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Cover of the recording
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True, in the Fifties he took lessons from Eugene Bigot and Olivier Messiaen, to whom a scholarship gave him access, but as a primarily political animal he sought one of his objectives in the renewal of Greek popular music ("dimotiki musiki'').
The "Passion of the Sadducees" (1982), commissioned by the ninth Berlin Music Biennale, is a confession of political convictions in the grand style, in which the desire of nations for freedom and their fight against enslavement and oppression are articulated with a wealth of historical references linking past and present.
His own life story had impressed on him the depressing prospect of a Greek left condemned to permanent exile in the Diaspora, leading him to use free verse written by his like-mind friend Michalis Katsaros – who had put up Mikis Theodorakis at his house for two years in 1950 - in his work. Its title relates to a Jewish grouping with religious and political objectives, which emerged about 200 BC.
Basically conservative in approach, the Sadducees proclaimed the true teaching, found themselves in opposition to the more populist Philistines and insisted, in contrast to the latter, on the sole authority of the Scriptural word. They denied the resurrection of the dead and the existence of angels, but increasingly showed themselves to be an opportunistic group, maneuvering for position and making deals with the Romans.
Katsaros wrote about the Sadducees who made their home in Jerusalem to point up the parallels between them and the mistakes of the Greek left. The grimaces, bitter comments, flashes of sarcasm and contemptuous distortions summoned up by this comparison leave their mark on the poetical images of the text, which are to be seen as the cry of a despairing soul.
The work closes with the visionary fear of the left's final extinction: the Sadducees themselves failed to survive 70 AD, the year in which the second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed.
With its archaic tonal language, modal harmony and liturgical performance practice, the seven part cantata for tenor, baritone, bass, speaker, choir and orchestra, fulfils Theodorakis' call for music that will be like a musical tragedy of our times and arouse historical associations. The shift between 5/8, 5/16, 9/16 and 7/16 time gives the first part ("Form of my ego") its rhythmic remorselessness. The close chromatics, falling sevenths and enmeshed instrumental parts of “Blind Time” illustrate the uncertainty sown by the expected change from one historical period to the next. The following movements are largely determined by the principle of vocal and instrumental declamation, and then a mighty glissando in octaves concludes the work, it seems like a warning sign: in these times, last chord must not be seen as the last word.
© Uwe Kraemer in Booklet of the recording at BERLIN CLASSICS 0092082BC - Translation: Janet and Michael Berridge
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