Martin Luther, in a treatise on the Crucifixion in 1519, had grim tidings for those of his followers who wished to lay the blame for Christ’s death entirely on the Jews. You killed Jesus, Luther told them: “When you see the nails piercing Christ’s hands, you can be certain that it is your work.” Luther’s message served as a warning to those who felt secure in their faith, their virtue, their worldly position; guilt for the crime at Golgotha is ubiquitous, seeping forward in time. Dietrich Bonhoeffer echoed the point in the early twentieth century, emphasizing how the Passion story shatters the illusions of a prosperous, self-satisfied modern society: “The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.”
Lutherian severity lies at the core of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which, scholars have argued, takes that 1519 treatise as a model. The immensity of Bach’s design—his use of a double chorus and a double orchestra; his interweaving of New Testament storytelling and latter-day meditations; the dramatic, almost operatic quality of the choral writing; the invasive beauty of the lamenting arias, which give the sense that Christ’s death is the acutest of personal losses—has the effect of pulling all of modern life into the Passion scene. By forcing the singers to enact both the arrogance of the tormentors and the helplessness of the victims, Bach underlines Luther’s point about the inescapability of guilt. A great rendition of the St. Matthew Passion should have the feeling of an eclipse, of a massive body throwing the world into shadow.
Such is the impact of Peter Sellars’s already legendary staging, which was first seen in 2010, in Salzburg and Berlin. Early this month, Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival and the Park Avenue Armory co-presented two performances of the production, with Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, the Rundfunkchor Berlin, and a distinguished group of soloists. The visual scheme is simple to the point of plainness, with a set consisting of only a few white blocks of varying size scattered about. A bare light bulb hangs over the center of the stage. The singers and the orchestral players are dressed in casual black. But, oh, God, how much emotion emanates from Sellars’s direction—or, more accurately, wells up from the musicians themselves, at his instigation.
The Rundfunkchor is at the heart of the conception. In a public discussion with Simon Halsey, the group’s director, and Jane Moss, of Lincoln Center, Sellars described how the chorus worked to embody his idea that the Passion is not a statement directed outward to an audience but an internal dialogue in the form of music—“a community having a conversation with itself.” He had the chorus spend weeks studying the text, memorizing it, finding ways to act it out. The result is a liberation of singers from bad ritual. Gone is the awkward nonsense that I think of as oratorio shtick: a soprano affecting a state of bliss, a bass staring stonily at nothing, a tenor absent-mindedly tapping his foot. Instead, music takes physical possession of the performers and, by extension, of the audience.
The Passion unfolded in a temporary auditorium erected on one side of the Armory’s canyonlike expanse, with an in-the-round seating plan patterned on that of the Philharmonie, in Berlin. When the audience began filing in, the tenor Mark Padmore, singing the part of the Evangelist, was already seated in the middle, head bent, the picture of dejection: this telling of the Passion seemed part of its immediate aftermath. Likewise, in the opening chorus, “Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen” (“Come, ye daughters, help me lament”), the Rundfunkchor singers looked traumatized, some of them kneeling, their heads in their hands. In Bach’s music, two choruses collide, the one questioning the other (“Behold!—Whom?—The Bridegroom”), while a boys’ choir chants sweetly of the Lamb of God. Sellars elicited a corresponding complexity of gesture and feeling: the first chorus, at a more advanced stage of grief, shook the second out of its catatonic state. The young choristers, meanwhile, on loan from St. Thomas Church in New York, raced from one end of the space to another, exulting in the light that the adults cannot yet see. It was all stunning to behold, and immaculately configured to the movement of the music.
So it went for the remaining three and a half hours, one illumination after another. Some of the most telling moments came when Sellars drew the instrumental soloists into the scenario, intensifying the impression that no one, not least the audience, was outside the story. In the aria “Ich will dir mein Herze schenken” (“I wish to give my heart to Thee”), the soprano Camilla Tilling sang while two oboe d’amore players—Albrecht Mayer and Andreas Wittmann—swayed at her side, like angelic companions. In “Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen” (“I will watch beside my Jesus”), Mayer stood above and behind the tenor Topi Lehtipuu, who kept staring up at his accompanist, as if the questing oboe line were imparting information he could not quite decipher. In “Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder!” (“Give me back my Jesus”), which follows the suicide of Judas, the bass-baritone Eric Owens knelt at the feet of the violinist Daishin Kashimoto, whose rapid, relentless figures descended like the strokes of a whip.
