Bach never intended his sacred cantatas to be staged. They were written — more than 200 of them — to be sung as part of the liturgy, which for the past 30 years is how Craig Smith,
the music director of Emmanuel Music, has performed them. But 18 years ago, Smith and his inspired collaborator, the precocious stage director Peter Sellars, put together a theatrically powerful double bill of Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht’s satirical Little Mahagonny and Bach’s Cantata No. 20 (“Conversations with Fear and Hope after Death”) in the mode of a ?lm noir murder mystery. To unify them, Smith took the inspired, radical step of replacing Bach’s solo violin with a Weill-y saxophone.
A dozen years later, Sellars and Smith gave Boston’s First Night another staged Bach cantata, the even more painful No. 199, Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut (“My heart is drowning in blood,” as Sellars translates it), one of Bach’s cantatas for a single voice. The voice belonged to mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt, who had once played violist in the Emmanuel Orchestra and was already a major new presence. Now married to composer Peter Lieberson, Hunt Lieberson is a full-?edged star of the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, Glyndebourne, and numerous landmark Baroque-opera productions. And her artistry has continued to grow in depth and daring. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Emmanuel Music, she was back in Boston for previews of an evening of two Bach cantatas staged by Sellars to be conducted by Smith at Lincoln Center (March 6, 8, and 10) and then in Paris, London, and Lucerne.
“Staging Bach cantatas is a little unusual,” Sellars said in his introductory words at the Emerson Majestic, “except at Emmanuel — a church that has regular AA meetings. . . . These cantatas were written for people working through real problems — they’re a kind of 12-step program.” Cantata No. 199 seemed largely unchanged from ?ve years ago. This is a work, as Sellars said, of “profound self-hatred: Bach meets Alban Berg.” It begins with Hunt Lieberson trying to push herself up from the stage. And before the sudden blissful ascent into joy at the very end, most of it remains the tormented effort of the despised self to ?nd release.
“The set is the costume; the props are the costume,” Sellars told us. The costume is a gown designed by Dunya Ramicova that looks like something a Grünewald or Van Eyck Madonna might wear — turquoise, with long, reddish brown sashes dangling from the collar. These sashes Hunt Lieberson wraps around her chest, like chains, or around her neck, like a noose (her sins are “the hangmen of Hell”). She holds them up to her eyes so they become emblems of her falling tears, or tries to smooth them out on the stage as if preparing for a Japanese tea ceremony. Finally, she swings them into the air in a startling moment of liberation. Sellars acknowledged his Asian in?uences, which are also evident when Hunt Lieberson repeatedly touches her forehead, her throat, and her heart (perfectly mirroring a descending three-note phrase).
Some people were distracted by the staging. Some were listening with their eyes closed. But Bach’s cantatas are often hard to grasp because they seem so abstract. They are happy or sad, and there’s always some kind of spiritual issue. But Sellars and Smith give us a drama that forces us to confront what Bach’s music actually means.
The second cantata is even more explicit. Sellars told us that Ich habe genug (“I have enough”), No. 82, was inspired by doctors in terminal wards in the Bay Area. And the question is: what is a good death? Hunt Lieberson is revealed lying on the bare stage in a white hospital gown. The quietly eloquent dancer Michael Schumacher holds a glaring work light attached to a long orange electrical cord (the evocative lighting by Sellars stalwart James F. Ingalls). Hunt Lieberson both hides from and embraces the light. It’s like a halo around her, but it also casts her into dark shadows. She rises — almost elevates — to meet the light, then falls back. She casts off her IV tubes, rejecting her life support. For Bach, as Sellars explains, death is not an exit but an entrance.
You could hear the strings (led gloriously by Danielle Maddon) breathe and Peggy Pearson’s plangent, insinuating oboe d’amore leading the soul down the hospital corridor and into a new world (“With Bach,” Sellars said, “you’re never alone — there’s always an oboe nearby”). This cantata is as sublimely beautiful as No. 199 is tormented. In both, Smith led the chamber orchestra with deep sympathy, and the players responded with aching sensitivity (special gratitude to Betty Hauck for what Sellars called a “psychedelic viola solo”).
These vocal solos probably have more music than many complete opera roles. And there was Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, singing more notes more poignantly, more powerfully, more intelligently, more inwardly, and far more gorgeously than we poor forked creatures have any right to deserve. We were blessed. That’s one of the things it means to be blessed.
