John's passion

Last Saturday at the Konzerthaus in Gendarmenmarkt was played for the first time the new work of the composer James McMillan, the “St John’s passion”. It is full of hatred, the classical equivalent of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.” Portraying a furious, accusatory Jesus, a kind of Harold Pinter-style savior, MacMillan’s “Passion” becomes a mere fit of temper, instead of the healing, transcendent work that many composers, from baroque master Heinrich Schütz to Arvo Pärt, have been inspired to create from the same text. MacMillan’s powerfully percussive, high-decibel work is heavy on brass and tympani, with melodies that are limited to the point of indigence, in the manner of Carl Orff, skirting near-minimalism at times. Yet, MacMillan claims in a program note that his aim was to produce a “sparse and lean orchestral texture… so there is limited percussion.” MacMillan’s is stubbornly depressing music, with odd trills seemingly meant to create a Middle Eastern effect, as in the film score of “The Ten Commandments.” Melodic quotations from Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Tristan und Isolde” add further confusion to the seething aural stew. What was MacMillan thinking? The Gospel of St. John itself is a troubling text, unique among the Gospels in blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus, a stance that early Christians, themselves Jews, rarely adopted. Bach’s “St. John Passion,” which, in sound, contains a devastating portrait of crowds of murderous Jews, is widely perceived as escaping charges of antisemitism from listeners today, since a composer of supreme authority and accomplishment wrote it in the context of 18th-century Lutheranism. Bach, after all, enjoys a quasi-divine status, which my friend, Romanian-French aphorist E.M. Cioran, expressed sardonically: “If someone owes everything to Bach, it’s God. Without Bach, God would just be a third-rate character”. What’s okay for Bach, however, is not okay for MacMillan. Far from putting the antisemitic potential of the Gospel of St. John into mitigating historical context, MacMillan underlines it by adding the “Good Friday Reproaches,” in which Jesus complains: “My people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me!” The reproaches are not, by any means, essential for a viable “St. John Passion” in our time. The Gospel of St. John can inspire fine contemporary music, like Sofia Gubaidulina’s “St. John Passion” (2000), which achieves dramatic, even operatic, thrust and verve and does not mention the “Good Friday Reproaches.” Frankly said, I didn’t like it, finding it too hard for my sensitive ears and not able to understand the meaning of it. Though the dancer (helped most of the time by the baritone) is good with a lot of experience, it didn’t seem accurate for me to see him on stage except maybe to stop focusing on the music. I was with two other friends, which ear is much better than mine but they have the same mind. But as usual, Rundfunkchor Berlin was excellent. Not a piece for the faint-hearted.