GINASTERA: THE ROAD TO 'BARABBAS'

...The quiet Deus, Deus meus, respice in me (O God, my God, look upon me), the anguished cry from Psalm 22...

...In 1941 he was appointed to the faculty of the Liceo Militar in Buenos Aires to teach music appreciation...

...Then it was clear to me— the Passion ends with the Resurrection, which is logical...

...Why did I not die in the womb...

...Ginastera's Cantata par America Magica, premiered in Washington in 1961, prompted Irving Lowens to call him "one of the major composers of our day...

...If there is one memory of the old Catholic Latin music which will not be erased, it is the chanting of the Passions on Palm Sunday and Good Friday...

...This is the only Passion with a happy ending," the composer told me...

...as for that Other, Crucifigatur...

...And all the evolution, as reflected in Barabbas, comes to an end when he is assassinated by agents of Caiaphas and the very priests who freed him...

...Remembering Bach's "Crucify Him" and the almost shouted "Barabbas," I suddenly understood the genius of Ginastera: with his mastery of musical expressionism, the dredged-up sounds of the darkness in the human psyche, what better place to call on it than in depicting this immense human sin, this impossibly irrational killing of God...

...And Barabbas...

...And in Beatrix Cenci, based on Shelley's epic, we had a drama of incest and multiple murders...

...And the greatest turbae of all are in the Bach Passions...

...The early cultural and musical influences of Ginastera's native Argentine pampa have of course left their imprint on his work, but so have the later musical influences of Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg—especially Stravinsky, as in the early Psalm 150...

...But Ginastera had also written Laudato...

...In spite of the composer's own disclaimer of religious intent, I think that Barabbas will be recognized as a religious work of a religious man...

...Rhythm and percussion...

...Hollering, spitting out Ave, Rex Judaeprum, demanding Barabbas...

...and an unmistakable individual style has long since decisively transcended the impelling influences...

...To be sure, not only chant had been used in the past...

...Perhaps Ginastera has reason, in his own life, for regarding Barabbas as a simpatico political-rebel figure: he too has had troubles with Caesar...

...I conceive of Barabbas as a Maquisard, a member of the Jewish underground working to throw off the Roman yoke...

...But reflected, too, are the pleasanter aspects of the crowd singing, shouting their Hosannas, while the choir of boys sings Hosanna, Filio David from Palm Sunday...

...Nos habemus legent (We have a law...

...Ginastera loves and admires the "democratic republic of the United States...

...In a nominally—indeed aggressively—secular atmosphere, the musicians, like the novelists, continue to invoke, and somehow praise, the name of God...

...It is a paradigm of the evolution of man, of the madness of man versus the Light which does not speak...

...Mark the words: Yo no soy el Dids de la muerte, sino de la vida—I am not the God of death, but of life...

...And what may we expect of Barabbas, another aspect of the Passion...

...I saw the action behind a full-stage scrim, suggesting the irrational, with eyes and hands projected on it, the organs of unholy passion...

...and their Exsulta satis, filia Jerusalem (Rejoice greatly, daughter of Jerusalem), recalling the Messiah...

...Again in contrast to the play, Christ does not appear on stage, only the light symbolizing Him...

...The poignant, almost pleading, voices of the Apostles as they respond to Christ's message of betrayal, Numquid ego sum, Dominel (Is it I, Lord...

...Back in Buenos Aires in 1947, he founded the Conservatory of Music and Dance...

...How introduce the wild, screaming angularities of Wozzeck into the fabric of this holy, austere music...

...The direction of Ginastera's thought revealed in the Turbae, and now in this metaphysical unity in the duality of Christ and Barabbas, makes Ginastera part of a contemporary musical phenomenon, the trend of many of our greatest 20th-century composers to choose religious subjects for some of their most ambitious works: Stravinsky, Kodaly, Britten, Durufle, Penderecki, Messiaen come to mind...

...I found in St...

...And in the end, expediency or not, "I long for the day," he said, "when the traditional Argentine democracy can be restored...

...From his early ballets, Panambl and Estancia, to his latest works, the drums are not silent for long—even in works which have no drums...

