Here’s a must-listen – well, perhaps for some of you. Today’s Early Music Show on BBC3 featured a program recorded in August on location during the Elche Mystery Play in Spain.
Host Catherine Bott and expert David Ward give background, context, descriptive narration of the goings on with, of course, loads of marvelous music – evocative and organic.
The play is performed in the Basilica of Santa María every 14th and 15th August with full dress-rehearsal performances taking place earlier on the 11th,12th and 13th. It narrates the Dormition, Assumption and Coronation in Heaven of the Virgin Mary. The play has survived due to the determination of the citizens of Elche past and present. After the performing of plays in churches was banned by the Council of Trent, Elche obtained a Bull from Pope Urban VIII to keep the play alive.
Such has been the determination of the citizens of Elche that the Play is now the last surviving example of this type of drama. The Mystery Play’s music, including monody and polyphony, uses Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque melodies. It is performed by a non-professional adult choir and a children’s choir whose innocent voices represent the Virgin and the angels.
However, the really distinguishing factor of the Elche Mystery Play is its complex medievally-inspired production, dividing the scenic space into horizontal, worldly space and vertical, aerial space and using aerial equipment that converts the whole into a spectacular experience.
The drama unfolds on both horizontal and vertical axes, with scenes played on the andador, a ramp running the length of the central aisle from the west door to the high altar; on the cadafal (the main square stage) at the transepts’ crossing; and, most spectacularly, on the airy space below the basilica’s dome.
Some have seen the play as a precursor of opera, for the text is entirely sung, its music a mix of 13th century chant (with strange Moorish tweaks) and intense polyphony and choruses from the renaissance and way beyond.
Early in part one (la vespra), Mary kneels on her tomb and in an unbroken, open-throated voice that would never win her a place at the nine lessons and carols sings a melismatic lament for her crucified son. The impact of a boy of perhaps 11 or 12 impersonating, with no girly obviousness, the grieving mother of God is extraordinary, especially when she tells John, the beloved apostle, of her imminent death and he describes his grief with almost operatic intensity. A little later, James meets two other apostles and they sing, in the play’s first polyphony, of the mysterious way in which Christ’s followers have been reunited. It is a heart-stopping moment.
(The program is available for online listening for about a week after the original broadcast, which was today.)
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