Andrea

Moore
Passion 2000 introduction

Passion 2000: A Short Introduction

In late summer 2000, the Europaisches Musikfestival Stuttgart presented four newly

commissioned settings of the Passion of Christ. The primary theme at that year’s festival

was the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach’s death, which the new works were commissioned to

commemorate. Commissioned from a quartet of internationally-known composers, the

terms of the project, titled “Passion 2000,” called for each composer to select one of the

four canonic Gospels, and write a Passion setting in their language of origin. They were

Sofia Gubaidulina, Gospel of John, Russian; Tan Dun, Gospel of Matthew, Chinese (he chose

English); Osvaldo Golijov, Gospel of Mark, Spanish; and Wolfgang Rihm, Gospel of Luke,

German.

Introduction

Part of a reception or other history of Passion 2000 involves delving into the

association of these Passions with Bach, particularly as he was upheld as a canonic figure

by the commission itself. My questions about the project include, but aren’t limited to, the

following: How do various dimensions of Bach reception align with the musical values of

these works? How do these composers talk about Bach? What is their prior musical

relationship with Bach, as demonstrated in their work, in interviews, in interpretations of

their work? Where do twentieth-century “new music” values of formalism and complexity

intersect with Bach reception in the response to these pieces, and where do other musical

value systems – egalitarianism, multiculturalism, eclecticism – come into play? What kinds

of musical values have informed reception of the works since their premieres, and how, if

at all, does that differ from initial reception?

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In addition to these musical and music-historical questions, Passion 2000 has an

unmistakable metaphorical resonance, or perhaps more than one. In Passion 2000, the

Passion genre is taken up at a moment – the millennial break, the end of a violent century –

already rife with interpretive possibilities for eschatologists. The basic Passion story (as

told in the four Gospels) has a teleology that drives toward the crucifixion of Christ, which

concludes the Passion narrative. While the resurrection is the real purpose of the story in

the liturgical setting, toward which all the suffering has been directed, in staged

representations the resurrection is often omitted. Thus, the Passion story, when enacted as

secular performance, relies on its audience to fill in that absent action, to lend meaning, in

hindsight, to the suffering and death of Christ. The Passion 2000 commission suggests a use

of the Passion narrative as homology with ways of writing and interpreting history at the

turn of the twenty-first century, an understanding that may require readers to take on faith

the possibility that meaning – for example, the meaning of the 20th century’s violence and

suffering – will at some point be comprehensible.

Periodizing the New Passions

The Passion 2000 commission came from within a re-unified Germany, and marked the

first major Bach year celebration since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. They also took place in

2000, widely (if incorrectly) understood in the global north as the beginning of the new

millennium. I have paired the four pieces thematically within these frames, reading Rihm

and Golijov as engaged with certain post-Cold War issues and questions, and Gubaidulina

and Tan as articulating millennial—and millennialist—concerns. I also look at their

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connection with the figure and music of Bach; for example, Rihm and Golijov chose the

Gospels texts whose settings by Bach have been lost—Mark and Luke—and both expressed

concerns about the anti-semitism of the Gospel of John. Rihm’s piece is intensely engaged

with the music-historical aspect of the commission, and its framing as a German

commemorative project centered on Bach; his piece engages Bach’s historical roles and

tropes, and political uses, ultimately putting Bach historiography through the filter of

German discourses about historical guilt and absolution. As the German composer for

Passion 2000, Rihm also carried a unique historical burden in the commission, one that he

responded to by rejecting the image of Bach as a “healer” and the idea of German millennial

redemption.

Golijov, who had already written a Bach-inspired piece for the Oregon Bach Festival,

offers an inversion of Rihm; rejecting the music-historical aspirations of the commission,

Golijov took Western music history itself as an archive of tropes and allusions, without

necessarily according them a great historical weight. Somewhat ironically, it was the

reception of Golijov’s Passion in the U.S. that brought Passion 2000 itself to wider

awareness here; Golijov, whose piece affected to carry the least music-historical weight,

helped Passion 2000 achieve the music-historical status its organizers clearly sought.

In Gubaidulina’s Passion of John, and Tan’s Passion after Matthew, as he calls it, it is

the millennium, more than the Cold War’s end, that is especially influential. Both

composers take the idea of millennial (or millennialist) renewal or redemption as their

themes. Gubaidulina, a lifelong devotee of Bach, wrote what she would refer to as the

commission’s “only religious work.” In her vision, the John of the Gospel fuses with John the

Revealer. Her Passion becomes a vehicle for emphasizing God’s cleansing wrath, and by

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extension, for articulating hope of a millennialist, apocalyptic redemption. By stark

contrast, Tan produced a non-doctrinal version of the Matthew Passion that offers a one-

world, New Age vision of resurrection.

