- Arvo Pärt & Robert Wilson: Adam’s Passion (DVD)dir. by Andy Sommer, and: The Lost Paradise (DVD)dir. by Gunter Atteln
After meeting at a Vatican convention of over 250 international artists and scientists in 2009, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and American stage director Robert Wilson decided to undertake a collaboration. The result is Adam’s Passion, a ninety-minute work of music theatre that pairs Pärt’s music with Wilson’s mise-en-scène, which premiered in May 2015 at the Noblessner Foundry in Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn. The work has been beautifully documented in a new DVD and is the subject of an hour-long documentary, The Lost Paradise, both from the German production company Accentus.
Four of Pärt’s works form the basis of Adam’s Passion: Tabula Rasa(1976), the work for chamber orchestra and prepared piano that made his name internationally as a composer, in which he introduced his tintinnabulistyle; Miserere(1989/1992), written for the Hilliard Ensemble, a setting of the traditional “Miserere” and “Dies Irae” hymns; Adam’s Lament(2009), a choral and orchestral setting of writings by the nineteenth-century saint and mystic Silouan the Athonite, expressing the agony of Adam’s expulsion from Paradise; and Sequentia(2014), a short piece Pärt composed in dedication to Wilson, used here as an overture. The title of the total work is richly evocative. With Adam’s Lamentas its cornerstone, it becomes a modern Passion akin to the masterworks Bach wrote nearly three centuries ago, shrouded in similar shades of majesty and melancholy. But where Bach’s Passionsfollow the suffering of the Messiah, “the Last Adam” whose death redeems the fallenness of the world, Pärt focuses instead on Adam as the instigator of the fall, the Biblical figure of mourning par excellence.
Under the baton of Estonian conductor To\nu Kaljuste, Pärt’s singular language is captured here in all its haunting splendor. Like Bach, Pärt’s work creates an [End Page 119]aura of the deepest inwardness, and evokes the internal drama of a soul striving for communion with a heavenly source from which it has been divided. Echoes of the morbid Lutheran Pietism saturating Bach’s Passionsare evident here as well—interwoven with Pärt’s signature, gilded scintillations, borrowed from Eastern Orthodox liturgy and mysticism—as Pärt fixates on the darkness of the human soul and the infinite mysteries of grace. This music broods in the spaces between sound, silence, and trance-like repetition, seeming to slow and sometimes arrest the flow of time, and Wilson’s staging forms a contemplative, dreamlike counterpoint to it. (Among other similarities, both men can be said to espouse an enduring strain of modern Symbolism in the contemporary arts, although this shared orientation is the subject for another essay.)
A thrilling friction between sound and staging runs consistently throughout the piece, one fully appropriate to the genre of the musical Passion play. Bach’s works were written for a Protestant church suspicious of theatre and graven images, and they mix private prayer with public pageantry, mournful introversion with its outward display, and those very tensions are once again on full view here. As basic material, few myths could be better suited for this pair of collaborators than that of Adam, who both gives expression to Pärt’s sorrowful musical palette, and also forms an emblem for Wilson’s enigmatic approach to images. Prior to Adam’s sin, so the story goes, names and meanings achieved an unbroken unity in the timelessness of Eden. In this account, Adam’s fall causes the performative bond between them to collapse into ruins, unleashing a newly ambiguous relation between sign and thing upon the world, the mythic, primordial origin of the very form of visual allegory practiced in Wilson’s theatre.
The staged production takes place as a modern mysterium, depicting...