin Beckford, “Composer James MacMillan warns of elite’s ‘ignorance-fueled hostility to religion,’” The
Telegraph, October 1, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/ religion/3116598/Composer-JamesMacMillan-warns-of-liberal-elites-ignorance-fuelled-hostility-to-religion.html.
12
A particular strong example of the bedazzling religious music of Messiaen is his large-scale choral-orchestral
piece, La transfiguration de notre seigneur Jésus-Christ.
13
Ivan Hewett, “James MacMillan Interview,” The Telegraph, April 22, 2009,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/ivanhewett/5202098/James-MacMillan-interview.html.
11
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David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion – Two Stories United by Suffering
In terms of instrumentation and sonic scope, David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion
(2007) is the polar opposite of MacMillan’s St. John Passion. Lang’s piece, which mixes the
story of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Match Girl” with elements of St.
Matthew’s Passion, is scored for only four singers who also play small percussion parts. And
while MacMillan’s passion was the latest in a series of religious pieces, Lang’s piece is a
departure from his earlier work. A founder of the influential New York music collective “Bang
on a Can” and so-called “enfant terrible” of the post-minimalist generation of composers,14
Lang’s music is generally more abrasive and snarky than sublime.15 However, this subversive
and experimental streak helped Lang mold a commission from Carnegie Hall and the choral
conductor Paul Hillier into his distinctive take on the passion narrative.
Lang’s thirty-five minute passion is broken up into 15 short movements, which alternate
between telling the Little Match Girl story (even-numbered movements) and responding to the
girl’s suffering (odd-numbered movements), borrowing texts from the Gospel of Matthew and
the extended libretto of J.S. Bach’s Matthäus-Passion. While MacMillan’s St. John Passion was
noted for its musical variety and drama, the music in Little Match Girl is arrestingly both
childlike and austere. The harmony is drawn in dark primary colors, mostly simple triads and
fifths, consistently in the minor mode. Simple melodic fragments are layered on top of each
other, repeating the emotionally resonant text for emphasis and creating a timeless, dream-like
state. The tempo never advances past a crawl, the percussion adding coloristic touches rather
than bombast.
Russell Platt, “New Time Religion,” The New Yorker, December 7, 2009,
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/recordings/2009/12/07/091207gore_GOAT_recordings_platt
15
A good example is his solo percussion piece The Anvil Chorus where the performer plays found metal objects of
his or her own choosing, like frying pans or aluminum pipes.
14
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Despite the music’s subtlety, Little Match Girl Passion packs a hefty emotional punch.
This is first in part due to Lang’s selection of spiritual texts to include with the Andersen story,
texts that highlight the human suffering of Jesus (though the name “Jesus” is never sung at any
point in the piece). The only lines that Lang takes directly from Matthew’s gospel (rather than
Picander’s libretto for Bach’s Passion) are verses 27:45-46, where Jesus is at his most intense
point of suffering.16 The Bach texts also emphasize the suffering aspects of the passion, with the
vocalists crying out, “Have mercy, My God. See my tears fall,” and whimpering, “Penance and
remorse tear my sinful heart in two.”17 These texts become commentary on the plight of the
Little Match Girl, helping to highlight the moral equivalency between the suffering of the young
girl and the suffering of Jesus that Andersen weaves into his work.18 Lang’s setting further unites
the texts. Throughout the piece, Lang’s consistent harmonic language and melodic layering
smooth over transitions between movements, fusing the varied texts into a story that feels
conceived as a whole rather than a mash-up. The text pairings and unified setting certainly help
give the already-depressing children’s story a strong dose of religious intensity, but it also
transfigures the passion narrative as well.
David Lang is in the precarious position of an observant Jew who has found much artistic
inspiration from Christian music.19 He has been very interested throughout his career with sacred
music of the late Medieval period by composers like Perotin and Machaut,20 and also finds the
Matthew 27:45-46, ASV, “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And
about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?”
