In the Pietà painted by Giovanni Bellini, the old grief-stricken mother is holding the dead body of her son on her lap. They are strangers, alone and defeated, on the desolate outskirts of a town standing in the background, grim and hostile in its walls and towers. In the Gospel of St. Mark the dead Christ is denied the comfort of his mother's embrace. During the Passion his family is absent; they abandoned him, like many other people from Nazareth, his home town, because they were “scandalized” by him.
Mark stresses the loneliness of Christ. Even before the Last Supper the disciples complain that they don't understand why a woman who wants to anoint his body should “waste” all that ointment. On the fatal night, he is deserted time and again: by Judas who hands him over; by the disciples who fall asleep then flee at the moment of his arrest; by the young man (who is not a disciple, but follows Christ as if he were) who beats a hasty retreat - one tradition identifies his as Mark himself. In taking flight. his discovers his own nakedness, the loss of innocence.
It is a Gospel that affords no comfort, insisting instead upon the vast mystery of the Resurrection: the last image Mark leaves us with is one of terror. “The three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Joseph and James and Salome fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them: and they said nothing to any one; for they were afraid”. The man who had lived through the mystic experience of the wilderness, bursts the furthest limits of their understanding and feelings, is far distant. Fear and ecstasy.
Mark wrote his gospel in Rome, probably between 60-70 A.D. at the request of the early Christian communities who wanted to preserve the memory of Peter's preachings. Stylistically, It moves on two different levels: the factual events, told with the immediacy of a news reporter to enforce their credibility, are accompanied by frequent quotations of those passages In the Old Testament which foretell episodes in the life, in the preachings and in the death of Christ. The events find truth in the prophecies: Mark shows a myth coming true.
Familiarity with the original Greek text mode several alternatives possible: in the account of the Last Supper, Mark uses the words soma and aima. which are rendered as “person” and “lifeblood” rather than “flesh” and “blood”.
And Judas does not so much betray Jesus as “hand him over” (paradòsei) making it possible for the Passion to come about. A passage which Hegel, in his Life of Christ, also considered crucial.
In his last speech, Mark quotes a verse from Ecclesiastes, in which the Redeemer is called upon to “demonstrate veritatem tuam”.
SOUND INCARNATE
To begin with a few basic choices:These voices and instruments attempt to tell a story everyone knows as if nobody did, trying to force music and sounds into the role of exempla. “picture tiles” marking the stops along a Way of the Cross, shown with all the innocent simplicity of streetsingers who with their voices - spoken, sung, shouted - and the help of a few simple images, demand that momentary “suspension of disbelief” so necessary for all journeys of the spirit.
And the “journey” on which this story takes us covers, in a very short time, the whole range of human feelings, including the ultimate experience of death, a death all the more atrocious in its cruelty; in the condemned man’s awareness of his own innocence, an unwilling and frightened sacrificial lamb (“Father, you who can, remove this cup from me”); who submits, though he feels alone and abandoned (“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani?”).
A ritual of incarnation and sacrifice, also reflected in the choice of music and sounds of different “dimensions” and “kinds”: higher and lower, divine and human, given to people who take action, but who even more give the impression of being “acted on” by the Myth, as was the case in Greek theatre.
This idea of “duality”, of multiplicity is present here on many different levels, also in the distribution of the vocal parts (the baritone, for example, has been given all the “double” roles, distinguished by samewhat ambiguous behaviour: Judas, Peter, Pilate).
Not only but different ways of singing constantly alternate or overlap. The words themselves are in motion, “run through” with vocalic alterations that make them unstable, fluid, volatile, make them, as it were, “rise” or “fall” from their usual role as Signifiers to the abstract -almost “divine” - condition of phonemes, pure sounds, and viceversa.
But even more decisive is the division into two distinct sonic levels marked by the simultaneous presence of musical and non-musical sounds. Non-musical sounds produced by “lowly” objects: waste materials, bric-a-brac, kitchen utensils; often ordinary everyday sounds, which speak of life on earth or of something else, something unrecognizable, transformed into new sonic images. Non-musical sounds which are forced dialectically to live with the musical sounds of traditional instruments - by history and by character more urbane, more institutional, almost “holy”.
But this use of sounds and objects borrowed from everyday life is not meant to be didactic, but rather to help keep the ear alert, to act as an element of contrast, as a stimulus to an “auditory wakefulness”: just as an object, placed between the lens of a camera and the scene to be shot prevents, almost in a Brechtian sense, the passive surrendering of the eye; in our case of the ear.
The whole perceptive field of this Passion is immersed in a sort of “perspective depth of hearing”, into which both the instruments and the voices, the voice of Jesus in particular, are set.
Jesus becomes incarnate in Man, but he is not a man like the others. The others - the disciples, the Woman of Bethany, Judas, Peter, Pilate, the High Priest, the soldiers, the multitude - speak and sing in the natural “single” voices of common mortals. Jesus, instead, is transcendent, always. You can see it, you can hear it when he speaks, when he acts. Jesus walks on the water, Jesus works miracles, radiates charisma, wisdom, light.
As the ritual unfolds, as the moment of sacrifice approaches, the voice of Jesus gradually becomes more luminous, tinged with a sort of “three-in-one” aura: encompassed by the musical “glow” of the three women’s voices, an unobtrusive but constant presence in a sort of “Stabat mater” - the episode does not appear in Mark - delicately woven into the texture of the whole work.