Seeing Passion in Everyday Life

For nearly 300 years, Bach’s Passions — oratorios retelling the story of Christ on the cross — have set the standard for musical depictions of suffering and redemption. Yet when David Lang set out to create a new work along similar lines, his first impulse was to leave Christian iconography behind. He began searching for a secular text that would capture the heartbreak and hopefulness of the passion stories without their religious overtones.

He didn’t have to look far. A well-worn copy of The Little Match Girl was on the shelf in the next room.

“I have three children, and I had read it to them a million times,” says Lang of Hans Christian Andersen’s parable of a poverty-stricken child who freezes to death on the street in midwinter. Incorporating texts from Andersen and the format of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Lang started writing a new score. The resulting work, titled The Little Match Girl Passion, went on to win the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for music.

This month, the work makes its West Coast premiere. In performances by the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Dec. 4 in San Francisco and Dec. 6 in Berkeley, The Little Match Girl Passion will be the centerpiece of a program, conducted by Music Director Lynne Morrow, that also includes music by Benjamin Britten, Dave Brubeck, local composer Sanford Dole, and others. 

Lang, a cofounder of the famous new-music group Bang on a Can, has written a wide range of concert, chamber, and theatrical works. As resident composer at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, he’s contributed scores for past productions of Euripides’ Hecuba and Shakespeare’s Tempest, and is currently working on music for the company’s upcoming production of Racine’s Phèdre. He also writes for film; audiences can hear his work in the current art-world satire Untitled.

Still, he says he’s never written anything quite like The Little Match Girl Passion. The work started with a commission from Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices. In a recent phone call from New York, Lang said his intent was to tailor the work to the singer/conductor’s particular interests.

“Hillier has a great relationship with so many contemporary composers — Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, Karlheinz Stockhausen — and I think of him as a completely modern person,” he explains. “But when I bought his CDs, it dawned on me that, because he’s a singer, and because he’s dedicated his life to vocal music, most of what he does is advocacy for Jesus. That’s where Western music began, and that’s where so much of our canon is.”

Linking the Spiritual and the Mundane

Lang, who is not a Christian, says he’s spent his own career trying to avoid the sacred music tradition. “I’ve always thought there’s this great repertoire that I’m just better off staying away from,” he says. “But with this piece, I thought maybe I should take it head-on — to see if I could deal with the tradition in a way that would allow me, as a non-Christian, to feel comfortable.”

What intrigued him about St. Matthew Passion was the way Bach and his librettist, Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici), alternated Biblical narrative with “crowd scenes” — that is, the horrified reactions of witnesses to Christ’s suffering.

“The feeling it creates is that those people didn’t understand, but we understand,” says Lang. “And if we had been there, we would have helped. It put Bach’s audience in the moment. It’s like saying, ‘You are there.’”

It was Lang’s wife who suggested The Little Match Girl as a source for an updated version. The composer says he quickly realized that the Dane’s story fit the bill.

“It was perfect,” he says. “On the surface level, it’s a parable about this person who suffers in public. No one helps her. She has this vision of where she’s going next, which allows her to find peace with where she is. When she dies, people can’t understand how death has ennobled her. They miss the point, because they don’t see how the death has taken her to this other spiritual place.”

Lang doesn’t quote from Bach’s score; in fact, his score doesn’t use an orchestra at all. Like Bach and Picander, though, he intersperses crowd reaction with narrative. Sung in English, the musical has a two-fold effect: It affords the audience a measure of emotional distance, while offering pointed perspective on 21st-century suffering.

“That was my original intention,” says Lang. “With Saint Matthew Passion, here’s a story that says that one person’s suffering was enough to change the entire world. Yet we allow, without even noticing, so much suffering all around us every single day.

“I don’t like art that tells you what to do or what to think. But I would like people to consider their own role, their own participation in the suffering of people around them.”

Chorus as Community

The Little Match Girl Passion had its world premiere performance in October 2007 at Carnegie Hall. Hillier conducted the performance with four vocal soloists, each also playing percussion instruments. Pacific Mozart Ensemble will perform it in Lang’s revised choral version, with 45 singers. Everett Q. Tilden will supply the percussion parts.
Lang likes both versions, and says his best decision was not to orchestrate the work. “I thought it made it more personal,” he comments. “The thing that’s great about singers is that they don’t hide behind anything. What they’re singing is coming straight from inside them. There’s a communal aspect to choral music, especially in works like this that have a spiritual topic. I didn’t want to make it old-fashioned and I didn’t want to make it like a movie. I wanted it to be up-to-date and plainspoken and very, very simple. The thing I like about it is it unfolds very easily. There’s nothing fancy about it at all.”

Morrow, who has been rehearsing PME in the work since September, agrees. “It’s a wonderful piece,” says the conductor, adding that Lang has drawn an indelible line from Bach to Andersen, through to the present. “The word passion means suffering,” she says. “Just as the St. Matthew Passion talks about the suffering of Christ, this story talks about the suffering of this little homeless girl. It has so much emotion. There’s something about singing: It’s vibration, it directly affects the body. The singers have been quite affected by it; David creates such a close-up feeling for the suffering that’s being portrayed.”

Singing the work in ensemble, as opposed to the original four-voice version, presents challenges, adds Morrow. “The score is quite rhythmically precise, so it’s all about coordination,” she says. “But to me, it becomes that much more breathtaking to have so many witnesses.”

Since its premiere, The Little Match Girl Passion has been performed in Europe and recorded by Hillier on the Harmonia Mundi label. Lang is clearly pleased that it’s coming to the West Coast. And he says he was stunned when he learned he’d won the Pulitzer Prize. “I didn’t expect it at all,” he remarks. “Usually the pieces that win prizes are fast and loud and hard and flashy. It’s not that anyone thinks those pieces are better. They just stand out more. So the idea that someone would give this quiet, introspective piece an award — I just couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. I hope they don’t want to take it back.”