Jesus Christ, opera star
ENO, April 2000
Roderic Dunnett / Independent (Digital)
Concerts of Bach’s St John Passion are familiar Eastertide events.
Now the crucifixion is being staged at English National Opera. Can the
director Deborah Warner retain its sacred heart?
Each Good Friday for the past five years (and the same this Easter –
the 250th anniversary of JS Bachís death) Stephen Layton has conducted
Bach’s St John Passion at St John’s, Smith Square in London,
with a top-notch Evangelist, such as Ian Bostridge or Mark Padmore.
‘And every time near the close of the piece, around 4pm, the sun
has come out; it’s been dark most of the afternoon – a normal,
broody Good Friday – and then suddenly, pow!" he says. "I
know that because it blazes straight into my eyes. And at that point I
always have to conduct with them shut. It’s pretty uncanny –
five years on the trot. I have this jinxed feeling that the year that
it doesn’t happen, our performance will somehow have missed the mark.”
Last year must have been a scorcher, for Layton’s St John Passion,
with his own choir Polyphony, wowed audience and critics alike. Success
bred opportunity. Nicholas Payne, general director of English National
Opera, has now invited Layton to conduct a staging of the St John Passion
for ENO, sung in English. Padmore, well versed in Baroque opera, sings
the Evangelist. Deborah Warner, who produced a run of triumphs for Opera
North in the Nicholas Payne–Paul Daniel era (and more recently staged
the Royal Opera’s Turn of the Screw with Bostridge and Daniel’s
wife, Joan Rodgers), makes her ENO début.
The Coliseum isn’t exactly Oberammergau, though there is a precedent
: Jonathan Miller made an attractive semi-staging of St Matthew Passion
in a Knightsbridge church a few years ago. And ENO itself has amazing
plans to stage Verdi’s Requiem next December. But what can we expect?
Jesus Christ Superstar? Godspell? The doubting Christ of Dennis Potter’s
Son of Man? Pasolini’s severe Marxist icon?
Dropping only a few clues, Warner plays characteristically coy. "With
Shakespeare, you always feel you’ve got an incredible collaborator
and mentor in the playwright himself; and you get the same with Bach.
You throw just a small idea into the melting pot, and it bubbles up and
generates a thousand others.
"We’ve got video and slide projection as one of our tools; and
we’ve raised the pit, advancing beyond the proscenium so as to bridge
the divide, positioning part of the chorus further forward.
"Compared to me," she adds, "the singers knew it all backwards.
So I felt pretty nervous at the start. But what struck me full in the
face was Bach’s revelation of character. The Evangelist – he’s
an extraordinary guy, this man who loses his friend. By the end, he’s
so cut up and churned up, he’s scarcely able to sing. There’s
this marvellous moment in the music where Christ drops his head and dies,
and the alto aria follows. By the following recitative you sense that
the Evangelist – ie St John – can scarcely utter at all."
Layton agrees. "The Evangelist, he’s just about wrecked by the
end. He’s joined on stage by all these people bringing flowers to
put on Jesus’s grave, and a young child brings him a lamb –
a highly potent Passover symbol. There they are, sitting on stage singing
what is, in effect, a funeral chorus, telling Jesus to ‘Sleep well,
and rest in God, who makes an end of all our weeping.’ That ‘our’
– it’s inclusive. I’ve never before had the idea of this
last chorus as being an involvement of all humanity. Everybody gets drawn
in. It’s something Deborah’s staging really brings out.
"There’s this dark feel to the St John right from the very outset,
a kind of brooding, a turmoil – almost like a Dance of Death. There’s
this undulating texture in the violins, and chromatic spikes in the woodwind,
a bass line that seems to keep hammering in nails, and an alternating
of consonance and dissonance. It’s incredibly unsettling, till the
tension is released by the first choir entry. I don’t think there’s
any other Bach quite like it.
"It’s a better plot than any opera. I mean, they don’t
crucify many people in opera. Take a moment like where Pilate says, ‘What
is truth?’ – ‘Was ist Wahrheit?’ In an ordinary performance
you play a chord in the continuo, and the moment passes. But actually
there are all sorts of other things you can do, like not playing a chord.
When Pilate [ENO company principal David Kempster] asks, ‘What is
truth?’, there’s not a murmur – and the whole bloody world
shakes. OK, it’s being slightly naughty; purists might not go along
with it, but I think with a staging it can be justified.
"Pilate’s an extraordinary, tortured figure too. I think Bach’s
Lutheran principles come over really strongly, perhaps never more so than
in the music where the Evangelist says that ‘from that moment onwards
he sought to release Jesus.’ We’ve had all flat keys throughout
the recit, and all of a sudden Bach twists it into E major, C sharp major
– it gives it this wonderful feeling; you sense that all the time
that Bach is hammering home the point, ‘This guy Pilate, he didn’t
want to do it.’ The staging brings that out all the more clearly.
"The chorus in the Passion has a crucial role, whether as Romans,
or as the people getting on their high horse, chanting: ‘We have
a sacred law’, or yelling out sort of blitzkrieg ‘Kreuzige!’s
– ‘Crucify him!’ It’s quite a change for them, coming
from Bizet or Verdi the night before and having to sing music that isn’t
operatic writing at all – it’s more a case of instrumental music
that the voice has to sing.
"It’s definitely more dramatic than the St Matthew Passion.
That has orchestral accompaniment to the recitatives, whereas the St John
has much starker continuo; and while the St Matthew has more tender love
and contemplation – sections like ‘Erbarme dich’ for instance
– there’s never quite the brutal venom and crowd baying for
blood that there is in the St John. And the alto aria (‘Es ist vollbracht’
– ‘It is accomplished’) following Christ’s death is
an extraordinary moment, where the music seems almost to contradict the
words. It says it’s fulfilled, yet the music is about as unfulfilled
as it could be. It’s stuffed full of black notes – you look
at an illuminated manuscript of this aria and you think, ‘Why did
he do that?’ It’s not till the next bit, when she sings ‘The
Lion of Judah’, that the triumph comes in."
And there’s Jesus himself, sung by Paul Whelan, who made a pretty
Christ-like figure of Maxwell Davies’s equally doomed Doctor of Myddfai
for WNO a couple of years ago. "Christ is an incredibly tricky figure
to play on stage," Layton says. "You have to avoid the statuesque,
yet there’s a particular gravitas to the role in the German way of
singing which I think it’s difficult for English singers to capture.
Paul looks and sounds superb."
Certainly, Holman Hunt would have given his right arm for a Whelan, though
Deborah Warner was originally less convinced: "Paul looked so much
like a traditional image of Christ that when I first met him, I wanted
to cut all his long hair off. But as things went on it became curiously
exciting that he does have this in-built Christ-like image. He’s
quite an angry, fighting Christ.
"One of the satisfying things is that Paul and the others will be
able to go back to singing the piece as oratorio with this experience
behind them," she says. "Mark, I think, is one of the truly
great Evangelists; yet when he does this piece in future, it will never
be quite the same. He will actually have been at the base of the Cross
himself."
By Roderic Dunnett
5 April 2000