"Sacred Dissonance"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, June 18, 2012.
When composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entered the shadow realm of dissonance, they often went in quest of
emotional extremes. So it was with
Strauss’s “Salome,” Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,” Berg’s “Wozzeck,” and other
landmarks of modernism. Yet the progression toward atonality also had a
mystical aspect: these uncanny new
chords could serve as esoteric icons,
emblems of the sacred. Such is the import of certain late works of Liszt, of
Scriabin’s music of divine ecstasy, of the
occultist pieces that Satie wrote for the
Rosicrucian theatre of Joséphin Péladan. Schoenberg’s atonal language
found its ultimate purpose in the opening measures of his opera “Moses und
Aron,” where hexachords represent
God speaking through the burning
bush. Twentieth-century composers
went on to create a staggering corpus of
sacred music, arguably eclipsing the
production of the preceding century.
Even secular-minded artists like György
Ligeti and Morton Feldman wrote works
of a spiritual nature, perhaps because
their chosen language drew them toward the unsayable.
John Adams has described himself
as a “secular liberal living in Berkeley, California,” yet he, too, has tilted
toward sacred subjects. His opera “The
Death of Klinghoffer” juxtaposes
Jewish and Islamic theology, and his
opera-oratorio “El Niño” gives a contemporary spin to the Nativity story.
“Doctor Atomic,” Adams’s opera
about the Trinity test, has religious
overtones. In part, these themes stem
from the preoccupations of the director Peter Sellars, Adams’s longtime
collaborator, who has sought to engage
with various spiritual traditions in a
theatrical vision informed by social activism. All along, though, Adams has
shown a mystic bent: the sumptuous
tonal chords of early pieces such as
“Harmonium” and “Harmonielehre”
come across as apparitions or illuminations, to use favored words of Olivier
Messiaen, the leading religious composer of the past century.
Adams’s latest work, “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” had its
première at the end of May, in Walt
Disney Concert Hall, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction
of Gustavo Dudamel. A Passion play in
all but name, it is a huge, strange, turbulent creation, brushing against chaos.
The modernist tradition of the dark sacred, of the radical sublime, is alive and
well; a composer who started out as
an acolyte of Boulez, Stockhausen, and
Cage has rediscovered his avant-garde
roots, and those who prize him as an
audience-friendly neo-Romantic are in
for some shocks. Although the structure
is unwieldy and overloaded—the first
performance lasted nearly three hours,
intermission included, and a good portion of the audience didn’t stay to the
end—it contains some of the strongest,
most impassioned music of Adams’s career. Above all, it is a work of daring: a
popular, celebrated artist has set aside
familiar devices and stepped into the
unknown.
The libretto of “The Other Mary,” which Sellars devised in consultation with Adams, depicts the last days
of Christ from the perspective of the
three people devoted to him: Martha,
her brother Lazarus, and their sister Mary, who, following an old Catholic tradition, is conflated with Mary Magdalene. Jesus is
quoted, but does not sing. Much of the
familiar drama of the Crucifixion—the
betrayal of Jesus, the trial under Pontius Pilate, the selection of Barabbas,
and so on—is absent; instead, passages
from the Old and New Testaments, focussing on inward matters of life, death,
doubt, and faith, are intermingled with
religiously tinged poems by Rosario
Castellanos, Rubén Darío, Primo Levi,
June Jordan, and, most crucially, the
Native American writer Louise Erdrich.
(There are four pieces from her 1989
collection, “Baptism of Desire.”) Sellars’s riskiest move is to incorporate
writings of the radical Catholic activist
Dorothy Day, letting Mary and Martha
voice Day’s journals and commentaries
in turn: the sisters become fighters for
social justice, Mary prone to wild emotion, Martha steadier and steelier. Day
is a mighty figure, but her hortatory
prose is not easily made into music, and
these sections tend to be weaker than
the rest.
Adams’s orchestra is not large by
modern standards: twelve woodwinds,
eight brass, and the usual complement
of strings. (Beethoven used similar
forces for his Ninth Symphony.) There
is, however, a major battery of percussion, including a forest of Almglocken,
tuned gongs, and tam-tams. The most
novel timbres come from a quartet of
piano, harp, bass electric guitar, and
cimbalom—the hammered dulcimer
that Stravinsky memorably employed in
“Renard” and “Ragtime.” As in “El
Niño,” a trio of countertenors supplies much of the Biblical exposition. In all,
it is a fantastically varied sound-world,
running the gamut from the neo-medieval harmonies of the high male voices to
the end-times funk of the bass guitar,
with the twang of the cimbalom lending a gritty exoticism to almost every
page of the score.
The work begins in spectacularly
abrupt fashion, with slashing chords
and the words “The next day in the city
jail we were searched for drugs.” (This
is from Day’s recollection of a humiliating imprisonment that she experienced in her radical youth.) The chorus interjects an apocalyptic prophecy
from Isaiah—“Howl ye; for the day of
the Lord is at hand”—while the horns
bellow in dissonant proximity to each
other, and the winds and strings scurry
underneath. The two female leads are
introduced, and a Spanish-language
chorus sways, buoyantly, in a minor
mode. It is in the third scene, devoted
to the raising of Lazarus, that “The
Other Mary” is overtaken by a divine
weirdness. Rapid arpeggios accumulate into a Ligeti-like fog, suggesting
the wafting away of a life; woodwind
glissandos hint at decomposition
(“Lord, by this time he stinketh”); and
a moaning, muttering, and shouting
chorus evokes fear and awe before the
awakening of the dead. Few musical
works have conveyed so vividly the
fundamental spookiness of the idea of
resurrection.
