discover
Rembrandt’s engraving The Three Crosses (1653) inspired Frank Martin to conceive his oratorio Golgotha. As he explained while still working on the score:
“After seeing these etchings, I was positively haunted by the idea of creating an image of the Passion with my own means… I would have liked to concentrate this whole terrible and magnificent drama into a very short work, just as Rembrandt had done on his modest little rectangle of paper. But… I had no choice but to move toward the idea of an oratorio, which, through its scale, could create the framework and atmosphere necessary to express a subject of this kind.”
Inevitably, Martin’s second oratorio was influenced by J.S. Bach, whose Passions Martin — the tenth child of a Huguenot pastor — had known since childhood and whom he readily described as setting the “precedents” for the genre.
Ten musical tableaux, grouped into two roughly equal parts, tell the story of Christ’s Passion, from the entry into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. Martin draws from all four Gospels, interspersed with excerpts from the Meditations and Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, along with individual verses from the Psalms and the liturgy for Holy Saturday. The final section of the work became an epilogue, in which the events of Easter are foretold and mourning gives way to hope. Here, Martin seems to have captured that “strange white light” of transfiguration that he so admired in Rembrandt’s etching: the paradox of a luminous darkness.
On June 8, 1948, the score was completed in Amsterdam, and it premiered on April 29, 1949, in Geneva. Martin himself admitted that he had not intended his oratorio — composed without a commission — for public performance. For this artist, deeply shaken by the horrors of war, turning to the Passion genre and its core message may have been an attempt to restore his own faith in the future and, in doing so, mark a milestone in a time of devastation, when Europe stood at zero hour.
Daniel Reuss founded Cappella Amsterdam in 1990, which he transformed into a professional ensemble. He first conducted the RIAS Kammerchor in 2000, and during his four years as artistic director of the choir (2003–2006), they recorded five albums for harmonia mundi. In February 2007, he made his debut at English National Opera in Handel’s Agrippina. In September 2008, he became artistic director and chief conductor of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.
about
Composer: Frank Martin
Conductor: Daniel Reuss
Performers: Cappella Amsterdam; Estonian National Symphony Orchestra; Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Soloists: Marianna Beate Kielland; Adrian Thompson; Konstantin Wolff
Label: Harmonia Mundi
Duration: approx. 85 minutes
