Bach's blood

It was also the sentimental reunion of three major artists whose mature work started in Boston: Sellars, conductor Craig Smith, and mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt, whose previous collaborations include now legendary productions of Handel's Giulio Cesare and Mozart's Don Giovanni (which can still impress us on video).

Bach's cantatas, as Emmanuel has been demonstrating for a quarter of a century, were meant to be part of the liturgy, never for theatrical presentation. They are sublime but often tortured meditations on guilt, suffering, and the possibility of redemption. A dozen years ago, on a double bill with the Weill-Brecht "Little" Mahagonny (six satirical numbers -- including the famous "Alabama- Song" -- that were later incorporated into the full-length Mahagonny opera), Sellars and Smith took the liberty of staging a fleshed-out version of Bach's Cantata No. 20, Conversations with Fear and Hope after Death. This devastating sequel to Brecht and Weill was like a purgatorial film noir, with a murder, an overdressed widow in black, and her guilt-ridden "friend." To connect Bach further with Weill, Smith gave the major violin obbligato to the saxophone.

Cantata No. 199 is, if anything, even more tormented. There's no invented "plot," but Sellars has made visible and palpable the internal writhings of one soul moving through a sleepless, anguished night of thinking herself a monster in the eyes of God. Anguish caused by sin, "Hell's hangman," the torturer who turns the "moist" heart into a desiccated Sahara of literally inexpressible pain ("Only Bach," Sellars told the audience, "could pull off an aria about not being able to open your mouth"). Tears of grief eventually water this silent wasteland. God's heart breaks for the sinner, and He opens His wounds to her. And the sinner, inebriated with joy, celebrates the end of her exile from God's love.

The musical performance was astounding. Hunt is always a full-hearted singer when given a chance (her Handel recordings under the restrictive baton of early-music specialist Nicholas McGegan rarely show her letting loose). But Smith, with whom she first started as a violist in the Emmanuel orchestra and who provided some of her first major vocal opportunities, gave her the room and the encouragement to soar (as he did to such stunning effect when she played the revenge-obsessed Sesto in Giulio Cesare), and to pull back into aching pianissimos. No surprise, she brings to Bach the deepest understanding and a shivering intensity.

Cantata No. 199 was composed for high soprano, and Smith's one musical compromise was to lower the key half a step to make the music more comfortable for Hunt's heroic fullness of tone while she maneuvered Sellars's vigorous movements. The transposition, though, really suited the music, with its sublime obbligatos for oboe d'amore (played with heartbreaking eloquence by Peggy Pearson, who goes back to the earliest days of Emmanuel Bach cantatas) and viola (Betty Hauck getting a rare chance to shine) -- the two instruments Hunt's voice sounds most like.

As always, the big news and source of controversy is Sellars. This was his first brand new piece for Boston since Cosí fan tutte at Castle Hill in 1984 and his first major local undertaking since the ill-fated Boston Opera Theatre's 1991 production of The Marriage of Figaro (which premiered three years earlier in Purchase, New York). It's been too long. Although some people felt the stage language went over the top, I found Sellars's images -- and the power of Hunt's embodiment of them -- deeply affecting. Her hands, in gesticulations of gestation, expressed first her desperate need to deliver herself of her guilt, then the birth of joy; together in prayer, touching forehead, throat, and heart, they embodied her humility, her wish to speak from both mind and heart (and because Sellars is so musical, they mirrored Bach's repeated descending three-note phrases). In the great da capo aria "Stumme Seufzer, stille Klagen" ("Silent sighing, quiet mourning"), Hunt circled the stage to the wreathing oboe, beginning from square one with each new attempt to pray, or weep, each retracing at a lower volume and with new gestures.

Dunya Ramicova designed for Hunt a turquoise gown with two long reddish-brown satiny sashes attached to the collar. Barefoot, Hunt looked like a penitent queen, or an angel. When she raised the sashes to her eyes, they became her "well of tears." Lifted above her head, they were the grim hangman. Knotted around her chest, they implied the bondage of sin. Laid out with care in front of her, they were her hopeful offering. Swinging freely, they turned her into a living bell, tolling the start of a new life, a happier New Year.