...or the desperate cry of Job, prefiguring the suffering Christ, Quare non in vulva mortuus sum...

...Those Jews in the mob, when they shouted for Barabbas, knew their man...

...in 1954, increasingly suspect because of his anti-Fascist sentiments, he was again fired by the Peronistas—from his own conservatory...

...In Corpus Christi, the City of the Body of Christ, I spoke with Ginastera, there as guest composer at Del Mar College's Contemporary Music Festival...

...The psychic disorder of the mob, individual and collective, certainly a determining, possibly even a deterministic, factor in Christ's Passion, here reflected in the wildly dissonant, outof-human-range, inhuman music...

...GINASTERA: TO BARABBAS RALPH THIBODEAU bian Argentina, for dramatic soprano and 54 percussion instruments, it established him as our greatest master of rhythm...

...The softer commentaries on the Seven Last Words...

...I picked up the thread...

...Ginastera gained his greatest renown, or perhaps notoriety, with his operas, especially Bomarzo (1967), a story of a historical hunchback Renaissance duke...

...The practice of setting the turba sections of the Passion polyphonically is an ancient and honorable one, going back at least as far as Richard Davy in 15th-century England...

...I understood, as I heard the mobs, shouting and-screaming, literally, Quis est hie"} (Who is this...

...What would the new Barabbas, with its sacred theme, elicit from the composer: the sublimity of the Laudate, or the musical and psychic chaos of Bomarzol The answer seems to be both, and I found it in the Turbae ad Passionem Gregorianam (1975...

...And on the hill of Calvary, Si filius Dei es, descende de cruce (If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross...

...But that was a long time ago, 1938...

...Whatever you call him, Alberto Ginastera is one of our greatest living composers, a man who, at 61, can look back at a solid achievement running now to 50 opus numbers...

...in 1945, for signing a manifesto defending democratic principles and human rights, he was fired...

...The centurion and his soldiers singing soberly, somberly, Vere filius Dei erat iste (Truly this was the Son of God...

...It is not a question of the religious dimension, but of the metaphysical suffering of the man, Barabbas, who feels guilt at having caused the death of another man, an innocent man...

...But like many liberals in Argentina today he accepts the current military dictatorship of General Jorge Videla and friends as a temporary, necessary expedient to deal with the terrorism of the revolutionary left...

...And I heard the irrational-sounding 17 February 1978: US music reminiscent of Wozzeck, bending, stretching the tonal system to and beyond the breaking point, rushing over into the frank atonalism of the New Viennese School, and into the aleatory style even more suggestive of psychic disorder, the power of chance —iacta est alea...

...And Alleluias at the end...

...His preeminence remains assured by a powerful creative imagination, extraordinary intellectual vigor, and an artistic integrity revealed both in his spiritual vision and in his obsessive concern to give his best to every work he begins...

...Every premiere of a Ginastera work is an event, and the musical world is currently looking forward to his new opera Barabbas, which will open the season of the New York City Opera in September...

...He added, "While Barabbas is guilty of many things, this is not one of them...

...In fact, rhythm plays such an overwhelming part in his works that, recalling Aaron Copland's phrase on the primacy of rhythm, we might say with Copland paraphrasing Goethe paraphrasing St...

...He dies when Christ dies, and remembering Him, he looks toward Calvary and calls Christ brother...

...It deals with homosexuality, narcissism, impotence, suicide by poison, voyeurism, nudity, seduction in a bordello, and various forms of violence, including an axe-murder...

...An interesting conception, often commented upon in recent years, but hardly intended, or even implied, in the original play by the contemporary Belgian playwright, Michel de Ghelderode...

...The wildly irrational in music: all very well for a couple of Renaissance madmen...

...Ginastera became internationally famous a quarter century ago, when his Piano Sonata was first played at Carnegie Tech by Johanna Harris...

...John: In the beginning was rhythm, and the rhythm was in Ginastera, and the rhythm was Ginastera...

...An evocation of pre-ColumRALPH thibodeau 15 professor of music at Del Mar College, and music critic of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times...

...The action takes place from sunrise to sunset of Good Friday...