St. Matthew Passion
by Johann Sebastian Bach,
directed by Jonathan Miller.
Brooklyn Academy of Music,
March-April 2006.
You are sitting in a comfortable but rather dilapidated old theater. In places the walls peel away to show the brickwork underneath, and the paintwork is often fancifully uneven. The performance space itself is a bare, flat, wide stage, which at this point is filled with a crowd of people dressed pretty much as you are. Some of them sit facing you in a rough semi-circle of chairs; others are bunched in two separate groups on either side of the performance area; two or three sit at a long table which, aside from the chairs, is practically the only scenery on the stage itself; a half-dozen or so have their backs to you.
Then, just as you register the fact that a number of these people are holding musical instruments, a conductor, heretofore invisible, lifts his arms and the music starts. Some of the people on the stage begin to sing, but at first they are almost indifferentiable from those who are not singing. (Later, it will become apparent that many of them are audience members seated on the stage, but because of the cunning distribution of people and voices—and the fact that some singers don’t open their mouths until well into the performance—it is not clear for quite a while which are singers and which are listeners.) Almost immediately, you are gripped by the realization that the singers are conveying a story to you, partly by telling it and partly by acting it out. But the difference between “telling” and “acting out” is itself blurred. The acting has a casual, everyday quality, the very opposite of operatic or histrionic, and even the language lends its weight to the everyday feeling: you can understand every word, because they are singing in English.
This is Jonathan Miller’s production of the St. Matthew Passion at BAM’s Harvey Theater in Brooklyn. I have seen it twice now, in 2001 and 2006, and on the basis of those two viewings, I am willing to wager that it is Miller’s directorial masterpiece. Most of what he has cared about in his various fields of endeavor—the human body in relation to other bodies, the human voice in relation to music, the portrayal of intense human emotion in art, the lightning-quick connection between the plausible and the impossible—has been brought to bear on this single production. Miller breaks all the rules, and in doing so he gets at the heart of the artwork. His gentle iconoclasm is so quiet, so careful—so reverent, as it were—that the artwork, far from being savaged or deconstructed, is left gloriously alive and intact.
If you try to tell Bach purists what is great about the Miller production, they will turn up their noses. The St. Matthew Passion, they will insist, cannot be fully staged. It is always simply sung, and it is always sung in German. It is a massive, impressive, special-occasion sort of piece, not meant to be done casually or in street clothes.
But to view these changes as a violation is to miss what Miller has seen in the musical piece itself. He has understood that at its very center is an evocation of feeling in the bystanders: first, the bystanders at the Crucifixion at the moment when it occurred, and second, the bystanders we become when we listen to the Bach. Miller has brought these two kinds of bystanders together and made them one—or, if not one, then a twinned pair, joined halves, two sides of the same coin. In linking us with the people onstage and them with us, he has sliced through time and space, making the faraway, legendary, slightly intangible Then into the visible, visceral Now.
Bach’s music helps, and the musicians in the Miller production, under the baton of Paul Goodwin, render it with skill and verve. A great deal is achieved here by excellent musicianship on the part of the conductor, the chorus, and the orchestra. But even some of this success can be traced back to a directorial decision, for on the stage of the Harvey, the instrumentalists are not just accompaniment; they are part of the action, too. Especially in the second half of the program, when the emotional intensity mounts, individual players—a violinist, a flautist—come forward out of their seats to stand near or even hover over the soloists with whom they are playing. There is something angelic in their stance at these moments, and also something maternal, as if the musicians are offering the singers some of the protectiveness, the warmth, which Christ so sadly lacked at the time of his execution. Sadness is the keynote: this is, above all, a sorrowful production of the Passion, one that is likely to bring tears to the eyes even of an unbeliever. Part of what causes the tears is the beauty of an achieved artistic idea—that miracle never ceases to move me, on each of the occasions when I am privileged to see it—but part of it is the story itself, for once made real and comprehensible to someone who is usually outside its influence.
