Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem
Encyclopedia
Passion cantata
A Passion cantata is a cantata that takes as its theme the Passion of Jesus Christ, i.e. the hours, days, or weeks leading up to and including his crucifixion. Some of the larger cantatas have been referred to as oratorios.-English:...
by Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...
for solo baritone
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
(Jesus), solo tenor
Tenor
The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...
(Pilate), solo vocal quartet (Evangelist), choir
Choir
A choir, chorale or chorus is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform.A body of singers who perform together as a group is called a choir or chorus...
, violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
, oboe
Oboe
The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...
, cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...
, bassoon
Bassoon
The bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family that typically plays music written in the bass and tenor registers, and occasionally higher. Appearing in its modern form in the 19th century, the bassoon figures prominently in orchestral, concert band and chamber music literature...
and organ
Organ (music)
The organ , is a keyboard instrument of one or more divisions, each played with its own keyboard operated either with the hands or with the feet. The organ is a relatively old musical instrument in the Western musical tradition, dating from the time of Ctesibius of Alexandria who is credited with...
. The work lasts approximately 70 minutes and utilizes only the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
text from the Gospel of John
Gospel of John
The Gospel According to John , commonly referred to as the Gospel of John or simply John, and often referred to in New Testament scholarship as the Fourth Gospel, is an account of the public ministry of Jesus...
, chapters 18 and 19, plus a brief introduction and conclusion.
History
When Pärt left EstoniaEstonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
for Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
in 1980, he took with him the first sketches for the St. John Passion, which would become the culmination of the tintinnabuli
Tintinnabuli
Tintinnabuli is a compositional style created by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. He first introduced this new style in two works: Für Alina and Spiegel Im Spiegel . This simple style was influenced by the composer's mystical experiences with chant music...
style. He eventually finished the work in 1982 and it was published in 1989. Since then, it has been recorded three times, and remains one of his most popular works. In much the same way that Pärt was inspired by medieval music in his creation of tintinnabuli, here too he is inspired by the earliest monophonic
Monophony
In music, monophony is the simplest of textures, consisting of melody without accompanying harmony. This may be realized as just one note at a time, or with the same note duplicated at the octave . If the entire melody is sung by two voices or a choir with an interval between the notes or in...
settings of the Passion. The St. John Passion is a through-composed
Through-composed
Through-composed music is relatively continuous, non-sectional, and/or non-repetitive. A song is said to be through-composed if it has different music for each stanza of the lyrics. This is in contrast to strophic form, in which each stanza is set to the same music...
setting of the text of John 18-19, preceded by a short introduction (Exordio) and followed by a brief conclusion (Conclusio). He uses a baritone soloist for Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
, a tenor for Pilate, and a Soprano-Alto-Tenor-Bass (SATB) quartet for the evangelist
Evangelism
Evangelism refers to the practice of relaying information about a particular set of beliefs to others who do not hold those beliefs. The term is often used in reference to Christianity....
. In addition, there are four solo instruments, oboe, violin, cello and bassoon, organ and SATB choir. The work lasts about 70 minutes and is not broken into movements.
Structure
In composing the work, text setting and declamationDeclamation
Grand National Tournament in Declamation is a public speaking event of the National Catholic Forensic League. One can qualify for the annual NCFL Grand National Tournament in Declamation through their local qualifying tournament...
were foremost in Pärt’s mind: all of the musical elements in the piece, from rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
to pitch
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
, are in some way determined by the text. Tonally, the work centers on a series of overlapping fifths
Perfect fifth
In classical music from Western culture, a fifth is a musical interval encompassing five staff positions , and the perfect fifth is a fifth spanning seven semitones, or in meantone, four diatonic semitones and three chromatic semitones...
: D-A-E-B. The rhythmic values are established by the text. Each character has a basic note value, and this is lengthened depending on the punctuation and its position within the phrase. Since a period at the end of a sentence generates a note longer than does a comma in the middle of it, the hierarchy of the textual phrases is reflected in the music.
Value assignment:
- In the last word of a phrase ending with a comma, the stressed syllable would be medium.
