On Esenvalds's Passion and Resurrection, Barber's Adagio for Strings, and D'Astorga's Stabat Mater

Oratorios use music to tell stories. For centuries, composers used music to heighten the so- called “Passion” narrative, which depicts Christ’s crucifixion. For many, this tradition culminated with Bach’s contributions to the genre, the Passion According to St. John and the Passion According to St. Matthew. Other composers have turned to other, poetic texts that consider a particular moment in that story. Perhaps the best-known of these is the Stabat Mater, a poem depicting the grief of Mary, Christ’s mother. This essay highlights a setting of the Stabat Mater by the eighteenth-century Sicilian-Spanish composer Emanuele D’Astorga. The twenty-first century has already seen a number of musical accounts of the Passion story, but none perhaps so original as Passion and Resurrection by the living Latvian composer, Ēriks Ešenvalds, which tells it in narrative, dramatic fashion while also lingering on moments featuring some of its secondary characters.

Ešenvalds created Passion and Resurrection in 2005 in response to a commission from the State Choir of Latvia, of which he was a member in the early 2000s. He recalls: “I worked on the piece very carefully, having had such wonderful experience as a singer and knowing how good the choir was, so it had to be of very high standard! Of course there was an emotional side of the piece—I myself am a believer, and the Passion story is the basis of all Christianity. I wanted to tell that story.” The initial inspiration for the many and varied components of his oratorio came while he was on tour in France with the State Choir of Latvia. He was lured into a music shop by the ancient sounds emerging from within: a motet, Parce Mihi Domine, by the Spanish Renaissance composer Cristobal Morales. This led him to take up the Passion story from a number of musical and conceptual perspectives, jumping off from several different points of inspiration, old and new.

The libretto that Ešenvalds created for this oratorio is itself a work of art. Whereas Bach’s passions directly map to the story as told by just one biblical evangelist (Matthew, or John) Ešenvalds’s work includes selections from Matthew, Luke, and John. Like Bach, Ešenvalds interpolates hymns and other poetic material to reflect on and expand the gospel narrative, but his scope is wider. His libretto includes passages from the fourth Tenebrae Responsory for Maundy Thursday, the Stabat Mater, and a non-scriptural text from the poem “O dulce lignum” by Fortunatus (c. 530–609). He reaches beyond the western church to the east and includes, from the Byzantine liturgy, the Hymn of Kassiani (Hymn of the Fallen Woman), parts of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostum, and the Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Other passages include fragments from a group known as The Seven Last Words of Christ. As the pieces of a multimedia collage do, the texts of his libretto appear in various sizes and textures: some complete, some fragmentary; some presented alone, in the foreground, some presented two or three at a time, overlapping, receding into the background.

Ešenvalds brings this libretto to life via four musical layers: chorus, solo soprano, solo quartet, and string orchestra. The way he structures these elements enhances the kaleidoscopic nature of the collage-like libretto. The work is in four movements that flow continuously, one to the next. Each movement follows a three-part framework that Ešenvalds outlines as “prelude, activity, and resolution.” In a process he calls “arcing,” he reiterates particular textures, orchestrations, and harmonic colors in a cyclical fashion. Sections of the narrative don’t begin and end in time so much as emerge and submerge. Like a film that simultaneously traces several storylines, the oratorio creates asynchronous planes of narrative that unfold as if refracted through the prism of memory or meditation. This “parallel dramaturgy,” as Ešenvalds deems it, allows the listener to follow multiple threads within the oratorio: the soprano soloist, whether she sings alone or soars above the choir and orchestra; the quartet, its ancient music ebbing and flowing in and out of consciousness; the chorus, acting either as omniscient narrator, the crowd, or the voice of Jesus; and the orchestra and violin soloist, who act almost as another character in the story. Because the different presenters in the story fade in and out at various times and sometimes overlap, and because there is no pause between sections or movements, the oratorio does not prescribe the precise point of focus for the listener but instead offers an array of moorings to which one might anchor temporarily during the larger journey.