I do not think it is a coincidence that this St. Matthew Passion was conceived by a Jewish agnostic physician, someone who knows that bodies cannot die on a Friday and come back to life on a Sunday. It is precisely in transcending his own sense of disbelief in the essential story that Miller has enabled this religious piece to speak to the rest of us—the rest of us, I mean, who do not believe in an immortal Christ. Every choice made by the director brings the actual physicality of the story closer to us. In the 2006 production, for instance, Christ was played by the remarkable Curtis Streetman, a man who looks like the Tony Soprano of Jesuses. Big and beefy, with dark disordered hair surrounding his face and a cheap red T-shirt encasing his solid torso, he seems at first all wrong for the part. And then he moves, with enormous dignity and grace, and sings, in his beautiful bass voice, and you remember that Jesus was in fact a carpenter, a man who probably looked more like this than like the skinny martyr so often portrayed in religious art. Yet even the artistic tradition is not irrelevant here, for at times Streetman wears on his face an expression that is exactly reminiscent of a mournful Caravaggio Christ. So he is at once strange and familiar, both the Jesus we already know and one we have never seen before. And in either case he is certainly an incarnation of man (the red shirt a kind of allusion, perhaps, to Shakespeare’s incarnadine), a physical presence who is here with us for a time and then is taken away. “Where is my Jesus gone?” the bereft chorus sings, and the words are humanly piercing, like a child crying for its mother, or a mother for her lost child.
Miller was lucky in other respects with his 2006 casting. Rufus Müller, who sang the Evangelist part, was terrific. Soprano Suzie LeBlanc and countertenor Daniel Taylor were also quite good, and the bass singer Dominic Inferrera did a lovely job with his small role as Pilate. But to single out performers in this way is to belie the feeling of the whole piece. It is precisely its seamlessness, its completeness—not as a performance, but as an event in life—that makes this St. Matthew Passion so satisfying. To praise individual performances feels a bit like praising the people who have appeared in wonderful documentary films like 28 Up or The Thin Blue Line: why should we applaud them for being themselves? I am not so silly as to imagine that Rufus Müller is St. Matthew or Curtis Streetman is Jesus Christ, but it is part of the magic of Jonathan Miller’s production that I can even begin to think of them in this manner. If I say that they seem simultaneously to be performing the role of a character and to be performing as themselves, you will perhaps have some idea of the production’s unusual nature. One of the ways in which this St. Matthew induces belief is to demand only that we believe in the very specific reality of the performance we are witnessing.
Curious as to how far this belief-inducement might take me, I wandered up to the Metropolitan Museum, a few days after St. Matthew, to take another look at the Duccio Madonna and Child. Was my experience at BAM simply a matter of great art’s persuasiveness? And if so, would I find myself turning as Christian in front of this Siennese painting as I had when confronted with Miller’s Bach?
The Duccio is indeed a great painting. It sits in the middle of a room that is almost always uninhabited, so that when I go to visit the picture, I rarely have to wait for anyone else to get out of the way. A tiny thing, about the size of a single sheet of typing paper, it does not draw undue attention to itself. And yet, when you get up close, it exerts tremendous power.
“Painted about 1300,” the museum’s caption proudly announces, “this exquisite work inaugurates the grand Italian tradition of envisioning the sacred figures of the Madonna and Child in terms appropriated from real life.” That seems true enough. When one compares it, at least, to the other paintings in its vicinity, there does seem to be a less stylized, more lifelike quality to this particular Mary and Jesus. It has something to do with the way he reaches up to grab her white head-cloth as he looks into her face, something to do with the way the toes of his right foot rest softly on her wrist. The painting is extremely moving in all sorts of ways, from the uncanny slimness of the Madonna’s fingers and the sad expression on her face (she is not looking at her baby, though he is looking at her: instead her gaze is lost in the middle distance, as if she is contemplating his future), to the fine cracks in the tempera and the noticeably broken edge of the very old frame. We are looking at the past here, and it is coming forward to meet us.
Yet, though I love this painting, the feeling it provokes in me is not the religious sympathy, or what I imagine to be the religious sympathy, that I took away from the Jonathan Miller production. If I examine my emotions as I stand in front of the Duccio, they seem composed in equal parts of mild tenderness (for the mother and baby) and intense admiration (for the painting itself). Neither of these seems in the least Christian; neither has to do with the fact that the mother is Mary and the baby is Jesus. What I lack, in other words, is the specific feeling of compassion—literally, the feeling of being with the Passion, of becoming an involved bystander at the death of Christ—that I got from the performance in Brooklyn. This belief in belief, if I can so put it, is not a lasting feeling; I cannot carry it away with me, nor do I wish to. But I am glad, all the same, to have had it, and I am grateful to Jonathan Miller for giving it to me.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. She is the author of a novel and six previous nonfiction books; her new book is Room for Doubt, out from Pantheon in January.
