Birtwistle and the Eucharist: Rethinking Transcendence, Flesh, and Desire in Opera Studies

It has been 137 years since Wagner claimed to consecrate the stage with this scene in Parsifal. Since then, opera has seen a proliferation of Eucharistic resonances, from the lemonade outpoured in Britten’s Albert Herring to the force-fed heart of the beloved in Benjamin’s Written on Skin, or Nekrotzar’s chalice of human blood in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre. In these operas, ritualistic music-drama meets food and drink to convey reverence, salvation, joy, or debauchedly parodic inversions of all of the above. Operatic bread and wine is untouchable from the stalls and impossible to swallow while singing. Yet it seems to reach beyond its own context towards something both more ambiguous and more overwhelming.

New York Philharmonic, 2010.

Both opera studies and Eucharistic theology share the same essential questions of presence, experience, and significance. Theology is distinctive, however, in that its bottom line is always ultimate transcendence, and it calls that transcendent God.

In its  fusion of the material and the transcendent, I want to take up the Eucharist as a powerful analogy that can radically redress questions of musical ineffability. Moving to get beyond a presiding split between the material and the textual in opera studies, with particular attention to the work of Carolyn Abbate, I will draw my theological framework from the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement. I will then examine an excerpt from a somewhat literalistic operatic Eucharist in Harrison Birtwistle’s The Last Supper.

Radical Orthodoxy

Originating in Cambridge in the 1990s through the work of John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (among others), Radical Orthodoxy’s founding assertion is that a faithful theological response to postmodern thought does not re-inscribe its rejection of truth-claims and attendant crisis of epistemology. Instead, it insists upon an ultimate transcendent that, while unknowable, we can reach out towards and try to know. God is the ultimate meaning of things (and more still).

In a sense, systematic theology has enjoyed an inverted reaction to modernism compared with other disciplines: apologetic during the twentieth century in its attempt to synthesise God into human narratives of mastery, it then revelled in the gulfs of ambiguity that postmodern thought can offer, speaking of a mysterious truth encompassing seemingly centreless assemblages, and seeing an opportunity for perspectives from premodern thought.

Radical Orthodoxy not only insists upon transcendence, but a fully, materially present transcendence that often speaks the language of phenomenology. In the words of James K. A. Smith, Radical Orthodoxy asserts that ‘only a belief in transcendence and participation in transcendence actually secures the reality of matter and the body’. He writes that Radical Orthodoxy consequently ‘insists on a valuation of the body, sexuality, the sensory and the aesthetic’. These gestures express surprising kinships with opera studies’ preoccupations with embodiment and desire, but distinctly re-orientates that desire towards transcendent meaning. Adorno may see in opera the attempt to ‘transfigure mere existence’ into a bourgeois ‘secularisation of [...] ritualistic display’, perhaps, if we think theologically, postmodernism can offer something less cynical.

I want to begin to construct a theo-musicological dialogue to suggest that what we can learn from the Eucharist as a way of approaching material transcendence. A way in which meaning is both experienced in the moment and still desired, in the pursuit of knowing more.

Drastic vs. Gnostic

At the heart of opera, Abbate finds a cohabitation of two ‘extremes’, one impossible and the other immediately perceived:

‘At one extreme are a series of operatic moments that attempt something impossible: to represent music that, by the very terms of the fictions proposing it, remains beyond expression [....]
At the other extreme, there are opera's ‘facts of life’—live performance, grounded and intensely material, with its labouring singers, breathing that becomes singing, staging, interpretation, and mortality’.

Abbate suggests that these irreconcilable poles ‘come together as a paradoxical amalgam’, and that their tension is a ‘quintessentially operatic phenomenon’.

It was this dualism that she would go on to take up in ‘the drastic and gnostic’ and extend to all music. Her conclusion is that music is drastic, as opposed to gnostic, because it exists in material events. It is experienced rather than known. The gnostic, to Abbate, conversely represents a ‘retreat’ into the formalist abstraction of the work in a state of ‘metaphysical mania’: the fruitless attempt to get at some further meaning. It ‘reflects the wish not to be transported by the state that the performance has engendered in us’.

Latent in Abbate’s argument, however, is the idea that both the drastic and the gnostic express a desire to approach to the ineffable or transcendent. For the gnostic, this results in the ‘clandestine mystery’ of complex pursuits of truth; for the drastic, ‘a nonrepeatable moment’ of totally subjective experience, ‘fugitive to understanding’. Put simply, both extremes are frustrated harbingers of the desire to know more.

