Contemplation to Transcendence in the Polytextual Music of Kati Agócs
by Katherine Balch
Sonograma magazine, 23 April 2019
Kati Agócs’s The Debrecen Passion (2015), for twelve female voices and orchestra, draws from diverse texts to create an oratorio-like musical drama of sacred and secular devotion. Throughout the approximately 23-minute work, recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Lorelei ensemble in 2016,[1] three poems by the Hungarian humanist-Christian poet Szilárd Borbély are intertwined with four texts from ancient Christian and Jewish traditions: the Medieval Latin Sequence Sabat Mater Speciosa, the Medieval Hungarian lyric poem Lamentations of Mary,[2] the Kabbalistic Prayer Ana B’choach,[3] and the Medieval Georgian hymn Thou Art a Vineyard.[4] This article focuses on Agócs’s approach to text setting when juxtaposing Borbély’s mostly secular texts with sacred texts, with emphasis on the motivic development and impact of the Borbély settings on other musical materials throughout the piece. Ultimately, I argue that traversing these temporally and linguistically varied texts is an overall trajectory of inward, personal reflection to outward, communal expression.
Thematic and Structural Precedents: the Christian Passion and Szilárd Borbély
The traditional Christian passion refers to the suffering endured by Jesus Christ in the final period of his life, as chronicled by the Gospels of Luke, Mark, John, and Matthew.[5] In the musical telling of the passion story, different singers were added as early as the 13th century to depict various characters within the narrative of Christ’s final trials, including Mary, the “sorrowful mother,” depicted in the Stabat Mater hymn. The 17th century saw the rise of oratorio passions in Protestant traditions, in which instruments accompanied solo and ensemble settings, expressive recitative replaced plainsong, and interpolated texts might include other passages from Scripture, Latin motets, chorale arias, and secular texts. J.S. Bach’s St. John’s Passion and St. Matthew’s Passion exemplify this style, which most closely resembles Agócs’s treatment of the passion as a musical topic.[6]
Agócs’s Passion remaps the Christ-centered themes of fear, suffering, innocence, eternity, and the notion of overwhelming, often painful or contradictory devotion from the psyche of the son and his disciples to the psyche of the mother, thus departing from this musical lineage while simultaneously retaining and amplifying facets of it. Elements of the Christian passion story are present throughout Agócs’s own Passion, yet with focus shifted from the traditional story tellers of the Gospel to the mother as narrator / protagonist, making the Stabat Mater hymn a thematic centerpiece. As an alternative to the traditional Stabat Mater Dolorosa, Agócs sets the medieval parody Stabat Mater Speciosa. In this parody, Mary is depicted at the birth of Jesus, rather than his death, intermingling the intensity of Mary’s love for her newborn with a foreshadowing of his crucifixion. The crucifixion, the thematic core of the Christian passion, is explicitly referenced twice in the sacred texts of Agócs’s Passion: first in the Stabat Mater Speciosa and later in the Lamentations, but notably both references are focused on Mary’s perspective. Further, Agócs abstracts away from the traditionally linear, intentionally pedagogical narrative of Christ’s last trials. Rather than her Passion being about Christ in particular, Christ arguably becomes a character that represents the child divine to any mother.
Agócs deploys a historical and linguistic variety that renders it anomalous from even the textual source variety in motets of Guillaume de Machaut and the passions of J.S. Bach. Texts by the contemporary Hungarian poet Szilárd Borbély (1963-2014) are alternated with texts from the 13th, 12th, and first centuries. The languages set are Hungarian, Latin, biblical Hebrew, and medieval Georgian. The Passion is not Agócs’s first employment of polytextualism. Rather, an interest in both ancient and modern languages and their intermingling is a consistent theme in her output.
Read the full article in Sonograma
Listen to The Debrecen Passion