The sequence that follows is more
conventional, at least within the intricate, collagelike template established by
Adams and Sellars in “El Niño.” There
is an austerely dancing chorus in the
vein of Lou Harrison (“Drop down, ye
heavens”); Lazarus sings a raw, rollicking aria of celebration; and Mary tears
into Erdrich’s poem “Mary Magdalene”
(“I will drive boys / to smash empty bottles on their brows”), with the chorus
declaiming Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval text “Spiritus Sanctus” behind
her. One gnashing dissonance in this
passage comes out of Beethoven’s “Eroica.” The final scene of Act I, dedicated
to the Last Supper, starts haltingly, with
Dorothy Day’s prickly defense of her
focus on poverty during the Second
World War, and then takes wing, with
a sublimely songful setting of Primo
Levi’s “Passover.” Listening to the latter, I had the thought that, in an alternate existence, Adams might have
had a career like that of Sondheim, writing musical theatre at an exalted level.
But the orchestral postlude for the
scene could never play on Broadway:
forty-two visionary bars in harmonic
limbo, with piercing chords for the brass
and with strings pulsing in heartbeat
rhythm, all coming to rest in a Messiaen-like haze of saturated tonality. The
entire sequence is a wonder, equalling
the impact of “Batter my heart,” the
surging finale of Act I of “Doctor
Atomic.”
Act II opens with a ferocious Erdrich
chorus (“Orozco’s Christ”) and another
momentum-slowing Dorothy Day disquisition, recounting her arrest during a
1973 United Farm Workers action in
Salinas Valley. This is the final lull:
from the first bars of the Golgotha
scene to the end, “The Other Mary”
moves on a very high imaginative plane.
Low gongs, bass guitar, and the soft
screech of a bowed tam-tam create a
cavernous aural space. Bassoons, cellos,
and basses crawl through the lower register. The ranting chorus returns, now
directed to be “yelling, mocking, abusive,” with a crowd of unhinged mourners ensuing. A klezmerish clarinet wails;
a police whistle blows in the wake of an
extended scream of lamentation. When
the Virgin Mary is described as beholding her Son on the Cross, those who
know “El Niño” will hear a heartbreaking echo of that work’s Mary music.
Oboes and clarinets keen through a lament by Mary Magdalene, based on Erdrich’s poem “The Savior.” Ashen
choirs of wind and brass mark the three
days in the tomb. It is all terrifyingly
beautiful.
Messiaen haunts several pages of the
score, but Adams lacks his predecessor’s
unquestioning belief. The Resurrection
elicits no major-key blaze of glory; instead, the shadows of Golgotha simply
steal away, yielding to a tableau of awakening nature, of instrumental rustling
and chirping mixed with recorded
sounds of frogs. The chorus, reverting
to childlike innocence, delivers a crisply
syncopated setting of Erdrich’s “The
Sacraments” (“It is spring. The tiny frogs
pull / their strange new bodies out / of
the suckholes . . .”). A roar of percussion
signals the earthquake that opens Christ’s tomb; then that noise, too, subsides. Mary Magdalene, near the tomb,
gazes at a man whom she takes to be a
gardener. “Mary,” the figure says, in the
countertenors’ narration. The orchestra shimmers, shakes, and rumbles all
around, with the cimbalom trilling at
the center of the sound. Then it vanishes into silence.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic began rehearsing “The Other Mary” immediately after the last of a
series of staged performances of “Don
Giovanni”—a coolly stylized production under the direction of Christopher
Alden, with arresting crumpled-paper
sets by Frank Gehry. The orchestra
had not been expecting Adams to deliver quite so vast a piece, and rehearsal
time was limited. Under the circumstances, and, indeed, by any standard,
they played magnificently; the brass
section, in particular, deserves a medal
for courage under fire. The vocal
leads—Kelley O’Connor, as Mary;
Tamara Mumford, as Martha; and
Russell Thomas, as Lazarus—gave
red-blooded life to elusive characters.
Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, and
Nathan Medley, the countertenors,
sang with purity and intensity. The Los
Angeles Master Chorale threw itself
vehemently, even dementedly, into the
proceedings. Dudamel, who apparently
knew the score inside out, led with a
clear, sure hand. The L.A. Phil demonstrated once again why it is the most
creative, and, therefore, the best, orchestra in America.
“The Other Mary” has yet to reach
its final form: when Sellars presents a
full staging of the piece—first at Disney,
next March, and then at Lincoln Center, later that month—it will undoubtedly change complexion. Also, because
Adams wrote more quickly than he
might have wished, beginning the score
eighteen months ago and finishing it
just three weeks before the première, he
may reconsider matters large and small.
Some cuts should only heighten the impact of what is already an immensely
potent work, one that may prove pivotal
in the composer’s output. At the age of
sixty-five, Adams seems to be entering
a new phase, revisiting the danger zones
of twentieth-century style, and the first
results are astonishing.