St. Mark Passion

After 3 years of weekly cantata composition, composer and Theotokos director Doug Balliett turns his attention to the Passion narrative, with a new setting of the famous story according to St. Mark. Premiered under Mr. Balliett's direction by Les Arts Florissants (Festival Dans les Jardins de William Christie), Theotokos Ensemble will give the American premiere on March 13th, at the Church of St. Mary's on the lower east side of NYC.

Mr. Balliett's new work is informed by years of study, of both the texts and their musical settings (for example a recent concert exploring passion settings from before the time of Bach), and he brings his long experience composing for the church to this ambitious undertaking. The libretto features a new translation of the scripture, contemporary poetry, and excerpts from classical commentary.

The original program note for the premiere of the St. Mark Passion is copied below. Please join us for this special presentation of a new sacred work.

with

Raha Mirzadegan, soprano

leiken, tenor

John Taylor Ward, bass

Theotokos Ensemble

Any musician, but especially one specializing in the performance of early music, spends a lot of time performing in churches. It is a beautiful accident of history that the urge to honor the divine with tall, spacious, beautifully empty buildings resulted in some of the most spectacular acoustic spaces ever built by humans. Or maybe it was divine providence. We shouldn’t forget that David played the harp, Myriam the tambourine, and Jesus sang hymns. Music is woven into all world religions, and the Judeo-Christian is no exception.

I spent years absorbing the liturgy slowly, through gig-osmosis. But it wasn’t until I lived the liturgical year through music, in very fine-grained detail, that I began to comprehend a fraction of the depth and mystery contained in the ecclesiastical calendar. Make of it what you will; when I chose to dig deep, I found very fruitful soil indeed. The rhythm of the church year mirrors the rhythm of seasons, connecting it, through a common ancestor, with all human ceremony. There are peaks and plateaus, nadirs and climaxes, moments of natural beauty, and times of want. The genius of the Christian year is mapping the birth, ministry, and death of Jesus onto this timeless timescape.

And so it is that Good Friday will always fall three days before Easter, which arrives on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox. It is a moveable feast, but what is immobile is the symbol, a commemoration that comes in the form of a reading. All around the world, churchgoers hear an account of the crucifixion of Jesus, told in the words of one of those four early accounts we have of this event: Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John.

Setting this particular reading to music has a history as long as notated music. It begins with Gregorian chant, like most western music, one particularly gifted singer taking the role of the evangelist. Antiphonal shouting followed, as the populace took the role of the “turba”, the angry crowds that turn on Jesus (this, the simplest of “musical settings” is still practiced in churches throughout the world). In the 15th century composers began to set these “turbae” scenes for professional singers, a polyphonic decoration of the plainchant passion, pursued by composers like Byrd and Lassus. Other composers, like the little-known Brit Richard Davy, set the entire reading in complex polyphony. Experiments in orchestration and registration ensued.

It was probably the Lutherans who brought the Passion most into the mainstream classical canon. Following closely on the massive achievements of Buxtehude, J.S. Bach, the great synthesizer, kept the plainchant evangelist (though he put it in the guise of operatic recitative), and then embedded songs and chorales into the story, emotional outpourings that comment on the action. For those who wonder what a Bach opera may have sounded like, look no further. And Passion composition didn’t end with Bach; recent examples include Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos and Arvo Pärt’s Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi Secundem Johannem.

Composing a Passion has always seemed to be something I would have to do during my lifetime. Besides that, it is required for the production of a complete (3 year) church music cycle, which I am currently engaged in attempting. Why now, in August rather than during Holy Week? Call it a Crisis of Opportunity. These singers, these instrumentalists, this astonishing medieval church, and the spirit of the festival—this is the chance, even if it means presenting the work closer to the autumnal equinox than to the vernal. I pray that Good Friday performances may follow.

What more can I say? The choice of St. Mark was easy: it is undoubtedly the earliest of the four gospels, the shortest, and the least “embroidered”, Christologically. In other words, the perfect place for an unworthy sinning worm of a composer like me to attempt to create something in this most dignified of musical forms. There is no attempt to directly imitate something, to redefine the form, or to make a meta-commentary on something else—only an attempt to engage with the text and create something beautiful for people I love.

—Doug Balliett, Los Angeles, June 14, 2024

Host or Publisher Theotokos