The musical language, at once ancient and contemporary, backward- and forward-looking, is wide-ranging but sincere, always beautifully calibrated to the dramatic moment. Ešenvalds draws upon the full range of timbres and colors available from the chorus, strings, and soprano to highlight the emotional extremes of his chosen texts. The oratorio opens with a direct quotation from Morales’s Parce mihi domine, sung by a quartet of voices, in a simple, chordal style that immediately evokes the Renaissance, punctuated by shimmering chords in the strings whose dissonant harmonies refract the crystalline sonority of the quartet. The soprano soloist enters the picture to offer the Hymn of the Fallen Woman from the Byzantine liturgy, a passionate plea for forgiveness. Where the words become more impassioned, Ešenvalds takes the singer to the top extreme of her range and demands rhapsodic, fortississimo eruptions. When her words are more intimate, he summons the simplicity of chant, embroidered with ornamentation from both the western and Byzantine styles. The chorus plays several roles, as it does in the Passion oratorios of Bach, Schütz, and others. Some composers reserve the role of Jesus for a male soloist (sometimes with a special “divine” orchestration), but Ešenvalds sets Jesus’s words using the full choir, in widely spaced, radiant chords that create an enveloping, communal voice. Elsewhere, where the chorus drives the action forward as an omniscient narrator, its music is declamatory and unison. Shifts in the soundscape alter the dramatic focus of the lens. To push the narrative pace where the story becomes more active, Ešenvalds summons bracing, harsh sounds from the strings that tighten our perspective on the scene. The ferocious bark of the crowd’s repetitions of “Crucify!” and the anguish of Christ’s final cry, “Eloi, lama sabachtani,” (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) take on extreme-close-up intensity. To pull back to a more reflective panorama, the composer diffuses the sonic density and leans on the spectral qualities of string harmonics and vocal whispers. Recurring throughout are quotations and adaptations of the Renaissance motet by Morales, hauntingly simple amidst their surroundings.

The piece begins with the Morales motet that drew Ešenvalds into the music shop in France. Its words are not the story from the New Testament but an ancient set of questions from the Old, the frustrated ruminations of Job: “Leave me alone, Lord. My life makes no sense. Why is man so important to you? Why pay attention to what he does? Can’t you ever forgive my sin?” Other Passion settings establish Jesus as the central character in the drama from the outset, but Ešenvalds, after this questioning prelude, begins with the “Fallen Woman,” an everyday person, whose story in the Gospel of Luke ends with Jesus’s saying “Her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.” Ešenvalds links her to Mary Magdalen, and their perspective, that of peripheral, unheralded women, frames the oratorio. The piece ends with the reunion of Mary Magdalen and the resurrected Christ. She, thinking the resurrected Jesus to be the gardener, says to him, “Sir if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.” He addresses her: “Mariam” (“Mary”). She responds, in one word, “Rabboni” (“my teacher”). Ešenvalds ends not with a burial, or the moment of resurrection, but with repetitions of those two utterances of tender recognition between two dear friends. Rather than explain to us directly what this encounter means to Mary and Jesus by using prose, Ešenvalds simply presents the scene, on repeat. The choir speaks for Jesus, in richly-voiced repetitions of “Mariam.” The soprano, as Mary, responds, soaring above the choir, “Rabboni.” With each subsequent repetition we can reconsider the encounter. Astonishment, fear, comfort, relief: So much can be exchanged between two dear friends with just two words of greeting. Thus the oratorio ends, and its story concludes not with a period but with an ellipsis, its narrative extending in all directions. The result is a remarkable, prismatic, ecumenical creation. The listener has been reminded of the accounts of the events in the Bible, but the final scene’s repetitions of Mary’s (re)encountering Christ suggest that the resurrection offers ongoing, renewable grace—not so much an answer to the questions posed at the work’s outset, but a way of trying to answer them.

The other extended work on today’s program also approaches the Passion story not from the perspective of Jesus but from that of a woman at the periphery of the central narrative, Mary, his mother. The thirteenth-century hymn, Stabat Mater Dolorosa, belongs to a group of pieces called sequences, which arose as alterations to liturgical chants in the medieval period. Whereas many chants set unrhymed prose texts to long, undulating melodies, sequences paired rhyming, regularly accented texts with regularly phrased melodies. This potent combination made sequences easy to sing and easy to remember, and the genre flourished. A huge creative outpouring from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries gave musical voice to medieval spiritual fervor. The Stabat Mater Dolorosa, a later addition to this repertory, is particularly vivid and memorable in its depiction of Mary’s grief. It was popularized by the Flagellants, a fanatical sect active in the fourteenth century, who sang it as they went from town to town. The burgeoning presence of sequences in the liturgy threatened to crowd out other liturgical components, and they overlapped considerably with secular music. As a result, all but four sequences were banned from worship during the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. The Stabat Mater was readmitted in 1727, for the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. D’Astorga’s setting appeared sometime right around that year, followed by Pergolesi’s famous setting in 1736, and many others.

The poem’s first, second, and fourth stanzas narrate the historical event while other stanzas offer reflections. The perspective shifts several times: Beginning in the third person, the poem observes the mother herself, grieving. It then asks, “Who is it that would not weep seeing Christ’s Mother in such agony? Who would not be able to feel compassion on beholding Christ’s Mother suffering with her son?” Soon it shifts perspective to the first person, sharing in her grief, pledging to stand beside her. At the closing it widens slightly, hoping, by sharing in her suffering, for victory over death and the glory of paradise.

