Title: Musical Illuminations of Genesis Narratives
Abstract: Musical Illuminations of Genesis Narratives is Helen Leneman’s fourth monograph focusing on the musical reception of biblical narratives. She contributes both textual and musical acumen to a wide range of musical settings. The sheer number of works included leads to an emphasis on description rather than analysis, and the book lacks a larger analytic frame for the wealth of textual and musical data that Leneman compiles. Nevertheless, her work remains valuable as an overview of the ways in which music contributes to the imagining of biblical characters and as an introduction to both familiar and obscure musical settings of Genesis narratives.The musical works that Leneman treats range from Handel’s Joseph (1744) to Sally Beamish’s recent opera Hagar in the Wilderness (2013). Her criteria of selection vary in each chapter, from the relative “creativity,” “originality,” or musical “power” of selected pieces to their “contrast” with one another. This often leads to quite-disparate selections. The book progresses through five biblical narratives: Eve in the garden, Noah and the flood, the Abraham-Sarah narratives, Rebecca at the well, and Joseph and his brothers. Leneman’s interest is primarily in how the music contributes to characterization. One of her most significant observations is the way in which music is used to fill in the emotional gaps in the narrative, describing, as one example, Sarah’s response to finding Abraham and Isaac gone on the morning of Isaac’s near sacrifice (Gen 22; Pizzetti, La Rappresentazione di Abramo e Isaac).Each chapter opens with a brief commentary on the biblical narrative in question, focusing on “gaps” in the story, unexplained motives or undeveloped characters, which are then creatively reimagined by composers and librettists. The second part of each chapter deals directly with the “musical illuminations” of these narratives. The discussion of each work begins with a brief biography of the composer and a selective history of the work’s composition, performance and reception, before describing how each selected work deals with the biblical text and how it is musically represented by the composer.Leneman focuses her discussion of Eve (ch. 1) on the question of her positive or negative portrayal in the biblical text. Massenet’s Ève: Mystère reimagines the story of Adam and Eve as a rapturous love story in which their final plea to God is not to separate them in the course of their divine punishment. In Fauré’s song cycle La Chanson D’Ève, Adam is entirely absent. It is Eve who is tasked with naming all of the living creatures; her voice propels the cycle, with only possible allusions to Adam. There is no “fall” in this setting, only a concluding invitation to mortality.In her second chapter, Leneman selects five 19th–20th-century musical dramatizations of Noah’s flood based on her assessment of their originality and power. Two of these works, Donizetti’s Il Diluvio Universale and Halévy and Bizet’s Noé have little recognizable connection to the biblical narrative. They focus instead on an imagined love triangle that precedes the flood and the suggestive reference in Gen 6:1–2 to the coupling of the “Sons of God” with the “daughters of men.” Britten’s Noye’s Fludde and Stravinsky’s The Flood: A Musical Play follow the biblical storyline much more closely, though they introduce the negative characterization of Noah’s wife. Saint-Saëns Le Déluge presents the most theologically reflective work, intent on portraying God as omnipotent and benevolent despite the destruction of his creation. Hints of empathy with the victims of the flood emerge in a poignant deviation from the biblical narrative in which it is they rather than animals who are burned on the sacrificial altar in the aftermath of the destruction. Leneman notes that musical treatments seek primarily to explain the nature of the evil that motivated God to destroy the world through the flood and often expansively characterize Noah’s family, inventing motives and conflicts for Noah’s wife, sons, and daughters-in-law.Musical settings of the Abraham-Sarah narratives (ch. 3) fill several “gaps” in the sparsely narrated biblical story. Several works make extensive use of quotations from the NT and Psalms as sources of commentary on the narrative action. The use of the NT is particularly notable in Abraham’s expression of hope during the Aqedah that Isaac will be raised from the dead (Mangold, Abraham; Blumner, Abraham). Leneman also focuses on how music serves to expand the characterization of and interaction between Hagar and Sarah (Laderman, Sarah; Cohen, Sarah and Hagar; Schubert, Hagar’s Klage; Arriaga, Scena, Agar dans le Desert). These works also explore the reaction of Sarah to finding Abraham and Isaac have disappeared and Isaac’s heart-rending plea to Abraham to intercede before God for his life (Pizzetti, La Rappresentazione di Abramo e Isaac). These presented viewpoints fill significant gaps in the biblical story.According to Leneman, Rebecca is a more fully developed character than the other matriarchs, displaying considerable energy and assertiveness (ch. 4). As is the case with musical settings of the surrounding narratives, composers contribute humanizing touches to Rebecca and Isaac’s romance and add layers of emotions to their imagined love story (Hiller, Rebecca, Ein Biblisches Idyll). Leneman highlights the constructed piety of each character, what she calls virtually a “requirement in Victorian era French oratorio” (see Franck, Rébecca: Scène Biblique; Carissan, Rébecca: Oratorio).In her final chapter, Leneman selects two musical interpretations of the Joseph narratives (Gen 37–50) on the basis of their marked differences. Handel’s Joseph and His Brethren portrays Joseph as a pious hero, marked by religious devotion and conjugal love, typical for the protagonists of religious oratorio at the time. Created (Utobal) and expanded characters (Asenath) play extended roles, largely to reflect and express Joseph’s emotional state (Mehul, Joseph: Opéra en trois actes). Both musical settings focus on the psychology of Joseph and his brothers.One of the primary challenges in discussing musical interpretations of text is the adequate description of the music itself through the medium of text. Leneman seeks to address this issue through including links to performances of the works that she describes when they are available. Unfortunately, most of the links that she provides are no longer functional. Leneman’s strategy, however, does suggest a potential way forward for future works dealing with the musical reception of texts, though a more permanent means of accessing the music will have to be established.Leneman displays both textual and musical acumen in her treatment of each piece, and her identification of the “gaps” in the text as an entry into reception history is fruitful. She makes several illuminating observations regarding the setting of these texts and displays a remarkable attention to musical and textual detail. The strength of this study, which is a broadly ranging treatment of musical adaptations of the biblical narratives, however, also leads to its primary weakness. It reads more like a survey of musical adaptations, rather than a detailed or systematic analysis. While Leneman offers brief concluding reflections on how each piece adopts and adapts the biblical narrative, the book might have benefitted from a more comprehensive analysis of trends and themes in the musical reception of each narrative, including the influence of musical genre and contextual factors that influence the imaginative retellings of biblical tales. The primary value of the work is as a general introduction to these pieces, their librettos, and their musical character. Leneman’s introduction therefore invites further in-depth analysis of the ways in which musical conventions motivate particular interpretations of biblical text.
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 10
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