The most beloved passage in the St. Matthew Passion is the alto aria “Erbarme dich” (“Have mercy”), which evokes Peter’s bitter weeping after his denial of Christ. Woven around the keening line is a sad, serene, gently dancing violin solo. John Eliot Gardiner, in his recent book “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” notes that the singer tries to emulate the violin’s endless melody but keeps falling short, because parts of it lie outside her range. It is, Gardiner says, an “audible symbol of human frailty,” akin to Peter’s failure of courage. Sellars devised an indelible visual analogue: Daniel Stabrawa, the Philharmonic’s senior concertmaster, leaned against one of the white blocks, his body language casual, as if he were playing the violin in an empty room. The mezzo Magdalena Kožená, who sang with urgent warmth all night, reached out to Stabrawa from a crouched position, at one point touching his shoe. He took no notice, and she was left sobbing on the ground. Music is often used to suggest the nearness of the divine: here, wrenchingly, the divine hovers out of reach, and withdraws.
Padmore anchored the proceedings with a tirelessly expressive recitative, his slender tenor communicating everything from radiant wonder to raw terror. Even when he wasn’t singing, he remained at the center of the action, reacting and reënacting; at times, he mimed the sufferings of Christ while Christian Gerhaher, the most hauntingly resonant of baritones, sang Christ’s lines. Much of the time, Padmore simply listened; this Passion was a ceremony of listening. The only performer for whom no “role” was devised was Rattle, who has led the Philharmonic since 2002, and who will hand over the reins to a yet-to-be-named successor in 2018. He somehow remained inconspicuous even as he imposed flowing tempos and held a small army of forces in near-ideal balance. I thought of him as a stand-in for Bach, shepherding his most precious creation.
Although this Passion was strikingly intimate, at several points Sellars used the entire space of the Armory to convulsive effect. In “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde gross,” the closing chorus of Part I, the singers ran out into the audience and took positions all around the auditorium. I had a mezzo singing almost in my ear, and while I lost a sense of the total sound I gained an appreciation of how each part fit into the whole, not to mention a heightened awareness of the text itself, which thunders the message of universal guilt: “O Man, bewail your great sin.” Then, there was Jesus’ cry of “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani” (Luther’s rendering of “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” or “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). Gerhaher sang it from somewhere out in the vastness of the space, beyond the temporary arena. A more uncanny symbol of the loneliness of death can scarcely be imagined. From there to the end, many of us were in a trance, out of which the chorus jolted us with one last unexpected gesture: in the silence after the final chord, the singers turned away from the block representing Christ’s tomb and stared outward, with cold, expectant glances. They seemed to say, “You, too, are responsible.”
The Berlin Philharmonic gave four concerts at Carnegie Hall before proceeding to the Armory. The series demonstrated repeatedly why this orchestra is so often described as the world’s finest. As usual, the lower register seized the attention first. In the fifth bar of Schumann’s First Symphony, cellos and double-basses slice down from D to A, propelling a turn from bright B-flat major to grim D minor. With the Philharmonic, in place of an indistinct rumble, you hear each tone. Yet icy precision is not the goal; in keeping with the philosophy of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the Philharmonic’s visionary mid-twentieth-century leader, the bass inhabits a background space, slightly distinct from the rest. What results is the sonic equivalent of deep focus.
All the same, the orchestra’s principal offering at Carnegie, a survey of the four Schumann symphonies, proved oddly inert. There were myriad marvellous details—solos that materialized out of the ensemble rather than posing in the spotlight; chords that were tuned and balanced to the point of becoming eerie; crescendos that built to saturating climaxes without ever losing their timbral richness—yet at many points a unifying rhythmic thrust was missing. Rattle and the Philharmonic were at their best performing Georg Friedrich Haas’s “dark dreams,” which was written for the orchestra last year. It marks a departure for the composer, who has specialized in trembling, churning textures; toward the end, microtonal atmospherics give way to stark unison statements, which seem to be the prelude to a new symphonic style.
While the Philharmonic made its way back home, the Rundfunkchor remained in New York for a final event under the aegis of White Light: a rendition of Rachmaninoff’s “All-Night Vigil,” at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, off Times Square. This was beautiful in the extreme. No longer a crowd of agonized souls, the chorus joined together in wave upon wave of ecstatic sound. Those of us who had seen the Passion felt as if we had got to know these singers, and, as they walked down the aisle at the end, more than a few of us were teary-eyed. We had been to the mountaintop with them. ♦