As Passion 2000 was intended to mark the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, Bach

permeates both the project, and my readings of all of its works. For some of the composers,

Bach has been a lifelong influence on their work, while others take a looser, more

conceptual approach to the question of influence or homage. Regardless of what they have

said, or not said, about Bach, it is fair to say that he haunts these pieces.

Germany at the Millennium

A reunified Germany needed new symbols and icons to support the forging of an

undivided national identity; music offered one potential solution. Celia Applegate writes

that the ongoing and renewable connection between German music and German cultural

self-identification is “something I will simply label continuity, that is, the very human

search for things that persist in the face of fragmentation, integration, disintegration,

catastrophe, and starting over;” this quest for continuity made music an excellent site for

working out some of the emotion around reunification. In Applegate’s study of the

Mendelssohn Bach revival of 1829, she argues that it was this later performance that

retroactively constructed Bach as the progenitor of the German canon and that it “made

music, Bach’s music, German music, as essential to what it meant to be German as the

language itself.” Crucially for understanding Passion 2000, it is partly this thread that the

project picked up; as Christian Eisert, the project’s organizer, wrote in the program book,

“There could be no doubt that a German composer would be represented. The German

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language tradition of Passion writing, which Bach built on and to some extent completed,

was too important to get around or omit.”1

Through Applegate’s consideration of sacred music performed in secular spaces,

and the ongoing development of a perception of musical works as “intrinsically, not

functionally, valuable,” we can think about issues of the canon formation process as well.

Applegate sees music precisely as a means of creating, or claiming, continuity, writing that

such an ongoing relationship between national identity and music is not “the product of

inertia or a stubborn refusal to change or a deplorable sense of prideful superiority…[but

that] culture in this sense is a way to change as well as a way to stay together,” staying

together being one of the most important political issues in post-Cold War Germany.

Bach had already been used to delineate one Germany from the other during the

Cold War. Elizabeth Janik writes about the first Bach anniversary year in divided Germany

(1950), that it “provided a first opportunity for the Federal Republic [West Germany] and

the GDR [East Germany] to stage representative festivals and congresses that aspired to

‘national’ significance. Both East and West German authorities sought to rescue Bach from

the racial interpretations of musical greatness that had held sway during the Third Reich,

while simultaneously safeguarding the composer’s identity as a titan of German tradition.”

The Bach Year 1950 also offered an opportunity for mutual scholarly denigration as each

country constructed its claim to be the true national representative (and owner) of Bach’s

legacy. The year 2000 saw new political formations and entities, but the practice of putting

a canonic composer like Bach into the service of nationalistic claims (however tacit)

continued.

1 Christian Eisert, “Passion 2000: On the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach’s death,” essay in Passion 2000, program

book of the European Musikfest Stuttgart, 29.

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In ethnomusicologist Eric Usner’s study of the 2006 Mozart Year in Vienna (Mozart’s

250th birthday), he argues that the figure of “Mozart” was reconstructed for the occasion,

and through musical programming, to transform Mozart into a representative of a post-

Cold War, cosmopolitan Vienna. (He also argues that this transformation was a return to an

older, pre-war Viennese diversity.) Similarly, the self-conscious multiculturalism of Passion

2000 suggested a Bach figure transformed for the post-Cold War, and especially for

postnational, European Germany – painfully in touch with its past and aware of European

trepidation regarding unification. Despite its cosmopolitan dimension, then, Passion 2000

was still very much a German project, intended, according to organizers, to represent the

four directions: Germany/German as a “northern” Passion tradition; South

American/Spanish as Southern; English and Russian to stand for West and East,

respectively. The assignment of Russia to “East,” more than anything, suggests a global

orientation for classical music that was still entirely centered – literally – on Germany.

J.S. Bach and the Classical Music Canon

In examining the production of musical prestige in Passion 2000, I assume that - however

tattered - canon is the ideological formation underlying such anniversary celebrations of

long-dead composers, especially when they come in forms like commemorative

commissions in outmoded genres. Scholarship that examines the work-concept is

especially important here, since as Don Michael Randal put it, “our belief in such a thing as

‘the work itself’ is what makes possible the creation of the list of such things that make up

the canon.” Joseph Kerman and William Weber have demonstrated the means by, and

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reasons for, which musical culture came to value older works over new. Marcia Citron has

shown some of the agendas and politics behind the question of which older works would

be valued. And the work-concept itself, according to Lydia Goehr, was oriented toward

producing “enduring products.” It is via the work-concept, according to Applegate and

Goehr, that Bach was retroactively rehabilitated as the progenitor of the German canon. But

if Bach was the beginning (or a beginning) of the classical music canon, then what is

Passion 2000, a Bach homage, in relationship to it? Is it an end, in accordance with its

calendrical moment? Or were there aspirations to mark an end and a beginning? (An aside:

musicologist Bruce Brown teaches the Golijov Pasión as the final piece in the music history

survey at the University of Southern California. Is it the end of music history?)

