All Together Now: Holy Week In East and West

All Christians--East and West--are celebrating Holy Week and Easter at the same time this year! There are some differences, of course, as this Antiochian Orthodox website explains, including exactly when Lent ends:

Great Lent and Holy Week are two separate fasts, and two separate celebrations. Great Lent ends on Friday of the fifth week (the day before Lazarus Saturday). Holy Week begins immediately thereafter. Let's explore the meaning of each of the solemn days of Passion Week.

Lazarus Saturday: Lazarus Saturday is the day which begins Holy Week. It commemorates the raising of our Lord's friend Lazarus, who had been in the tomb four days. This act confirmed the universal resurrection from the dead that all of us will experience at our Lord's Second Coming. This miracle led many to faith, but it also led to the chief priest's and Pharisees' decision to kill Jesus (John 11:47-57).

Palm Sunday (The Entrance of our Lord into Jerusalem): Our Lord enters Jerusalem and is proclaimed king - but in an earthly sense, as many people of His time were seeking a political Messiah. Our Lord is King, of course, but of a different type - the eternal King prophesied by Zechariah the Prophet. We use palms on this day to show that we too accept Jesus as the true King and Messiah of the Jews, Who we are willing to follow - even to the cross.

Holy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: The first thing that must be said about these services, and most of the other services of Holy Week, is that they are "sung" in anticipation. Each service is rotated ahead twelve hours. The evening service, therefore, is actually the service of the next morning, while the morning services of Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday are actually the services of the coming evening. . . .

Please read the rest there. Here is the schedule for services at St. George's Orthodox Christian Cathedral this week.

In honor of the occasion, I'm listening to Maximilian Steinberg's Passion Week!

Not English, But Russian, Polyphony

As the liner notes to this new recording of Maximilian Steinberg's Passion Week informed me, the composer was the pupil and son-in-law of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, who had a great deal of influence on Russian Orthodox sacred choral music in his time:

The achievements of the ‘new Russian choral school’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been widely recognised in the musical world. In the course of this veritable renaissance of new compositions and arrangements for unaccompanied choral voices, a pleiad of composers, spearheaded by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and followed by Alexander Kastalsky, Pavel Chesnokov, Alexander Gretchaninov, Viktor Kalinnikov, Alexander Nikolsky, and Sergey Rachmaninov, to name just a few, explored the sonorous and expressive capabilities of the choral instrument to an unprecedented degree. They sought out new ways of evoking the splendour of the ‘Kingdom of God on earth,’ joining the spiritual depth of ancient Christian liturgical texts and chants with transcendently  beautiful choral polyphony.

Generally speaking, this school is associated with the city of Moscow, and in particular with the Moscow Synodal School of Church Singing and Moscow Synodal Choir. Indeed, many of the composers—Kastalsky, Kalinnikov, Nikolsky, and Chesnokov—were affiliated with the Synodal School, and important premieres such as Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil and Gretchaninov’s Passion Week, took place in Moscow. Less known is the role played in this movement by composers whose primary sphere of activity was in St Petersburg, regarded as a more Western-looking bastion of modernity and the avant-garde.

Nonetheless, St Petersburg was not altogether unaffected by the general movement in the liturgical arts towards the recovery of a more traditional, nationally Russian and Eastern Orthodox style. In the realm of church architecture, this was reflected by the construction of such edifices as the Dormition Cathedral, the Church of the Saviour on the Blood, and the Naval Cathedral of St Nicholas in Kronstadt, all completed in the early twentieth century. In the realm of Russian Orthodox sacred choral music, the most important figure was Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), and a number of composers who were in one way or another connected with him: Anatol Liadov (1855–1914), Sergey Liapunov (1859–1924), Nikolay Tcherepnin (1873–1945), and Alexander Chesnokov (1880–1941), whose contributions to sacred choral music have yet to be thoroughly explored. Even less known is the remarkable work featured on the present recording—Passion Week, composed by Rimsky-Korsakov’s favourite student and son-in-law, Maximilian Steinberg (1883–1946).