Univocal vs. Analogical

One of Radical Orthodoxy’s central projects is to conceive of the transcendent in terms that specifically resist univocity—that is, the idea that we can speak of the divine within the same terms of reference with which we speak of humanity. An example would be ‘God is infinite and I am finite’. It is upon this post-Enlightenment plane that Cartesian dualism is founded; the flatness of the univocal—the assertion that things only exist if they are distinct from one another—as much enabled Descartes to argue that God (merely) ‘exists’ because God is distinct from humans as it enabled him to assert that humans are composites of divisible minds and bodies.

It is this insistent interruption of the transcendent that renders the drastic ultimately unsatisfactory. While Abbate’s centring of music’s materiality has been highly productive, particularly in theoretical discussions of the voice, to disavow knowledge and privilege the perceiving body rather than integrating the two is to re-inscribe a Cartesian split. As Michelle Duncan puts it in a 2004 essay, if we attempt to ignore the ineffable ‘the problem of how to get at the operatic “real” without being reductively materialistic remains’. A Eucharistic counterpart is Augustine’s description of non-believers who ‘carnally press’ the sacrament ‘with their teeth’.

In order to resist the enlightenment logic of the univocal, Radical Orthodoxy turns to ana-logical thought. A major doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, it entails a transcendent horizon, whereupon we cannot fully conceive of God, but instead participate in him. For Aquinas, to say ‘God exists’ is only to say something analogous to a tautology, for instance; God is existence itself, but existence within a mode which is more and other than existence as we can know it. The analogical opens up a space for the unknowable by paradoxically resisting a dichotomy of known and unknown. Through analogy, an attempt is made to bring absolute mystery into imperfect focus in the realm of human perception.

The Eucharist

If we embrace analogical thought, the Eucharist is much, much more than a ritual re-enactment of the last supper as read in the synoptic gospels. Bread and wine are shared, but by what Ward terms the ‘ontological scandal’ of uttering ‘this is my body’ and ‘this is my blood’, these elements are rendered somehow Christ each time they are consecrated.

There is a tautology, surely, in the assertion that the omnipresent God is really present as the Eucharist. But analogical thought frames this excess of presence within terms of God’s superabundance. God is conceived of in terms of the Trinity, which more specifically is a superabundance of love. The members of the Trinity give themselves to one another: the father gives the son by pouring himself into flesh, the Son gives his life by pouring out his blood upon the cross, and the holy ghost binds the three in animated motion. In these acts of love, they desire one another into being, and it is this driving motion that maintains the more-than-ontology of God. To borrow Bernard of Clairveux’s analogy: the father kisses, the son is kissed, and the holy spirit is the kiss itself. A God of pure relationship.

God exists as love itself in the form of a perpetual desire to give fully, that is at once satisfied and never goes away. Anological thought therefore models itself on this eternal desire for more. In Catherine Pickstock’s words, this is ‘not desire as absence, lack and perpetual postponement’ but ‘desire as the free flow of actualisation, perpetually renewed and never foreclosed’. Where I might mundanely desire a sandwich, eat one, and feel reasonably satisfied, the Eucharist is full and perfect beyond comprehension. The world exists in its divine motion and the human life of Christ is fulfilled.

There are parallels between God’s real presence as flesh and opera studies’ commitment to understanding presence. According to Duncan’s phenomenology, presence is only ‘fluidly’ material and ‘made available through the questioning of a more complex rendering of space, temporality, and the body’s very being in the world’ through which it ‘perforates the metaphysical by weaving in and out of bodies’. Questions of presence bring the tensions of operatic meaning to a head, because they ultimately concern the question of what is real. And of ‘weaving in and out of bodies’, brother Angel F. Méndez Montoya asks, ‘what could be more intimate than ‘ingesting’ God?’.

So, this diagram shows an analogical desire which both orientates itself towards and models itself upon the Trinity. The desiring subject cannot know God, but can participate in the abundant flow of God’s love with the grace of Christ’s sacrifice continually renewed in the Eucharistic memorial, which is tangibly, viscerally accessible in the material world.

The Last Supper

Harrison Birtwistle’s The Last Supper, written in 1999 to celebrate the millennium, imagines what might happen if Christ and the apostles came back to earth to break bread again. As the table below by David Beard shows, the opera is structured around arrivals, rituals, dances, and tableau-like ‘visions’ of the Passion. Moments of reflection, which Beard describes as ‘time transcended’ within Birtwistle’s idiosyncratic ‘processional style’, are strung like beads on a Rosary. The Eucharist takes place after the narrator ‘Ghost’, who represents humanity, has been invited to the table. 