17
David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion, Liner notes, Harmonia Mundi, 2009.
18
Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion, Liner notes.
19
Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, “Noted composer’s passion confronts suffering, religion,” www.austin360.com, May 1,
2008.
20
Pierre Ruhe, “Talking with David Lang about ‘The Little Match Girl Passion,’” www.artscricicatl.com, January 5,
2010.
16
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sweeping emotional power of Bach’s religious works undeniable.21 Whenever Lang listens to a
sacred work, he has to divorce the spiritually expressive music from much of its Christian
message, particularly statements in the passions that are anti-Semitic.22 In this light, Lang’s Little
Match Girl Passion is his attempt to write a piece with the same contemplative power as Bach’s
Matthäus-Passion without the divisiveness of religious doctrine. By pulling out the suffering
aspects of Jesus’s passion from its source and pairing them with a secular story, Lang
universalizes the passion narrative. Unlike in MacMillan’s St. John Passion, where the listener
must accept the composer’s Christian dogma to be vulnerable to its emotional potency, The Little
Match Girl Passion reaches across religious traditions to appeal to a universal emotion of grief at
the sight of an unjust death. It is a humanist passion rather than an evangelical one.
Lang’s universalization of the passion story does drain it of much of its Christian content.
Jesus is not the suffering redeemer of the world, but more like the simple suffering servant found
in the book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 53.23 As someone sensitive to different religious
traditions, Lang was worried that his work that fused the sacred with common would be
considered disrespectful.24 Peculiarly, Lang’s fusion passion has received almost universal
acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize in music, while MacMillan’s strictly sacred one has been much more
controversial. This difference in reception has a lot to do with the chosen performance space. If
MacMillan’s passion were performed like Renaissance and Baroque passions, during the Good
Friday service, there would be no controversy because the interpretation of Jesus expressed is
one that is universalizable to all members of the church—both a suffering Jesus and righteously
21
Van Ryzin.
One verse in Matthew’s passion that has been intensely controversial in this regard is 27:25, “And all the people
answered and said, His blood be on us, and on our children,” ASV.
23
This story from the book of Isaiah is read during the Catholic Good Friday liturgy, and in that context is
interpreted as a prophecy of Jesus’s passion.
24
van Ryzin.
22
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angry one. In the concert hall, many listeners have difficulty with MacMillan’s piece because its
aesthetic effect is so intertwined with its theological message, a message that listeners outside the
Christian tradition would not identify with. The secular nature of the concert hall however
benefits Lang’s passion. His piece could not be a part of Christian service because of its nonsacred elements, but the lack of a singular religious tradition in the concert hall allows him
explore religious music in novel ways, provided that he does so in a manner that appeals to
universalizable human emotions. Lang distills the intense emotionality of the passion from its
theological trappings, allowing all listeners to have a deeply-moving spiritual experience.
Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos – Concert Hall as Chapel and Town Square
Both Osvaldo Golijov’s life and music are suffused with contrasts. He grew up in
Catholic Argentina, son of an Orthodox Jewish mother and an atheist father.25 Golijov recounts
that there was a lot of different music floating around the house; traditional European classical,
klezmer and Jewish liturgical music, and the tangos of Astor Piazzola.26 While much of his
music certainly blends these various influences, none are so brazenly genre-crossing as his 2000
composition Pasión según San Marcos. Golijov’s passion, as well as three others based on the
other gospels, was commissioned by conductor and Bach expert Helmuth Rilling in honor of the
250th anniversary of J.S. Bach’s death.27 Golijov was unfamiliar with Mark’s specific account of
Jesus’s death, but he was very familiar with the public depictions of Jesus he grew up with in
Argentina.28 Using both his life experience and varied musical influences as a guide, Golijov
gives Mark’s passion a distinctively Latin American flavor, complete with a dark-skinned Jesus,
Thomas May, “About the Piece – La Pasión según San Marcos,” http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/piecedetail.cfm?id=2929, 2010.
