Magnum Mysterium – Zeugenaussagen zur Auferstehung

After receiving a commission from the Protestant Church in the Rhineland to write sacred music about the resurrection under certain performance conditions, I was faced with a multitude of questions: How can I, as a composer of our time, approach this subject? What does resurrection mean to me? There are the different accounts of a historical event by the evangelists. However, there are also texts that point to a Christianity of resurrection as a Christianity of the future. Then there is the composition itself. In addition to professional musicians, a church choir, i.e., an amateur choir, is available for the performance. This means different requirements and different levels of difficulty. How should the instrumental ensemble be composed in order to meet the compositional intentions and at the same time not exceed the planned performance costs? And so on and so forth. So I decided on a three-part piece, each part of which can also be performed on its own. Part 1 is based on the 28th chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew (Martin Luther’s translation, revised text 1975): the resurrection of Jesus, the appearance of the risen Lord, the Great Commission. The text of the evangelist is recited by a speaker, while the choir and the favorite voices are assigned collection prayer texts for Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Easter Monday. A short instrumental prelude and interludes structure the entire text of this part, with short electronic inserts in some places to emphasize certain passages of the text, especially in the reporting. The conclusion is the chorale “Jesus Christ, our Savior.” Here, every listener is also addressed and included as a singer in the sense of a Christian community. Part II is based on the 15th chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, also in Luther’s revised translation: Christ is truly risen. It is the confrontation of early Christian thought with a consciousness rooted in the Hellenistic world of ideas. The apostle’s tenacious and evidence-based insistence is contrasted with four passages from the Gospel of John and the First Epistle of Peter. Here, too, the instrumental parts serve as a structure, and the chorale “We thank you, Lord Jesus Christ” concludes the piece: all those present are included. The third part of the composition includes, among other things, Gregorian chants of the Catholic Church in the spirit of ecumenism, which are recorded on tape and electronically converted to correspond to the compositional intentions. From the wealth of chants, I chose excerpts from the Proprium, which differ from the Ordinary in the liturgy of the Mass. Specifically, I chose parts from the Graduale (Haec dies) and the Alleluia (Ascendit Deus), i.e., excerpts of meditative contemplation and extension of the first reading from the Old Testament, as well as epistles and acclamations to Christ, assigned to the Gospels. Wipos of Burgundy (around 1040) famous Easter sequence “Victimae paschali laudes” (Praise be to the Paschal Lamb), in excerpts from its first polyphonic conductus-like version from the Spanish Codex Las Huelgas. I also selected excerpts from the Initium “Christ is risen” of the Eastern Church (in German), which is only used during Easter week, as it appears in the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, passages from the small ektenia in the Neo-Byzantine tradition, parts of the prayer for peace from the great litany, and Easter hymns from the Greek Orthodox tradition in plagal modes, all referring to the “Anastasis,” the Resurrection, and also in electronic sound transformation. An excerpt from the Schacharith prayer of the Hebrew faith (in German translation), recited by the speaker without instrumental accompaniment and without influencing the sound of the language by electronic means, refers hymnically to the immortality of the soul: “Blessed are You, Eternal One, who allows souls to return to dead bodies.” The ringing of metal idiophones at the beginning and end of the third part of my piece are reminiscences of Greek Orthodox Easter rites I have personally experienced, here sublimated and brought into a compositional context. My work concludes with the jointly sung chorale “Christ ist erstanden” (Christ is risen).
(Günther Becker)