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FEATURE
Unfamiliar Territory: Michael Marissen, Daniel Underhill Professor of Music at Swarthmore College and pre-concert lecturer on the Brandenburg Concertos at Tempesta’s upcoming October shows, is no stranger to controversy. He wrote a New York Times article, printed Easter morning, 2007, calling Handel’s Messiah overtly anti-Jewish. The “Hallelujah” Chorus doesn’t celebrate Christ’s birth or resurrection, Marissen wrote; the chorus is cheering the Romans for destroying Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 AD. Take that, Messiah sing-ins. “Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’” set off wrangling in scholarly and popular circles that should only increase when Marissen’s new book, Rejoicing Against Judaism: A Forgotten Aspect of Handel’s Messiah comes out. In 1998, his book Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism and Bach’s St. John Passion created similar upset. “Messiah appears to be very much a work of its own era,” he wrote in the Times article, filling in background on clerical anti-Semitism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. “Listeners might do well to ponder exactly what it means when, in keeping with tradition, they stand during the ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus.” (FEATURE continues below) |
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2009-2010 SEASON PASS
Season Pass &
Join us this season for two monumental cycles in their entirety: Bach’s beloved Brandenburg Concertos—alongside some of the works that inspired their creation—and Zelenka’s Lamentations of Jeremiah. A Tempesta di Mare Season Pass is a bundle of good things rolled into one:
Get your Season Pass now for only $145 (a 30% savings over buying single tickets)! Use the order form below. A Tempesta di Mare College Pass gives the budget-minded full-time student these benefits:
College Passes for just $40 (a 30% savings over buying single tickets)! Use the order form below.
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FEATURE (continued) Ponder indeed. The fact that some of us will squirm the next time “Hal-le-lu-jah!” pops up over a commercial for laundry detergent tells Marissen that he’s doing his job. “What a good interpreter, a good writer on the arts does, is to take the familiar and make it unfamiliar again,” Marissen says, with a nod to literary theory. But Marissen calls his first book, The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (1995) his most controversial work. “The anti-Semitism stuff is relatively uncontroversial intellectually, but very controversial emotionally. The Brandenburg stuff is not very controversial emotionally, but intellectually, it’s harder for people to deal with,” he says. The root of controversy is in how the Brandenburg book moves beyond music to embrace society and thought. Marissen demonstrates Bach’s very Lutheran mind at work in the music. “A lot of people think of Bach church cantatas as Brandenburg concertos with unnecessary words added to them,” says Marissen. “I took the opposite view, that the Brandenburgs are like church cantatas but without words.” (FEATURE continues below) |
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ON THE ROAD Cleveland, Oct 14 Cleveland friends, be sure to come to our new production, From Venice to Leipzig at the St John Cathedral’s Helen D Schubert Concert Series on Wednesday, October 14 at 7:30 pm. We will perform music by Vivaldi, Veracini, Telemann, Walther, Weiss and Bach. The Cathedral is located at 1007 Superior Avenue E. All concerts are free and open to the public; no tickets are required. A free-will offering will be taken. Free parking is available in the Cathedral Garage on the SE corner of Rockwell Ave and East 9th St. Directions here. |
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FEATURE (continued) Marissen’s Bach is not the enduring common conception of an art-for-art’s sake Bach who wrote his church cantatas to pay the rent while pouring his soul into timeless abstract works of pure sound like the Brandenburgs and the Well-Tempered Clavier. “Bach’s not a Jekyll and Hyde character,” says Marissen. “His concertos and his church works both come out of the same world and life view.” According to Marissen’s argument, Bach uses the pecking order among orchestra members as a reflection on other hierarchies in rigidly hierarchical eighteenth-century European society. Marissen demonstrates how in Brandenburg Concerto 1, which Tempesta will be playing after his lecture, Bach acknowledges the hierarchies—where soloists rank over players in the ensemble, for example, and hunting horns are almost literally outsiders—but then proceeds to thoroughly mix them up. “New Testament notions of the first shall be last, the high and mighty will be brought down and the low will be lifted up, sentiments that are so central to the New Testament and so important to Luther, that’s what the Brandenburg concertos are about,” Marissen says. (FEATURE continues below) |
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2009-2010 SINGLE TICKETS
Tickets à la Carte Single tickets are now available for mail-in and telephone orders. For mail-in orders, use the tear-off form on the new brochure—or download and print this PDF order form—and send it with your check. You can also call in your order with a credit card. Our phone number is 215-755-8776.
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FEATURE (continued) But then, there’s everything else in Brandenburg 1, too. “It’s just totally wild,“ he says. “The formal stuff is all turned upside down, the most extreme abuse of instruments takes place there, it has old-fashioned and new-fashioned, it has dance, it has so-called abstract music. Everything but the kitchen sink is in there.” Even after a decade and a half of scholarship, he still loves the Brandenburg Concertos. And the rest of the program? He can’t wait. “I love the other baroque repertoire too, Fasch and Telemann and Zelenka, all these guys. I have 5,000 CDs at home. Fasch and Zelenka and Heinichen, those three guys are even better than Handel, and Handel’s wonderful.“ Certainly, his own job as a writer and scholar is to “make the familiar unfamiliar.” “But what early music groups like Tempesta di Mare are doing—to find really high quality music that’s unfamiliar and make people familiar with it—I love and value that very much too. It’s fantastic,” says Michael Marissen. Hallelujah to that.
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Tempesta di Mare • 1034 Carpenter St • Philadelphia PA 19147 • 215-755-8776 • www.tempestadimare.org