A beautifully rhymed poem that wears its heart on its sleeve offers much to a composer, and Emanuele D’Astorga created a setting that takes beautiful advantage of such a work. His lifespan overlaps those of J.S. Bach and Handel almost exactly, placing him and his music squarely in the High Baroque. But if Bach’s music was idiosyncratically archaic, and Handel’s was grandiose and cosmopolitan, D’Astorga’s was thoroughly Mediterranean and treats us to the affecting sounds flowing from Italy in the first third of the eighteenth century, by which point its homegrown art form, opera, had fully flowered. Stabat Mater is D’Astorga’s only surviving sacred work; the bulk of his output comprises secular solo cantatas in the Neapolitan operatic style. The solo movements of his Stabat Mater are full of the kinds of touching turns of phrase characteristic of that genre. The choral movements infuse Baroque expressivity into more ancient forms, such as the fugue. Here’s how the conductor and scholar Robert King, who created an edition of the work for Oxford University Press, sums up the place of this Stabat Mater in music history:

The Stabat Mater demonstrates an enormously attractive musical style, featuring a mixture of melody with melancholy, sweetness tempered with mild chromaticism, old-fashioned polyphony contrasted with Neapolitan cantilena, a surprisingly Germanic use of motivic development in the bel canto bass solo movement, and a final, quietly operatic chorus that gently directs the listener away from the Virgin’s sorrow towards the Carmelite missal’s more optimistic “palm of victory.”

In the alternation of intimate solo movements and broad choral movements, we’re reminded that grief is at once intensely personal and also communal. Who among us hasn’t felt, when attempting to comfort someone grieving, that nothing we can say will penetrate the intense, individual pain we’re trying to assuage? And yet, sometimes one’s mere presence—a symbol of a wider community of support—offers more than any words could. There’s a reason we still gather together at times of loss.

It occurred to me that I needed something to bridge these two accounts, perspectives, and sound worlds. Something about the repeated oscillation of two chords in the choir’s “Mariam” at the end of the Ešenvalds was redolent of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Realizing that I’d have the strings on hand, I placed it in between the two extended works. From its premiere in 1938, Barber’s Adagio has reached directly into the hearts of its listeners. It was presented at memorial concerts following the deaths of both FDR and JFK. It has been used, to devastating effect, in films. The slow start, flowing but arrhythmically suspended, and the plush velvet of low strings, softened and darkened by a preponderance of flats and seventh chords, immediately evoke a melancholic, contemplative atmosphere. The low strings rock slowly back and forth between two chords like the inhalation and exhalation of deep sleep. In the first violins, an almost hesitant melody uncoils slowly, not wailing, exactly, but lamentingly looping back on itself. Like someone trying to summon the emotional fortitude to face something difficult, it starts up, rises a bit, resigns temporarily, then tries again. Passed to other sections in the string band, the melody’s strength steadily grows, as Barber builds masterfully towards the work’s intense climax, which draws the players’ hands so high up the fingerboard, shortening and tightening the strings, that one seated close enough can hear the effortful scratch of horsehair across steel. After the climax, the opening chords and melody return. The melody again tries to go somewhere, but resigns itself to just its first five notes. It concludes with those five notes repeated, slowly, in the lowest register of the violin, settling comfortably into the warmth of F major. Barber’s colleague and contemporary, Aaron Copland, located the secret to the Adagio in its sincerity:

It’s really well felt, it’s believable, you see, it’s not phony. . . . It comes straight from the heart, to use old-fashioned terms. The sense of continuity, the steadiness of the flow, the satisfaction of the arch that it creates from beginning to end. They’re all very gratifying, satisfying, and it makes you believe in the sincerity which he obviously put into it.

The Adagio has been used to mark momentous, collective mourning, and yet it can also feel like the musical exteriorization of very individual, personal grief. Like the Passion and Resurrection and Stabat Mater, it can change complexion depending on whether the listener is absorbing it as part of a community, or alone. Each spring the world’s Christians retell and relive their faith’s central story. Some will focus on the suffering of Christ or the grief of his mother, as represented in the Stabat Mater poem. Others will celebrate the joy of the resurrection. The story, as a whole, captures so many of the mixed feelings of loss and renewal. In Ešenvalds’s hands, it is beautifully, powerfully told, from an unexpected perspective. Yet because of the humanness of its soloist, the freshness of its sounds, the openness of its structure, and the way its texts interact, the oratorio lets all listeners in and allows us to resonate in very individual ways with the story’s many human sentiments and struggles—despair, grief, hope, devotion, and, above all, it would seem to me, forgiveness.