26
“Osvaldo Golijov – Biography,” http://www.osvaldogolijov.com/bio.htm, November, 2009.
27
Ibid.
28
Thomas May.
25
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and propulsive, percussive music based on flamenco, rhumba, samba, and other Latin dance
styles.
Golijov’s composition is as much a passion play as concert piece. There are dance breaks
inspired by the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira and the dual choirs have choreography as
well, including an intense flamenco foot-stomping sequence as Jesus stands silently before
Pilate. It also has a strong ritualistic element because of the lack of interpolated texts that act as
commentary. The visual spectacle of Pasión según San Marcos links it to Latin American street
festivals, like Posadas, but what it lacks is a clear segregation of characters. There is no single
evangelist part, or a Jesus soloist, but rather the words are spread among the choir and a variety
of soloists who play no specific role. The alternation of choral and solo settings of Jesus’s words
has particularly striking implications. Jesus is not just a first century Galilean Jew, but a
transcendent being whose story plays out in the daily lives of the poor and politically oppressed
of Latin America as symbolized by the choirs dressed in humble robes. The combination of
multiple storytellers, settings of vernacular translations of Mark’s gospel, and the mixing of
popular Latin music styles make Golijov’s passion a musical analog of liberation theologian
Ignacio Ellacuría’s concept of the “crucified peoples,” where Jesus is encountered through the
experience of the oppressed masses.29 Like MacMillan, Golijov is not setting the passion story as
much as a particular experience of the passion, though a much different one than MacMillan’s
devoutly Catholic experience.
In terms of audience reception in a secular concert hall, Golijov’s passion sits in a
tenuous middle ground between Lang’s and MacMillan’s passions. With its shear volume,
theatrical presentation, and percussive intensity, the passion attacks the listeners’ senses and
Robert Lassalle-Klein, “Jesus of Galilee and the Crucified People: The Contextual Chistology of Jon Sobrino and
Ignacio Ellacuría,” Theological Studies, June 1, 2009, 348.
29
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forces them to deal with Golijov’s politicized message. If listeners disagree with or cannot relate
to the message, the passion becomes obnoxious pastiche of popular Latin forms because these
musical gestures lose their symbolic meaning of communicating the experience of the common
Latin American person. Golijov’s politicized interpretation also has the same problem as Little
Match Girl Passion: the particular fusion of text and musical styles can come off as disrespectful
and drain much of the passion’s Christian meaning. In a paper that both reviewed of the
American premiere of Golijov’s passion and the critical hype surrounding it, music theorist and
composer Michael Linton criticizes many of Golijov’s musical gestures that he felt ineffective at
articulating the true meaning of Mark’s passion.30 He was particularly critical of the settings of
Jesus’s dialogue for a female soloist that utilized singer Luciana Souza’s range extremities and
Middle Eastern melismas, making Jesus look like a “disembodied transsexual lunatic.”31 Linton
was also disappointed at Golijov’s emphasis on political symbolism over character development,
particularly during the foot-stomping section before Pilate.32 For Linton, Golijov’s passion is
unsuccessful because the music undermines the story by advancing the composer’s own agenda,
misappropriating the passion narrative for his own ends, rather than treating the passion as an
end in and of itself. Lang was able to avoid this kind of criticism in Little Match Girl Passion
because he used Matthew’s passion account as a lens through which to view the suffering in the
“Little Match Girl” story. He took universalizable elements from the passion to add emotional
heft to Andersen fairy tale, rather than trying to universalize the entire passion story.
However, La Pasión según San Marcos is admirable for its creative audacity. Although
Golijov comes to the passion from outside the Christian tradition, he does not treat the narrative
humanistically like Lang, but as a source of divine truth, though certainly not the same kind of
Michael Linton, “Passion Stomp,” First Things, December 2001, 20-21.
Ibid, 20.
