SOF 42 / July 2000 SOF 42 / July 2000 It seems that there are still new, new ways of telling the old, old story. DAVID BOULTON looks at Covent Garden's brave and imaginative production of Bohuslav Martinu’s lyrical and all-too-relevant opera The Greek Passion passion play It must be millennium fever at work, but it’s remarkable how much so-called “high culture” this year has been explicitly religious in tone and content. We've noted in recent SOF issues the big gallery events: Seeing Salvation at the National, Heaven at the Liverpool Tate, Taste - the New Religion in Manchester. This year’s BBC Proms season is about “faith in the future” (pinched, no doubt, from the title of our forthcoming SoF conference!), and concentrates on “music inspired by man’s relationship with God”. Even Harrison Birtwistle has turned in a postmodern opera-oratorio about the Last Supper.
And in May the newly-refurbished Royal Opera House at Covent Garden bravely revived Martinu’s extraordinary opera The Greek Passion, which is about Christ’s passion and human passion: a play on passion, based on a passion play.
The opera is derived from the novel Christ Recrucified by the Greek communist writer Nikos Kazanzakis. (The book was subsequently used as the basis of Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ). It is set in a Greek /Turkish village in the 1920s, during the appalling atrocities by which one and a half million Greeks were driven out of their homes in a bloody population exchange which set the scene for later waves of ethnic cleansing. This is no nymphs-and-shepherds fantasy. The passions to be explored are those of our own familiar world.
It is Easter and acting-parts are being allocated for the village passion play. The popular postman will play Peter, the unpopular tanner Judas. Katerina, the village girl who is no better than she should be (an expression I have never understood), is naturally typecast as Mary Magdalen. A farm labourer, Manolios, gets the plum part of Jesus. They rehearse the text - and start asking each other what these oddly baffling words - “Blessed are the poor in spirit... the meek... those who love their enemies’ - can possibly mean. Where could the script-writer have found such disturbing lines?
Gradually the actors become engrossed in their parts, and begin to be transformed by the words they are learning. Manolios loses all interest in his promised marriage to Lenio, the ardent young illegitimate daughter of the richest man in the village. But he doesn’t lose interest in sex. He has passionate dreams of Katerina, and she of him. He is playing God made flesh, and Katerina is flesh made divine.
As they wonder how to square their passion for each other with the demands of the passion play, into the village bursts a flood of asylum seekers, fleeing from the latest bout of ethnic cleansing. They are hungry, sick, frightened. What is to be done with them? Build detention centres? Give them food vouchers? Grigoris, the villagepriest-cum-home-secretary, has no doubts. They will take our jobs and give us their diseases. And most of them are probably bogus. They must be turned away.
Our passion players are not so sure. How would this fit with all that oddly haunting stuff about mercy, pity, love? They encourage the refugees to stay, finding some food for them and facing the hostility of the forces of conservatism among their neighbours. Manolios and Katerina agree to subordinate their physical passion for each other to their passionate concern for their new neighbours. Meanwhile, Lenio has understandably given up on her promised spouse and found another lover, a young shepherd named Nikolio, and, oblivious of the political crisis engulfing the village, they make their own delightful passion play, under the open skies.
The village elders and Grigoris are furious because of the unsettling effect the now Christ-like Monolios is having on the village. He is excommunicated in the church where he is about to play Jesus. Angry and bitter at their hostile treatment by Grigoris and his followers, the asylum-seekers start talking of seizing land and food by violence. Manolios continues to take their part: how can anyone mouth texts about blessing the poor whilst driving the poor away? Grigoris stirs up the crowd, and the tanner-Judas strangles Manolios-Jesus at the foot of his cross.
The end? Not quite. A resurrection, then? Too obvious!
This is the real world! The band of passion players is scattered. Up in the mountains, the refugees survive a summer and prepare for a cold winter, knowing that Manolios has been sacrificed on their behalf, and that his death has done nothing to improve their lot or soften the hearts of their oppressors: salvation has been postponed, for reasons beyond anyone’s control.
Down in the village, normality restored by the dispersal of the asylum-seekers, the priest Grigoris leads his flock in preparations for Christmas. For both communities, the great religious festivals at the heart of . their communal life go on, either as consolation in defeat or as celebration of victory. True religion and undefiled is neither the “Christos anesti!” of a Greek Easter nor the a “Happy Christmas!” of a western winter solstice. So what is it?
Well, what about young Lenio and Nikolio? They are virtually absent from the Kazantzakis novel, and appear to be Martinu’s own creations. They alone extricate themselves from the politics and the religion, to make love, not war. Theirs is not the passion of the cross but the passion of human flesh and blood. They have better uses for their lips than preaching, better ways to spend an Easter or a Christmas than singing hymns...
Martinu would seem to be saying that religion hasn’t been much of a success in saving either the wretched or the self-righteous. The asylum seekers are still seeking asylum, the villagers intone their intoxicating liturgies, apparently oblivious of the demands made on them by This is no nymphs-and-shepherds fantasy.
The passions to be explored are those of our own familiar world. the words they sing, Manolios is dead and his comrades scattered. Only Lenio and Nikolio, who couldn’t give a damn for religion or politics, have found happiness in each other. All you need is love?
It is still not that simple. I suspect that what we learn from the denoument of the passion play itself - that what happens to Monolios is what has happened to saviours before him, and will happen to saviours to come - applies no less to the lovers who so nimbly separate themselves from the main action. So as we wonder what will become of the betrayed refugees, of Katerina and her fellowplayers, of the murderer Judas, and of the smug .
Hallelujah-singers in Grigoris’s church, so we also wonder how long Lenio and Nikolio will make love under the Greek sun. Do we suppose that the intensity of their impassioned feelings for each other can be sustained indefinitely? By both of them? Or is their passion play in the wings as transient, and as apparantly pointless, as the one that occupies centre stage?
This is a profoundly ambiguous opera. There is nothing black and white about it. Its ambiguity was probably one of the reasons it was at first rejected by Covent Garden in 1957 when it was considered “unlikely to appeal to the exclusive, intellectual audience” the culture-snobs who ran the place wanted to attract.
Martinu actually wrote a second version, less ambiguous, better calculated to appeal to an audience looking for a more conventional treatment of the theme. Thankfully, director David Pountney, conductor Charles Mackerras and the current Covent Garden management had the courage to go for the complex original rather than the sanitised revision. “The two great themes”, wrote Martinu, “are like thin trickles of blood: the heritage of man’s Christian virtues and his obligations to humanity”. The Greek Passion is a truly magnificent reworking of “the greatest story ever told”. Unhappily, the Royal Opera gave it only six performances - so if you missed it, you missed it. Watch out for a revival.