On this Easter Sunday, drawn by a deeply repressed Lutheran collective unconscious, I tuned in to Bach’s Matthäus-Passion performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Nicholas Collon. It’s a familiar piece, or should I say the ultimate familiar piece, but in the light of the zeitgeist my attention was drawn to a dramaturgical feature to which I hadn’t paid attention before, namely the way Bach and his librettist Picander chose to open the work.
As we know, passion stories can be started from any point in the narrative, and for instance Bach’s previous effort, the Johannes-Passion (1724), opened with the arrest of Jesus, whereas Matthäus (1727) only gets there after a full hour of music. Matthäus makes the conscious choice of giving us more context, and its timeline starts already with the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew’s Chapter 26, in the political backstage, where high priest Caiaphas leads the plot to get rid of Jesus. In the form of a popular choral commenting on this plot (Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen) we are collectively faced with the question of why: “what are the crimes” Jesus has to answer and pay for? In what can only be interpreted as an answer to that question, we cut to Jesus in Bethany, where a woman pours a whole jar of expensive perfumed ointment on his head. Everyone in the assembly is scandalized, especially the apostles, who think of everything that could have been done with that money, for instance in favor of the poor, had the ointment been sold instead of being wasted in this fashion. Jesus makes a strange threefold argument in defense of the woman: 1) it was, as translated in the English Standard Version, ‘a beautiful thing’, or as Luther puts it in the version set by Bach, a good work (ein gut Werk); 2) perfuming his body is the proper ritual preparation for his burial, as he will soon be gone; 3) the memory of this act will last through the gospel, perhaps precisely because of its beauty and magnitude, if not its absurdity.
Of all the episodes one could start a passion with, this one is quite the statement, a controversial one. The apostles make a convincing point that the act of wasting the ointment cannot possibly be justified, and in Matthew’s narrative one of them, Judas, basically storms out from the incident and goes to Caiaphas to bargain the price of his betrayal of Jesus. This suggests a causal relationship between both, a reaction to the unforgivable justification of extravagant wastefulness. “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me” is a rather surprising, if not self-centered retort, and one can very well imagine Judas making a point of proving Jesus wrong, of demonstrating that he – who according to the Gospel of John is the treasurer of the group and manages the apostles’ common purse – understands the value of money, the agency that money provides in the world, unlike this out-of-touch prophet who places himself above material necessities and the immediate suffering of the many. Regardless of the fact that any Passion-play is obviously composed to be performed in the context of an audience convinced of the divinity of Christ, this opening episode introduces Jesus to us at his most obscure and least relatable. Although most would agree that this episode does not call for death penalty, it does put common sense and decency on trial.
It is not a coincidence that this episode of the wasted ointment is opening such a superlative work as the Matthäus-Passion, a piece of liturgy dilated to operatic proportions, requiring two choirs and two orchestras that would fill the entire available space of the Thomaskirche – a display of material resources that Bach fought hard over the years to obtain from Leipzig’s Town Council. That fight for resources, which is familiar to all producers of art, must have unfolded pretty much like the biblical conversation about the waste of ointment, and probably as clumsily on the side of the defendant: although it can always be written off as a spectacular PR operation, in actuality, nothing can justify creating such a monumental waste of money as the Matthäus-Passion, when there is so much more that can be achieved in the material world with the resources that go into it, including very good, very concrete things that help the livelihoods of people in need. By starting their luscious work of art with this very story, Bach and Picander are owning to the fact that they are pretty much spending a jarful of expensive ointment, and that somehow that is an act that matters, although it cannot exactly be justified – it can, however, be understood, and keep echoing beyond the moment of its execution, because it will be remembered.
In Finland, where the performance I watched took place, recent elections have stirred the usual stinkpot of populistic rhetoric, and we had to hear once more about how the funding for the arts should be cut in favor of better expenses, art being ‘a luxury good.’ As inclined as we all are, as artists, to find very well-reasoned and corroborated justifications to the function to art and ourselves within society, and even to the positive economic impact of the arts sector, when we think of our work with honesty we can and should be drawn to wonder whether we cater only to a privileged demographic, and whether every resource of time and money that we employ is worth using in that way, when it could be invested into a soup kitchen and immediately have a greater immediate impact there.
Despite every reason that makes art important, there is an aspect of the making of art that is quite simply economically, and therefore morally, unjustifiable. Someone like Bach, who struggled with this himself, couldn’t have offered a more eloquent response than the Matthäus-Passion, an act of creation that exhibits its resources with captivating, intoxicating lush. Giving more profundity to the notion of luxury than can be said of fascist or neoliberal talking points, Georges Bataille famously called such an exhibition the ‘accursed share’: a society consuming its excess, sacrificing it in the form of luxury or art, without any expected return on investment, in a spectacular waste of resources. This happens in all known cultures, in purely aesthetic contexts or, for instance, in the form of extravagant funeral rituals, as Jesus himself notes in his defense. This elaboration – art as ritual, doing to us collectively that same thing that funerals do – is one way in which the scandalous and inexplicable act of wasting expensive ointment while people are starving can be explained. But regardless of how detached and anthropological one’s theoretical understanding of the wasteful act of making art is, it remains just as scandalous and inexplicable, just as ‘accursed,’ and will never stop being that, as a statement that some things quite simply exist beyond the assigned values of market economy. In this festive period that has different meanings for different people, I live with this as an open, unsolvable question to every artist and society – such is the profound and perfumed mystery that Bach and Picander have placed at the opening of their greatest of mystery plays.
>marginalia* 