- In the last word of a phrase ending with a colon or period, each syllable would be long.
- In the first word of a new sentence (or phrase beginning after a colon), the stressed syllable would be medium.
- In the last word in a phrase ending with a question mark, each syllable would be medium.
- Otherwise all syllables are short.
Pärt divides the Evangelist text into four sections (50 phrases each), plus a final concluding section of 10 phrases, for a total of 210. Each section begins with a different solo voice, an instrument then joins it, and this pattern continues until all 8 are sounding. The alto and bass voices and oboe and bassoon are always M-voices (Hillier's
Paul Hillier
Paul Douglas Hillier is a conductor, music director and baritone. He specializes in early music and contemporary art music, especially that by composers Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music, beginning his professional career while a...
coinage, referring to the melody voice in a tintinnabuli configuration); the soprano and tenor voices and violin and cello are always T-voices (again, Hillier's coinage referring to the harmonizing voice). In the case where a T-voice is presented alone, the M-voice is simply implied.
Christ always has the longest and lowest notes, creating a stark contrast with the other characters. The pitch center for Christ is E, and it is accompanied by a drone and T-voice in the organ. For the turba, the pitch center is again E. The alto and bass voices, again always playing an M role, are mirrored, and the soprano and tenor T-voices alternate above and below the M-voices. While both are centered on E, the M-voices use E Phrygian
Phrygian mode
The Phrygian mode can refer to three different musical modes: the ancient Greek tonos or harmonia sometimes called Phrygian, formed on a particular set octave species or scales; the Medieval Phrygian mode, and the modern conception of the Phrygian mode as a diatonic scale, based on the latter...
against E major
Major scale
In music theory, the major scale or Ionian scale is one of the diatonic scales. It is made up of seven distinct notes, plus an eighth which duplicates the first an octave higher. In solfege these notes correspond to the syllables "Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti/Si, ", the "Do" in the parenthesis at...
in the T-voices; this makes for striking cross-relations
False relation
A false relation is the name of a type of dissonance that sometimes occurs in classical polyphonic music, most commonly in vocal music of the Renaissance....
between G-natural and G-sharp, though the two never sound at the same time. Pilate, like Christ, is accompanied only by the organ, but sings in faster rhythmic values and has a higher tessitura
Tessitura
In music, the term tessitura generally describes the most musically acceptable and comfortable range for a given singer or, less frequently, musical instrument; the range in which a given type of voice presents its best-sounding texture or timbre...
. Pilate's part is the most unstable in the piece, created in part through the use of an M-voice centered on B and a T-voice centered on F (a tritone
Tritone
In classical music from Western culture, the tritone |tone]]) is traditionally defined as a musical interval composed of three whole tones. In a chromatic scale, each whole tone can be further divided into two semitones...
apart) and through the refusal of Pilate to be either a T-voice or M-voice, always alternating between these two roles.
Recordings
- Paul HillierPaul HillierPaul Douglas Hillier is a conductor, music director and baritone. He specializes in early music and contemporary art music, especially that by composers Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music, beginning his professional career while a...
, dir., Passio, by Arvo Pärt, Hilliard EnsembleHilliard EnsembleThe Hilliard Ensemble is a British male vocal quartet originally devoted to the performance of early music. Founded in 1974, the group is named after the Elizabethan miniaturist painter Nicholas Hilliard....
, ECM New Series 837109 (1988). - Antony PittsAntony PittsAntony Pitts is a British composer, producer and conductor.His compositions have been published by Faber Music, with 2 CDs of choral music on Hyperion Records and other recordings on Harmonia Mundi, Naxos, and Unknown Public. He was a Senior Producer at BBC Radio 3 until 2005...
, dir., Passio, by Arvo Pärt, Tonus PeregrinusTonus PeregrinusTonus Peregrinus is a vocal ensemble specialising in early music and contemporary sacred music, especially that of founder and director, Antony Pitts...
, Naxos 8555860 (2003). - Tauno Satomaa, dir., Johannes Passion, by Arvo Pärt, Candomino Choir, Elatus 0927498762 (2006).