Three Choirs Festival

Bliss experts Andrew Burn and Paul Spicer asked Dame Sarah Connolly her thoughts on Bliss' Mary of Magdala.

The heart of Bliss’ cantata is the description of how Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the risen Christ on Easter morning. Can you set the scene for us?

Mary approaches the Sepulchre on the third day after Jesus’ death in a high state of anxiety because she has just seen people, whom she assumes are robbers, around his burial site. The lower and upper strings play dramatically in the extreme ends of their instruments, the music is in the minor key, chromatic and rhythmic, and there is a sense of real foreboding as she cries about the potential gravesite desecration. The upper violins cry with her. She shouts for Peter and John to join her.

There is a significant pause in the orchestra to indicate both that she remains alone and has time to look more closely at the figures. The music calms to pianissimo and assumes a tender, mysterious aura as she shares with us her question: ‘But what are those two strangers, white and shining seated at the head and feet where we laid him?’ Her instincts tell her they aren’t mortal as she asks what they rather than whom, and she recognises they are spirits of some kind.

The angels then address her in a duet that musically reminds me of a gentle ‘Hear ye, Israel’ from Elijah. She answers their question ‘Why weepest thou?’ with her first fear, that Jesus’ body has been stolen. When she looks beyond them and sees a figure standing very still tending a vine, she assumes he might be a gardener, early at work. Bliss sets this music with sweet, tender harmony as she asks him if he knows where Jesus might be. I feel there is a beautiful sense of humble domesticity in this moment. Through the harmonic use of added sixths in the major key, Bliss creates a moment of ease, of gentle respect, and she asks the ‘gardener’ if he can tell her where he has put her master. His response is a quiet, unaccompanied, ‘Mary, Mary’. The orchestra assumes the shock of that by responding very majestically, and she answers, ‘Rabboni!’   

Can you describe Mary’s solos for us, and how Bliss captures the gamut of her thoughts and emotions in his music?

Bliss makes Mary a very contemporary woman with fears and a poetic heart. She quotes a passage from Song of Solomon, ‘Loveliest rose of all the roses of Sharon’. Her thoughts display great courage and loyalty, including protection from the apostles’ initial judgement ‘There were voices raised in derision’, and her music is energetic and open hearted. The text is active; she is on her way to tend the burial site after the Sabbath is over. The music implies she has been longing to do this but wasn’t allowed to. Bliss makes the audience wait to hear Mary sing and amusingly her first words are ‘At last’, which is maybe what the audience might be thinking! I love the fact that Bliss has set Hassell’s text as you would speak it. There are very few melismas, which gives a sense of recitative. I try to contrast this writing vocally with the more lyrical passages. The emotional range musically is enormous, and Bliss packs a mini opera into 25 minutes!

Hassell’s text creates a scene where Mary remembers her first meeting with Jesus when she was vilified as a harlot. How does Bliss portray this? 

Bliss sets this moment a capella, or unaccompanied. ‘I remember where first I found him, where he tenderly called me by name’. It’s her most precious memory, and of course it’s why Mary Magdalene exists in the Bible. Bliss must have felt it needed no adornment.  

Which other works by Bliss would you recommend to Three Choirs audiences?

As a student at the RCM I sang his settings of Li Po’s poems, Ballad of the Four Seasons. I thought they were very different to anything else, and more dramatic than Howells! On the same CD as Bliss’ Mary of Magdala with Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra I also recorded The Enchantress, which is another dramatic scena. He is definitely writing here for a singer who has performed Wagner! 

These questions were by Chairman of The Bliss Trust Andrew Burn

Does the fact that the work was commissioned by the Worcester Three Choirs Festival automatically suggest it should be religious? Does Bliss get around this, given his lack of personal faith?

This is a fascinating question. I don’t believe that any musical work written to religious texts requires religious faith, not by the composer or performer. Faith, or lack of it, is personal, and wearing either like a badge is off-putting to me. This piece is an account of an interesting woman’s extraordinary experience as told in the Bible. Whether one believes it or not is irrelevant, because Bliss’ account evokes tender love, loyalty, compassion, fear, domesticity, and some notion of dignity and respect for the power of authority of the church. Sometimes it sounds a bit Hollywood, like Miklós Rózsa’s The Robe in the grander moments!

How does the orchestration of the work support and colour? Is the scoring sensitive to the soloists?

The scoring is sensitive to the singers, but it might have been useful for Mary to have sung Brangäne (Tristan und Isolde) as it gets pretty noisy at times! The reason why I mentioned the best of the Hollywood film score writers – Rósza, Korngold, Steiner – is because their musical tropes depicting awe, fear, anger are definitely heard in this score, but used very sparingly. The chorus ‘Look there! That woman!’ has the rage and fugal intensity of Bach’s turba chorus ‘Barrabam!’ in the St John Passion.

How far do you feel that the work is essentially a love song from Mary to Jesus?

These days I think it’s entirely acceptable to recognise the sensuality in Jesus and Mary’s relationship. She became a priestess after all. Bliss and Hassell’s use of the Song of Solomon text is indicative of that, and her music is at times remarkably sensual. This contrasts well with her outrage on seeing potential robbers by his grave. 

These questions were by Bliss expert Paul Spicer