Sequentia’s Benjamin Bagby takes a modern approach to Gregorius—the Holy Sinner
Early Music Vancouver’s presentation of the work features accompaniment on the Romanesque harp
Benjamin Bagby.
Early Music Vancouver presents Gregorius – The Holy Sinner with Sequentia at the Vancouver Playhouse on January 17 at 7:30 pm
INCEST AND BONDAGE, remorse and rebirth: the themes of Gregorius—the Holy Sinner could easily have been plucked from the shelves of an airport bookstore, or written into the plot of the latest Succession-style streaming drama. That the source for the latest production from the esteemed early music ensemble Sequentia is an obscure German narrative dating to approximately 1200 AD seems almost irrelevant, given that human foibles have changed little over the intervening 800 years. As interpreted by the ensemble’s music director Benjamin Bagby and his younger colleagues Jasmina Črnčič and Lukas Papenfusscline, a.k.a. leiken, Hartmann von Aue’s medieval parable seems anything but antique, and in fact its core message seems especially appropriate for the particular moment in history that we are living through.
“The only unpardonable sin is despair,” says the title character, and he should know. Born out of the unholy coupling of an aristocratic brother and sister, abandoned to the sea as a baby, raised by monks and fishermen, and then plunged back into incest with his own mother, the future—and entirely fictional—Pope serves as an object lesson in psychic strength, self-forgiveness, and belief, qualities as necessary in our secular society as they were in the Middle Ages.
Gregorius the Sinner also exemplifies the aims of Sequentia’s Lost Songs project, an ongoing investigation of formative and transformative song cycles drawn from mostly Northern European sources. As those lucky enough to have heard Bagby perform Beowulf here in Vancouver in 2020 well know, the 74-year-old musician and scholar is also a masterful storyteller, capable of combining deceptively simple (and often quite hypnotic) music with just enough theatrical flair to keep an audience on the edge of its seats.
“I’ve always been very interested in the switch-over moment from the oral culture to a written culture,” Bagby explains in a Zoom conversation from his home in Paris. “That’s always intrigued me: the invention of notation and the slow seeping in of notational domination to the way we write down music and the way we remember things. And I think that this huge tradition of what we would call long-form songs was never written down in any musical way because nobody had the need for it. Works like Gregorius or many other pieces of the same period and the same type—and that includes Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde and all these wonderful stories that we all know and love—had their origins in oral storytelling tradition. And so this is what the relationship is with Lost Songs. We think of these stories as being literature, something you read. Which at some point it was, but in its beginning it was in the hands of professional storytellers and very often linked with singing, and with certain instruments that were used as an accompaniment or as a partner in the performance, and the most important of these instruments was of course the harp.”
In Early Music Vancouver’s presentation of Gregorius—the Holy Sinner at the Vancouver Playhouse on January 17, Bagby will handle most of the narration, with Črnčič taking on the female roles and leiken primarily voicing the title character. Both Bagby and Črnčič will provide accompaniment on the Romanesque harp, an instrument revived in the past century primarily from historical images.
Making a satisfactorily theatrical experience out of von Aue’s original text has been a challenge. For one thing, the full story is some 4,000 verses long: perfect for long winter nights around a blazing fire, but a bit beyond the capacity of the modern-day attention span. Bagby reports that Sequentia’s Gregorius has been condensed to a manageable 90 minutes, and his comprehensive program notes will cover most of the missing details. There’s also the minor point that there is no extant sheet music for the original Gregorius—and there’s still no fixed score.
“It’s always becoming something new over time,” Bagby says, praising the interpretive and improvisational abilities of his colleagues. “There’s no score that we can hand out; we couldn’t hire an outside singer and say ‘Here’s your score,’ and the conductor would give us a downbeat and off we’d go. You can’t work like that; it’s got to grow at an organic speed.”
Bagby adds that he’s applied a very modern and rather modular compositional approach to the music for Gregorius—the Holy Sinner. He’s analyzed those compositions of the period that were preserved in manuscript form; broken them down into linked collections of musical modes, each with a specific emotional intent; and constructed a new score accordingly.
“It’s basically recycling known pieces from that time, but stripping them down to their essence and rebuilding them,” he notes. “What are the Lego blocks used to put this together? And can we kind of take them apart and put them in little piles and say ‘Okay, these are all the blocks with a certain kind of movement, or in a certain kind of register’? I took that as a point of departure for constructing new melodies which have all the qualities of the old melodies.”
But this is all rather technical. More important is that in Sequentia’s telling the 13th-century saga of Gregorius—the Holy Sinner will be as alive as it was in Hartmann von Aue’s day.
“There are themes here that are just timeless,” Bagby says. “The idea of what to do with an unwanted baby, for instance, is something that we’re still dealing with today. We don’t have a solution for it. In the Middle Ages one of the solutions was to abandon the child in nature and let God decide what would happen to it… the idea that it’s out of our hands. We no longer have that option, because that would be considered murder, which it is.
“And the storytelling element is essential,” he continues. “We’re trying to re-create something here which took the place of everything that we do to amuse and inform ourselves today. All the various ways we are addicted to our screens can be replaced by one old guy sitting down and saying ‘Once upon a time there was a duke who had two children, and they were beautiful, and they were brother and sister.’ And you’re already hooked.”
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