‘I could never better Bach, but I forge on’
Howard Goodall reveals why he has written a new Passion for Easter that resonates with people of all faiths – and none
One of the oddest things about being a composer is that you have absolutely no idea which of your pieces will be embraced by the public. My requiem setting of 10 years ago, Eternal Light, has struck a chord with choirs around the world (it’s had more than 500 performances in over 25 countries), and one of the American choirs to have taken it to their heart – on multiple occasions – was that of St Luke’s Methodist Church in Houston, Texas. When they approached me last year with a view to commissioning something new, I already had in the back of my mind that I’d like to try a Passion setting: but what, in the
21st century, would such a thing be?
Reiterating the full story, as so many of my predecessors had done, didn’t sit comfortably with me, because as a post-enlightenment kind of a guy, I find the details of the ancient tale less plausible and less musically inspiring than its powerful messages.
As with my requiem, I wanted the work to reach out to people of many faiths and of none. So I chose to reflect on the themes of this Christian story that address human tragedy. Whether or not you believe Jesus of Nazareth died and came back to life, to me the resurrection represents the survival of an idea: that our capacity for love is indestructible, no matter what happens to our bodies.
So I started looking for texts. I began with Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,a volume of poems by Emilia Lanyer, which was published in her lifetime in 1611. Descended from a family of possibly Jewish musicians brought from Venice by Henry VIII, she is likely to have met Shakespeare. She certainly knew Elizabeth I well and had a long relationship with one of her ministers. In her version of the Passion story, Pilate’s wife comes into the court scene, and she concentrates on the suffering of Mary at the cross.
I decided to thread Lanyer through my Passion and, because I didn’t know of a Passion setting that had taken the female point of view, juxtapose her work with other texts (mostly) by women. I found a poem about a slave auction written by an eyewitness who observes the unbearable torture of a mother seeing her child sold. I researched into Irena Sendler, who worked in the Warsaw ghetto and saved around 2,500 Jewish children’s lives, and while I couldn’t find a specific text by or about Sendler, I chose three texts in Latin that reflect the themes of her story. I included Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Gethsemane, which is not overtly religious but evokes the crises of doubt and insecurity we all face, and Christina Rossetti’s Mary Magdalene and the Other Mary, which locates us in the crucified Jesus’s tomb with his mother and closest friend.
The most famous poem is William Ernest Henley’s Invictus. It is a cry of defiance that whatever the challenges or torments a person encounters, their spirit is unconquerable: “I am the captain of my soul.” I chose an 18th-century English hymn text, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross by Isaac Watts, because I loved it when I was a boy chorister. I included Yeats’s beautiful, dance-like Lake Isle of Innisfree as a metaphor for the afterlife, which had the benefit of nudging my style, I hope, away from any danger of pomposity, with its enchanting, Yeatsian twinkle.
Unlike in the Bach Passions, in which the drama is enacted by the soloists, the choir has the linear narrative and the soloists reflect on that. As for the music, I don’t make any apology for the fact that the number of choirs that perform my choral music is broad and I’m pretty sure one of the reasons is that it’s quite tuneful. So I’m not going to start writing like Boulez because I think people will take me more seriously. I grew up in an Anglican tradition: Tudor polyphony presses a lot of buttons in me.
The instrumentation is quite lean. I wanted to get away from the idea of a string section so we have two antiphonal string quartets because I love all that music in space that Monteverdi filled St Mark’s in Venice with. You have echoes rather than one focused centre. The strings are very active, rhythmic and pulsy all the way through. I also have two horns and one saxophone, piano and bass. The horns act as a counter to the voices. The soprano saxophone acts like a soloist because, to me, it’s the closest thing to the keening sound of human distress.
The Passion field is so dominated by Bach – the St Matthew Passion is, I would propose, the best piece of music ever written – it’s impossible to beat in terms of scale and drama. Of course you could say, “I’ll never write a play because Shakespeare wrote some incredibly good ones,” but we’ve got to forge on. After all I’ve got form here: I’m the man who rewrote the tune to Psalm 23. So why not try? My Passion premiered at St Luke’s Methodist Church in Houston on Palm Sunday.
I live by Sondheim’s line from Sunday in the Park With George: “Stop worrying if your vision is new/ Let others make that decision/ They usually do.”
Howard Goodall was speaking to Jasper Rees
Howard Goodall’s Invictus: A Passion receives its UK premiere on May 25 at St John’s Smith Square. It will be released on CORO Connections later this year
The Easter story represents the survival of an idea – that our capacity for love is indestructible