Robert P. Morgan links canonic value to a work’s relationship with the musical past,

whether it is modeled on earlier music or makes a deliberate break with it, and the musical

relationship to Bach is paramount in these works, whether they adhere to, depart from, or

attempt to disregard his canonical Passion settings. The four settings in question are quite

different in style and influence, lending themselves to a hermeneutic and descriptive kind

of analysis flexible enough to address multiple genres and styles, while still rigorous about

engaging with what is actually on the page.

To assess the relationship between the Passion 2000 works and their predecessors,

we can look to a few key musicological sources on the Bach Passions, with particular

interest in arguments about the works’ temporal construction. John Butt points to differing

constructions of time in Bach’s Passions, distinguishing between the St. John Passion’s

“‘classical’ sense of time as something rooted in eternity” and the St. Matthew Passion’s

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libretto, which “suggests a more linear concept of time by alluding to what will happen in

the end time.” This binary of cyclical and linear time is one way of considering the works of

Passion 2000 as expressions of historical beliefs. Does a work take root in what has

happened, and suggest a belief in the past’s immutability? Does it gesture instead to what

will happen – not necessarily (although possibly) in end times, but also in better times, in

coming times? What is its orientation, demonstrated musically and textually, toward the

future and the past? The final movements of each of the Passion 2000 pieces can tell us a

great deal about that last question.

Karol Berger also takes up the question of Bach’s temporality, albeit in a less fluid

way than Butt’s. Arguing for a shift in Western conceptions of time at the mid-18th century,

Berger writes of the St. Matthew Passion that it “is marked by this wish to neutralize time

and render insignificant its relentless flow from past to future,” and finds in Bach evidence

that “God’s time, time without irreversibility, is the very best because it allows permanence

and thus holds death at bay.” I also look to Bettina Varwig for insight into conceptions of

time in 18th century Leipzig, where she finds a range of understanding that encompasses

both a sense of accelerating time (brought about partly by the standardization of time’s

measurements through public timekeeping), a growing division between work time and

free time, as well as a less experiential idea of eternal Newtonian time, which “existed as an

infinite medium before the creation and after the demise of the universe.”

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Passion 2000 introduction

Passion 2000 and the production of prestige

What constitutes musical prestige has changed a great deal since 1989, or even since 2000.

The range of musical references and allusions in these pieces is stunning, and they could

not have been written in a more musically dogmatic moment. Their 18th-century models,

Bach’s Passions, are of course also models of eclecticism; as Susan McClary has pointed out,

Golijov’s Pasión “self-consciously parallels Bach’s own penchant for eclectic collage—a

characteristic we rarely notice because the intervening three centuries have made his

secular dances and Italian love songs all just sound like…baroque church music.” The

references across these four pieces include twentieth-century American experimentalism,

Russian Orthodox liturgical music, capoeira, the Kaddish, and Tuvan throat singing. They

also make reference to Argentina’s dirty war and other twentieth-century Latin American

disasters, to the Holocaust, and to processes of remembrance, memorialization,

forgiveness, and renewal.

Re-centering Bach at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

William Weber has argued that concert institutions that mixed repertoire from different

European countries were “usually making a bid for cultural authority on a European scale,

as opposed to that of region and nation.”2 Extending his thesis to turn of the twenty-first

century Europe, it seems that the Bachakademie Stuttgart, long part of a national German

musical project, was also making a bid for larger cultural authority, only now on a global

scale. Many of its official sponsors referred to this global or universal dimension in their

encomia at the beginning of the Passion 2000 program book. Erwin Teufel, Premier of the

2
Gooley.

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state of Baden-Württemberg, identified as the European Music Festival Stuttgart’s

Schirmherr (patron), knew the drill: “Of all the arts, music understands best how to move

our deepest selves, open our spirits and souls,” because “the language of music is

understood everywhere.”3 The business consortium that supported it, which included,

among other regional corporations, (not Lexus but) DaimlerChrysler, highlighted both a

local and global presence: “We, the five sponsors of Passion 2000…are all rooted in

Stuttgart…but we are all also active internationally.” Even the sponsors of the commission,

then, drew on classical music’s long tradition of claiming a “universal” value, that is, a

potential relevance to people all over the world. And yet, despite Passion 2000’s global

aspirations, its invention at one stroke of a cosmopolitan repertoire (each of these pieces

has a fairly substantial performance history at this point), and its explicit evocation of the

“four directions,” it still placed Bach—whose complex historiography includes turns as a

universal healer, a figure of Germanness, a devout Lutheran, a proto-communist, and

more—at its heart. Thus, the new Passions’ range of geographic and cultural origin is

ultimately filtered through a European musical institution, and specifically a German one,

with Germany once more assuming the role of musical standard-bearer and creator.

3
Passion 2000 program book.

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