In December 2000, the premiere of El Niño signaled a landmark in John
Adams’ artistic evolution. This Nativity oratorio, premiered over the
weeks of Christmas at Paris’ Châtelet Theater, conveyed a message of
rebirth and hope attuned to what the composer sensed as the mood of the
new millennium.
Yet the very simplicity of this story of birth
and renewal allowed Adams to evoke unsuspected undercurrents of
darknessbeneath its reassuring light. Already in that score, juxtaposed
against musical imagesof joy and the miraculous, one could hear a
threatening note of violence, especiallyin the work’s climactic episode
of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.This strategy of weaving together
multiple, at times contradictory, layers of emotionalresonance is even
more central to Adams’ new work, The Gospel According to the Other Mary.
It is a key to his treatmentof that most archetypal story of Western
music and art: the Passion of Jesus. For several years Adams and
hislongtime collaborator Peter Sellars contemplated a companion piece to
El Niño.
Their goal, explains Sellars, was to set the Passion story “in the tradition of sacredart, in the eternal present.” Violence and suffering and transformation are theimportant components of this story, and by drawing on his entire repertoire of experienceas a dramatic composer Adams depicts these with searing humanity.
But his unflinching portrayal of the human condition is only part of The Other Mary’s vast spectrum. Operating on twosimultaneous planes – the biblical and the contemporary – his score goes to the heartof its often disturbing subject matter with a keen psychological intuition, particularly in the portrait of the work’s title character.“Of all the arts music is by far the mostpsychologically precise,” Adams has saidabout his work as a composer.
“The subtlestharmonic shading or melodic twistcan completely color and influence howthe listener feels about and perceives aperson or event. Music being above andbeyond all things the art of feeling, it is thecomposer’s role to give emotional and psychologicaldepth to a character or a scene.No other art form provides such potenttools.”This is a Passion not only of Jesus, butof a family who loved and were loved byhim: Mary Magdalene, her sister Martha,and their brother Lazarus. Its creatorsreject the conventional “reformed prostitute”version of Mary Magdalene, consideringit a baseless identity foisted onher centuries after the fact. They presentinstead a woman of rich emotional complexity,a psychically damaged womanwhose turbulent inner life and hard pastgo hand in hand with her deep powers of intuition and volatile sensuality.
Their goal, explains Sellars, was to set the Passion story “in the tradition of sacredart, in the eternal present.” Violence and suffering and transformation are theimportant components of this story, and by drawing on his entire repertoire of experienceas a dramatic composer Adams depicts these with searing humanity.
But his unflinching portrayal of the human condition is only part of The Other Mary’s vast spectrum. Operating on twosimultaneous planes – the biblical and the contemporary – his score goes to the heartof its often disturbing subject matter with a keen psychological intuition, particularly in the portrait of the work’s title character.“Of all the arts music is by far the mostpsychologically precise,” Adams has saidabout his work as a composer.
“The subtlestharmonic shading or melodic twistcan completely color and influence howthe listener feels about and perceives aperson or event. Music being above andbeyond all things the art of feeling, it is thecomposer’s role to give emotional and psychologicaldepth to a character or a scene.No other art form provides such potenttools.”This is a Passion not only of Jesus, butof a family who loved and were loved byhim: Mary Magdalene, her sister Martha,and their brother Lazarus. Its creatorsreject the conventional “reformed prostitute”version of Mary Magdalene, consideringit a baseless identity foisted onher centuries after the fact. They presentinstead a woman of rich emotional complexity,a psychically damaged womanwhose turbulent inner life and hard pastgo hand in hand with her deep powers of intuition and volatile sensuality.
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