Rimsky-Korsakov’s involvement with the choral church music of the Russian Orthodox Church dates from his tenure at the Imperial Court Chapel from 1883 to 1894, as assistant to Mily Balakirev. While there, he was involved with producing polyphonic arrangements of traditional unison chants, and also wrote a number of compositions in a deliberately simple yet original style, in accordance with the emerging national character of Russian church music. Although after leaving the Chapel, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote no more choral music for the church, he evidently transmitted his exploration of early chants, as well as some degree of familiarity with the sources of ecclesiastical melodies, to his students. Some fifteen years after his death, this knowledge manifested itself most wondrously in Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week.

This sacred polyphony has not been without controversy, however, as this website demonstrates:

the use of Western-style polyphony in church has been opposed in recent centuries by several saints (including St. Seraphim of Sarov; [14]St. Philaret Drozdov, Metropolitan of Moscow; [15] St. Ignatius Brianchaninov; [16] St. Barsanuphius, Elder of Optina; [17] and the New Martyr St. Andronik Archbishop of Perm) as well as by the Holy Synod of Constantinople, [18] the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece, [19] and by many venerable hierarchs (such as Patriarch Germogen of Russia [20] in the seventeenth century, Metropolitan Evgeny of Kiev [21] in the eighteenth century, and Archbishop Averky of Syracuse and Holy Trinity Monastery [Jordanville] in the twentieth century). Nevertheless, other saints (primarily some of the New Martyrs of twentieth-century Russia) and other hierarchs used and loved Western-style polyphonic ecclesiastical music because they appreciated its beauty. Their acceptance is perfectly understandable, since musical preferences are not dogmatic issues but are dependent upon cultural circumstances and personal taste. Besides, if, according to St. John of the Ladder, lovers of God are moved to spiritual joy, to divine love, and to tears even by worldly songs, [22] incomparably more so will they be inspired by hymns, even if their melodies are of a worldly character or bear some of the aforementioned shortcomings.

A Suppressed Holy Week From the Former Soviet Union

The BBC Music Magazine has chosen The Clarion Choir's recording of Maximilian Steinburg's Passion Week from Naxos as its Choral Recording of the Month for December 2016 and provides an excerpt here. Providing some background, conductor Steven Fox writes:

My dear colleague Barbara Mouk had been telling me about Passion Week since I first met her in 2004. Her father, the Russian- American conductor Igor Buketoff, had given her the score shortly before he passed away. The composer of the piece, Maximilian Steinberg, was the prized student of Rimsky-Korsakov, and eventually became not only his son-in-law, but also his successor on the composition faculty of the St Petersburg Conservatory.

Steinberg composed Passion Week in secret over a three year period, 1920-23, when the Bolsheviks had just banned sacred music, so it was never performed. Barbara explained to me that she believed Shostakovich, who was Steinberg’s student, had brought the piece over to the US on one of his trips here, hoping there might be a choir here that could finally perform the piece.

But Maestro Buketoff had trouble finding an American choir that was adept at singing in Church Slavonic. So he eventually handed the mission off to Barbara, and Barbara took it to me. But I must admit that I also was (shamefully!) slow to take on the project. During my first years working with Clarion, we were almost exclusively focused on performing Baroque and Classical music. But in more recent years, we expanded into later periods, particularly with The Clarion Choir. As our repertoire started to take this new direction, Barbara re-approached me about Passion Week and said - 'you have no reason not to give this piece a serious look now!' And I am so thankful to her that she did. The piece is extraordinary, and, in my mind, deserving of a special place in the Russian choral repertoire.

The style of the work combines the rich vocal scoring and luscious Romantic palette one associates with Rachmaninov's choral works, but it also adds more modern elements of style: there are times when the rich vocal texture reverts hauntingly to a single voice and then into stark silence. The silences between phrases are a critical part of the piece, as we learned in performing and recording it. They add a sense of contemplativeness that I believe comes directly out of the Holy Week plainchants upon which the work is based.

