I don’t know whether significant events exist. Perhaps I would say no, because everything that happens is just repetition, a predictable and calculable everyday event from birth to death. But for me, the moments when a new work of art is born always stand out in the everyday events, and by that I mean what the word really means: real art.
Passion composed by Péter is real. And music, in a sense for what I want to be involved in music for the rest of my life, and at this point, unfortunately, words fail me, I can’t put this particular “in a sense” in words, perhaps it can’t even be put.
The good thing about this piece is that the composer is concerned with nothing but pure music, and he is able to dissolve his own inner world into music with apparent ease. And how good it is to find out that there are still people who have this level of inner life that can stretch and fire a seventy-minute piece.
Because the piece is about Péter Zombola, not about Jesus Christ, and this statement may not shock anyone who cares about art in 2015. That’s right, old stories only make sense when we ourselves become the protagonists. It is perhaps no coincidence that, for centuries, the Passion Play has seen different actors taking up the cross and carrying it to the village calvary each year, not to mention the more extreme examples of this identification, say in the Philippines.
And the words of the story appear like dead letters from a dusty bible ground between the teeth of the scientist who found the Book, running his finger over the lines – yes, that’s the text, that’s the story word for word, I remember that. But what’s actually happening, as in the works of the great predecessors, is not revealed by the story. What’s beautiful is that the music begins to speak where the words fall silenced: in the interludes interspersed between the choral movements and in the prelude and postlude music that frame the piece.
It is these movements that give the piece its vein, their tension that holds together this substantial construction, in which the biblical lines blabbered by the choir merely wander as commentaries under those vast domes. It is like Bluebeard’s castle: dark, full of pain and blood, yet not cold. This castle is heated by a profound love, and this love transforms even the otherwise ruthless and unbiased choir in the plea of the penultimate movement, even if the initially whispered request later grows into a howling demand: love in this piece has transformed the world, transformed humanity.
The neutral evenness of the universe, Kubrick’s monolith, is equally present in the post-love world, where the canon of recurring questions chanting “why?” is repeatedly filtered through the Babylonian noise of humanity. And the answer is an old church hymn I heard so often as a child from the old women’s choir, which accompanied the ever-false organ lagging beats behind: Sweet Jesus, for you I live, Sweet Jesus, for you I die…
It’s good to know that art is not over yet. There will be something to get up for tomorrow.
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Author: Máté Hámori