32
Ibid, 21.
30
31
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truth devout Christians take it as. Golijov’s passion functions as a religious ritual with its
musical incantations, communal participation (soloists are mostly just members of the choir), and
lack of meta-commentary. The passion functions to universalize the Christian religious
experience, stripping away the sticky doctrine of MacMillan’s passion in order to engage the
entire audience, regardless of personal religious tradition. La Pasión según San Marcos
transforms the concert hall into an all-inclusive place of worship. Because the composition itself
sees no boundaries between pop and classical, music and theater, religious ritual and secular life,
it breaks down boundaries with the listeners as well, inviting them to join the communal musicmaking. It is La Pasión’s unique ability to engage the entire audience on a religious level that no
doubt led to a thirty-minute ovation at its premiere.33
Why the Passion?
James MacMillan’s St. John Passion, David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion, and
Osvaldo Golijov’s Pasión según San Marcos all highlight the challenges composers face when
depicting a story with the kind of historical and social baggage as the Passion of Jesus. Though
the concert hall performance does not restrict a composer’s musical choices in the same way a
church service does, the secular space modulates how the audience receives the work. In most
cases, the concert hall audience can enjoy and appreciate a Christian religious work on a purely
aesthetic level, whether Mozart’s Requiem or a motet by Palestrina. This allows composers from
outside Christian traditions to write religious music for the concert hall; there are many masses
and requiems that were never meant to be performed in church and have a happy existence on a
purely artistic level. But what makes the passion so much more tenuous to set is its centrality to
the doctrine of a religious faith. Jesus’s passion has a definite meaning in Christianity, though
Andy Gill, “Album: La Pasion Segun San Marcos,” The Independent, March 26, 2010,
www.theindependent.co.uk.
33
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the meaning has mutated over time and between communities, and it is nearly impossible to
divorce the meaning of the text from the meaning of the musical passion as a whole. The
composer is not as much hampered by the performance space itself as how the source material is
interpreted by listeners in the performance space.
So why did these three composers choose to write a musical passion when the process is
so fraught with difficulties, as composers avoided it for the greater part of 150 years? It is not
just about commissions, especially considering Lang and MacMillan were never commissioned
to write a passion in the first place, but about the composer’s exploration of his or her self in the
context of an art form that for so long was intertwined with Christian churches. For James
MacMillan, music and Catholic spirituality go hand in hand. After finishing his setting of the
Seven Last Words from the Cross in 1993, MacMillan wanted to continue his exploration of the
ritual grieving of Good Friday, and made it his ambition to set a passion narrative.34 David Lang
not only wanted to tell a story, but to explore the story with the same kind of religious devotion
found in Bach’s Matthäus-Passion that had affected him so deeply.35 Osvaldo Golijov sought to
set a passion for both personal and transcendent reasons: to understand the faith and way of life
of the people he grew up with in Argentina, as well as to be a part of the tradition of adapting and
readapting the powerful story of Jesus’s death.36 The adaptations and readaptations Golijov talks
about help keep the Passion meaningful centuries after the death of Jesus, forcing artists to
contemplate how an experience with this story inspired such powerful works of art in their own
rights and what aspects of the work make them so affecting. MacMillan, Lang, and Golijov have
all made both worthy and provocative additions to this canon, forcing future generations of
MacMillan, “St. John Passion,” Program note.
Lang, Little Match Girl Passion, liner notes.
36
David Harrington, “Conversation between Osvaldo Golijov and David Harrington,” La Pasión según San Marcos,
viii (Brooklyn, NY: Ytalinna Music Publishing, 2002).
34
35
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composers to consider the meaning of the death of a poor Galilean in rapidly globalizing and
secularizing world.
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hostility to religion.’” The Telegraph, October 1, 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
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Gill, Andy “Album: La Pasion Segun San Marcos.” The Independent, March 26, 2010,
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This is my own work in accordance with university regulations.
Kevin Laskey
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