There is another recording of this work available too:

Cappella Romana has even issued a deluxe vinyl recording!

Blessed John Henry Newman on Passion Sunday

On the calendar of the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Liturgy of the Roman Rite, today is Passion Sunday. Blessed John Henry Newman compiled these notes for one of his sermons on this fifth Sunday in the season of Lent, meditating on Christ's priesthood. The readings for today's Mass are from the Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 9, verses 11-15 and from the Gospel of St. John, chapter 8,  verses 46-59. Newman's notes:

1. INTROD.—Go through the gospel of the day, showing the strangeness of our Lord's doctrine, and the surprise and contempt of the Jews, in detail—modes of expression, ideas, objects, different.

2. So it was: it was a different system. If the world was true, He was not; if He, the world not.

3. They felt it obscurely and in detail, though He did not speak openly. How would they have felt if our Lord had said openly, 'I am the priest of the world'? What a great expression! But this is the truth, as forced on us by today's epistle. What the gospel says obscurely the epistle speaks out.

4. What is a priest? See how much it implies: first the need of reconciliation—it has at once to do with sin; it presupposes sin. When then our Lord is known to come as a priest, see how the whole face of the world is changed. Describe the world, how it goes on, buying and selling, etc.; then the light thrown on it that it is responsible to God, and has ill acquitted itself of that responsibility.

5. Again, it implies one the highest in rank. The head of the family was a priest—primogeniture. Hence Christ the Son of God.

6. Christ then, the Son of God, offers for the whole world, and that offering is Himself. He who is high as eternity, whose arms stretch through infinity, is lifted up on the cross for the sins of the world.

7. And He is a priest for ever. 'Thou art a priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedec.' The offering of the Mass. Say not it is an historical religion, done and over; it lasts.

8. And as, for ever, so all things with blood. Why? Grace of Christ, and Adam's grace before the fall. Men 'washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb'; 'the blood of Christ cleanseth,' 1 John i. 7

9. Now turn back and see how different from what we see—need of faith, so says our Lord in the gospel of the day.

10. And this awful addition, 'He that heareth the word of God is of God,' etc., John viii. 47

11. This a reason for these yearly commemorations, to bring on us the thought of the unseen world.

 

Less obscure, perhaps, is Newman's Litany of the Passion, which is included in the Meditations and Devotions for private use:

 

Jesus, the Eternal Wisdom, Have mercy on us.
The Word made flesh, Have mercy on us.
Hated by the world, Have mercy on us.
Sold for thirty pieces of silver, Have mercy on us.
Sweating blood in Thy agony, Have mercy on us.
Betrayed by Judas, Have mercy on us.
Forsaken by Thy disciples, Have mercy on us.
Struck upon the cheek, Have mercy on us.
Accused by false witnesses, Have mercy on us.
Spit upon in the face, Have mercy on us.
Denied by Peter, Have mercy on us.
Mocked by Herod, Have mercy on us.
Scourged by Pilate, Have mercy on us.
Rejected for Barabbas, Have mercy on us.
Loaded with the cross, Have mercy on us.
Crowned with thorns, Have mercy on us.
Stripped of Thy garments, Have mercy on us.
Nailed to the tree, Have mercy on us.
Reviled by the Jews, Have mercy on us.
Scoffed at by the malefactor, Have mercy on us.
Wounded in the side, Have mercy on us.
Shedding Thy last drop of blood, Have mercy on us.
Forsaken by Thy Father, Have mercy on us.
Dying for our sins, Have mercy on us.

The statues in Catholic churches are veiled from this Sunday until Easter. As fisheaters.com notes, we do this because: "This veiling of the statues and icons stems from the Gospel reading of Passion Sunday (John 8:46-59), at the end of which the Jews take up stones to cast at Jesus, Who hides Himself away. The veiling also symbolizes the fact that Christ's Divinity was hidden at the time of His Passion and death, the very essence of Passiontide."