Thelma Lovell
‘… the experience of the Holy: terror, bliss, and recognition of an absolute authority … the most thrilling and impressive combination of these elements occurs in sacrificial ritual: the shock of the deadly blow and flowing blood, the bodily and spiritual rapture of festive eating’ (Walter Burkert: Homo Necans)
Baroque is something of a catch-all term but if, as Willi Apel puts it, ecstasy and exuberance are two of its defining characteristics, then the Brockes Passion is a paradigm example of that cultural era. Yet while Handelians feast on the music (as they did during the Academy of Ancient Music’s recent superlative performance at the Barbican on Good Friday 2019) can the text be considered equally palatable to a modern sensibility? Does its undisguised fervour veer into melodrama, too crudely graphic to conform to our ideas of the spiritual?
We are so much more familiar with the deep ocean swell of Bach’s great structures in the St Matthew Passion as the ne plus ultra of sacred music. The comparison, however, is not between better or worse, but of which route to take to the heart of the religious mystery. Roughly speaking, Bach awes us from within to make us receptive to the Passion story. For Handel it is a more empirical process, from the concrete to the abstract; it is through insight into human agency and motivation that the deeper meaning filters through. Hence the Brockes re-telling was the ideal vehicle for such a natural dramatist – and it is worth remembering, as Ruth Smith observed in her fine article ‘Handel’s Brockes Passion: a Unique Composition’ in Handel News No.74 (January 2019), that the composer adhered closely to the instructions of his librettist.
If we flinch at parts of the Brockes Passion, then that is as it should be. Like it or not, we are willing voyeurs of, and thus in a sense participants in, a primeval sacrificial ritual that strengthens social bonds. An anthropologist – Durkheim comes to mind – would instantly recognise the choreographed interplay of tensions whose release can only come with the shedding of blood. This is the essence of the sacred, the mystery of mysteries that ensures divine protection for the community. The opening reference to disease that can only be cured by such means is a familiar theological trope, as for instance in Bach’s cantata 25 (Es ist nicht Gesundes an meinem Leibe), with its catalogue of suppurating horrors (at least Brockes is content with a boil or two). And then we are plunged straight into the Eucharist: the symbolic (or, for a Catholic, the actual) consuming of the victim’s flesh and blood.
This, in a nutshell, comprises the entire programme of the work. But its necessary expansion gives writer and composer much to do. For instance, there is the interplay of three layers of audience; we are watching the Daughter of Zion and the Believing Soul as they themselves watch and comment on the central events. The complex story is propelled onward with Baroque energy in a succession of distinct scenes and, most importantly, through Handel’s variety of mood and characterisation. Conflict, the motor of all drama, is everywhere. Peter’s battles with himself are a case in point: how better could we understand repentance and shame than through his three highly personal arias with their transition from militant bravado to vocal nakedness as he stands unarmed, and that final howl at the admission of defeat? There are powers beyond his control: the force majeure of the angry mob and, most painfully, his own inner limitations as he accepts that his courage has failed.
The panoply of arias for the Daughter of Zion and the Believing Soul – not especially long, but all full of concentrated emotional expression – present an ideal vehicle for Handel as painter of feeling. They embody the Christian collective torn by its own conflicted vision of the Passion: anger, disgust, pity and anguish are on display, but also a kind of horrified desire. The rite has to be fulfilled; in spite of the animal barbarity, the ending of the whole work is one of joy and relief. In the final aria all tears can – indeed must – be wiped away, for this one death brings salvation to all.
But what about the victim himself? He too is drawn into the irresistible nexus of sacrifice, though as a man he wishes desperately to avoid the physical agony. Here, Brockes and Handel jointly stage a scene thick with apprehension. We hear Christ’s juddering heartbeat as he begs his Father to spare him the fated ordeal. There is a particularly eloquent harmonic colouring (the deadness of the flattened supertonic) as he at last yields to the divine will; only thus will he too accede to divinity. The Daughter of Zion then interposes a commentary identifying the source of pollution that corrupts the community and can only be expunged by the death of Christ: it is the monster (Scheusal) of human sin.
Fast forward to the most psychologically difficult part of the Brockes Passion: the prolonged allusion to torture in music of sublime beauty – notably Dem Himmel gleicht and Die Rosen krönen. As Brockes emphasises the physical vulnerability of Christ, the mangling of the flesh, the blood, sweat and tears that brutality exacts, we may well wonder what all this has to do with spirituality. But that is precisely the point: the mystery of the sacred is heightened, not lessened, by the contrast between flesh and spirit. Belief in their reconciliation demands a correspondingly enormous investment of faith which, having once been made, is all the securer for the effort involved. But how is this to be achieved? The answer here is surely music as surrogate and enabler of the synaptic leap between logic and faith – a glimpse of aural heaven amidst the gore. In true Baroque fashion, Affekt is all-conquering, subjecting the evidence of reason to a different sort of power. Perhaps it is music itself that is sacred – benign or dangerous, depending on its uses, but undeniably a mystery.