Unfortunately, there is no commercial recording to date. This excerpt comes from Radio 3’s archive: the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and Roderick Williams sings Christ. The video follows a skeleton score, which is also shown as a picture below with colour-coded annotations.

The breaking of bread follows Christ’s falsetto E, to which he sings the word ‘love’. He has just washed the disciples’ feet. This E spreads through the orchestra, first in the violas, then the cellos, horns, and trombones. This levelling gesture, stemming from ‘love’, mirrors the liturgical kiss or handshake of peace which has preceded the Eucharist since early Christianity, and anchors love as an embodied practice. As William T. Cavanaugh writes, the Eucharist is ‘the direct encounter of human beings who consider themselves members of one another and of the Prince of Peace’. In consuming Christ, communicants do not cannibalistically digest his flesh, but become incorporated into the corpus of the church; they themselves are the Church, which is the post-resurrection body of Christ. As Paul writes to the Ephesians, ‘we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones’. In my analysis, this unison acts as a cantus firmus of sorts, underpinning everything. 

(Click to englarge)

Christ’s original liturgy, ‘this is my body’ fans out in a chromatic pitch-wedge from A♭ to A and G. Underneath, the chorus echoes him in Latin, implying a D♭ tonality (set up by a tuba pedal at the very beginning of the opera) and repeating the figure for each word, chanting melismatically. An A♭ in the bass throughout creates a V-I relationship. The obbligato bass trumpet and trombone outline the same semitonal contours as Christ’s vocal line. The pitches of the cantus firmus -- C, D♭, E♭, E, F – are also chromatically adjacent.

By the bar after this excerpt, the obbligato has expanded to a C-G♭ tritone range, which encompasses the cantus firmus pitches. Just as the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine retain their perceptual properties, these pitches remain static.

As this diagram demonstrates, they only inhabit half of the octave. In tension with that D♭-A♭ fifth in the chorus and bass shown alongside it, these elements are very claustrophobic; this is tense music. So what else is going on? What renders this bread more than just bread?

True to their gospel counterparts, the disciples struggle to comprehend their ambiguous harmonic surroundings; all they can sing is the same G-D♭ tritone bass cadence to the words ‘you said’. They do this several times. Once again expressing tritone-fifth ambiguity, their outer D♭-A♭ compass mimics the chorus’s Latin ‘this is my body’. However, the D♭ link reconciles that tension with the open fifth by reinforcing it as the central pitch. Nevertheless, that cantus firmus C-G♭ tritone remains concealed within their chord.

In summary:

• There is a cantus firmus that stems from the word ‘love’, gets shared around, and partakes of Christ’s semitonal pitch collenction along with a brass obbligato.
• There is a repeated choral melisma that echoes Christ’s words, but clings to a bassline that stretches it to a D♭ tonality.
• And the Disciples repeatedly sing ‘you said’ at Jesus in a way that ambiguously incorporates all of these elements.

By constantly singing, ‘you said’, the disciples both reaffirm Jesus’s words and insist that they don’t understand what’s happening. The static nature of the cantus firmus tritone suggests that what they still receive what is perceived as bread. But the D♭, the same pitch that opens the opera like a 'heartbeat', suggests a faithful bottom line to which they always turn.

The ambiguity in the midst of these competing poles and clusters is an important part of the experience of this scene—The Last Supper is, in many ways, a confusing opera—but here that mystery is ultimately productive. You don’t expect a big Romantic climax, but instead are arrested by odd, humble, grains of things that feel meaningful. Consider for example this E, concealed at the symmetrical centre of the pitches in my analysis. E is often an important pitch in Birtwistle's music, and is usually reserved in this opera for the word ‘love’. Christ ultimately reaches beyond it to an F, transgressing love’s boundaries in a simple gesture of excess as he completes the consecration: ‘do this in remembrance of me’.

Conclusion

In identifying the Eucharist’s interstitial concerns for materiality and meaning with opera studies, I suggest that a renewed interest in transcendence modelled after theology might lift musicology beyond such impasses as the drastic and the gnostic. The imperative to seek out more, to experience more, and to know more thrives on the faith that there will always be more, as long as knowledge and sensuality are allowed to sustain one another. Here is a deep kinship between those who study opera and those who study the Eucharist, and in this sense, the study is its own small transcendence. For if the will to know more is desire and it is desire that sets the Trinity in motion, our relationships with these complex, unknowable things, to which we give so much of ourselves, send new manifestations of the practice of love spinning into being.