Our popular arts do not easily express faith. This is not only because of what artists choose as a subject but also the manner they adopt, and it isn’t a uniquely contemporary problem. When the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin stated that a “noble style” would apply to both house and church, he protested the British tendency to reserve the Gothic for their cathedrals and chapels. He saw it as an admission that they had consigned their religion to an ethos remote from Victorian London, that their true spirit confessed itself in rail and steam rather than in ribbed vaulting and a pointed arch. In a city as relentlessly modern as Los Angeles, we are more likely to create spaces and art that suppress the imagination than ones that animate it. We can have religious sentiments in a stucco ranch house or a Chick-fil-A, but the buildings don’t inspire us any more than a fortune cookie supplies wisdom. We build merely serviceable churches, or resurrect old-time tent revivals in stadiums, where the spirit cultivated is that of a “big win.” But this hasn’t always been true. There have been eras where faith and art supported rather than undermined each other.
Among its many virtues, the artistic culture of the seventeenth century had no qualms about mixing the sacred and the popular. On Saturday, February 22, when Pomona College presented Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, it was a reminder that a culture can produce art that is at once both religious and secular. In Biber’s time, the partition between the two could be as flimsy as a soap bubble. His Sonatas are a series of violin and continuo pieces that evoke the mysteries of the rosary—episodes in the Christ story beginning with the Annunciation and ending with the coronation of Mary. He bases many of its movements on popular dances, such as the German allemande or Italian corrente. In “The Presentation in the Temple,” when Simeon blesses the infant Jesus, Biber uses a ciaccona, a Mexican dance that in its sixteenth-century form was thought “sensual and wild,” as the German musicologist Curt Sachs wrote in 1933. But by the time he composed the piece, the dance was tame enough to portray a blessing. In “The Crowning with Thorns,” he writes a gigue, a dance likely originating in Elizabethan farces. By choosing it, Biber shifted the perspective from Christ’s suffering to the soldiers’ mockery. It’s a clever use of the dance’s connotations to paint a scene. He uses the same form, now celebratory, in “The Assumption of the Virgin Mary.”
In this performance, Andrew McIntosh was the principal on violin. Malachai Bandy, Maxine Eilander, and Ian Pritchard accompanied him on the viola da gamba and violone, the baroque harp, and the organ and harpsichord, respectively. In some ways, this division is deceptive—the accompaniment parts, called the basso continuo, are partly improvised by the players through a close reading of the score. Like much of the music from this era, the Sonatas give the soloist a complete part, while the rest of the ensemble works from a bass line. This absence requires accompanists to invent new music with each performance. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a thriving culture of improvisation. But this allowance for creativity places the responsibility for the continuo’s success on the sensitivity of its players, a responsibility Pritchard, Bandy, and Eilander handled with grace and genuine inspiration.
In “The Assumption,” Eilander chose to double some of the rapid passages in the violin on the harp, which gave extra focus and contrast to the movement. Pritchard’s swimming chords in “The Nativity” lent the sonata splendor and opulence. Bandy, on the viola da gamba and violone, supported the others with a solid but subtle foundation. He mostly receded into the texture of the continuo while McIntosh performed his melodies, runs, and trills—the focal point of the music.
The Rosary Sonatas are explicitly religious, but they are also showpieces: demanding, virtuosic, and dramatic, full of turns and momentous pauses. Their sacred themes aside, they are transfixing concert pieces. They embody Ruskin’s “noble style,” showing how porous the religious and secular can be in a vital culture. Historians consider Biber’s art an instance of stylus phantasticus, the “fantastic style,” which points to the quick-changing aspects of the music, the curves and contrasting textures indispensable to the imagination. You can hear this from the very opening of the sonatas. This performance began with a low, sustained drone on the organ over which McIntosh’s violin threaded quick, expressive, and rhythmically free lines. It was Biber giving play to his fantasy while announcing something momentous is about to take place: the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary, but also a grand declaration of his style. This is an announcement, too, of Biber’s arrival.
They are extraordinary pieces, arresting and complex. But Biber also made them taxing to the violinist, perhaps to demonstrate his own musical talents to Archbishop Maximilian von Khuenberg of Salzburg, to whom he dedicated the work. Virtuosity aside, Biber requires the violinist to retune his violin strings to altered notes after every piece. This scordatura can be disastrous on a temperamental instrument like the violin. McIntosh brought four violins to share the burden of diverse tunings and frequently had to stop mid-piece to retune a drifting string. He had intonation issues and struggled with some passages, likely because of the conceptual effort of reading one note on the page and hearing a different note sound. To a non-musician, it is like reciting the alphabet in a different order with each repetition. It may impress a savvy archbishop, but without sufficiently intensive and time-consuming practice, it can disappoint.
There were moments in the music, though, where this interplay of secular and sacred felt effortless, transcending any issues of intonation or pitch. Ian Pritchard dancing behind the organ during “The Assumption” was one such moment. Another was McIntosh’s expressive long bows and virtuosic runs and ornaments in “The Carrying of the Cross.” These moments were clear examples of what a thriving and imaginative culture looks like: playful and brilliant, but without pretense or doubt.
