Echoes of old beliefs: Birtwistle’s Last Supper and Adams’s El Niño

Are Christian symbolism and practices still viable subjects for modern art? Arnold Whittall considers two recent musical instances of their appropriation.

Musically, the twentieth century expired in a riot of pluralism: a diversity that, for some, represents unsettling cultural confusion, for others joyous stylistic and technical freedom. Risking an enormous generalisation, I’d suggest that no late-twentieth-century composition – not even Andriessen’s Trilogy of the last day (1993–97) – more perfectly embodied that cultural diversity, in the context of subject-matter focused on death, than Gérard Grisey’s starkly vivid last work, Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil – Four songs for crossing the threshold (1996–98). Grisey has said of his ‘musical meditation on death’ that ‘the chosen texts come from four civilisations (Christian, Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian) and share a fragmentary discourse on the ineluctable nature of Death’. Nevertheless, the work’s ending is neither dark nor pessimistic, but what Grisey terms ‘music for the dawn of a humanity finally disencumbered of the nightmare’: a lullaby following the Epic of Gilgamesh’s depiction of a devastating flood, and suggesting – or so the composer’s rather enigmatic note implies – a new phase for a humanity freed of all taboos and nightmares, including those, one might surmise, of Christian-era religion.

The possibility that, in the West, Christian symbolism and practices are still available for meaningful modern art, whether to provide a context that evokes transcendence, or themselves to be transcended, as in Grisey’s work, certainly cannot be discounted. Two composers with avowedly strong religious impulses, Jonathan Harvey and John Tavener, explored apocalyptic Christian imagery in two particularly powerful late-century pieces – Death of light/Light of death (1998) and Total eclipse (1999). But my focus in this article is on a pair of compositions, first performed in 2000, in which two very different composers not primarily associated with sacred music or religious imagery approach complementary Christian subjects: Harrison Birtwistle’s ‘dramatic tableaux’ The Last Supper and John Adams’s stageable oratorio El Niño. My argument is, in essence, that in these treatments of ‘old beliefs’ both composers succeed in revitalising long-established ideas about compositional practice, thereby helping their chosen subject-matter to resonate the more memorably between the counter-poles of old and new.