Serratia can split several times an hour, when conditions are right. Double a few times, and soon you’re talking real numbers.
The overture begins with almost nothing: one oboe, one English horn, and one bassoon. They play in unison at first, a theme filled with anticipation borrowed from a mass by Ockeghem. The unison divides; one melody becomes two, then two become four, rising and stretching. Dawn in the free city of Münster, Northern Rhineland, January 1534.
The first tradesmen trickle through the Prinzipalmarkt. Vendors set up their stalls, and customers congregate. Two violas join the reed trio. An ermine-trimmed noble draws a retinue across the market square to a swell in the trombones and cellos. Over the course of several dozen patient measures, dawn turns into full-on morning.
Streets radiate from the prosperous plaza, lined by step-gabled houses and pinnacled façades. To the east, the commanding Gothic Rathaus. To the north, the cathedral spire. Brisk commerce fills the marketplace. The orchestra begins a vast prolation canon — copies of a single germ, sped up or slowed down, pitched at various intervals. The tangle of lines gives way to pulsing chords. Then the shock of a baritone cuts through the sound:
Fire, air, the rain, the sun — the Lord made all things common, for our shared joy.
The fireplug preacher Rothmann, in his dark robes, mounts the stone bank rimming the plaza’s fountain.
Whoever says “This is mine, that is yours”—that man steals from you!
Some of the chorus stop their buying and selling long enough to shush him. They sing of recent calamities throughout the empire that must not reawaken. Rothmann’s baritone shines out above them.
God gave us the world, whole. We’ve wrecked it, and fight over the crumbs. No wonder you’re miserable — all of you!
A trio of merchants caution the preacher, above the massed strings. They say the years of chaos must stop. The city needs peace and prosperity; all else is rabble-rousing noise. The words form islands of triadic consonance in the orchestra’s atonal surge.
Others come to Rothmann’s defense. The man hurts no one. Let him preach what heaven tells him. The merchant trio become a sextet, a plea for harmony, productivity, wealth. But the preacher laughs them off in a swelling solo:
Peaceful? Productive? The Prince-Bishop wants you productive! Producing for the Prince. Fools! For peace, you’ve traded away your souls.
The ill, the oppressed, the unemployed, and the merely spiritual begin to flock to Rothmann’s side. Old clashes break out across the stage. The cast splits into a freewheeling double chorus, its two factions feeding the rising excitement. Chords stack up and melodies clash above a turning ground bass. Each time the cycling figure returns, its texture thickens. Rothmann shouts above the fray — curt and thrilling melodic anagrams of the original, aching theme.
God put joy into your body — real joy! Live in the light. Live in full beauty. Live in the common air.
A sudden modulation into a remote harmonic region, and four men on horseback appear from the wings. At their head is the tailor’s apprentice, John of Leiden, a charismatic man with a flowing beard. To a brass fanfare, in a heroic tenor, he leads his posse in a motet. They come from the Netherlands at the bidding of Jan Matthias, the baker turned prophet, who has identified Münster as the place where God will begin the world’s end. Rothmann, they sing, is clearing the way for the long-delayed heavenly kingdom.
Rothmann embraces them, and together, in long, brazen lines of modal melody, they sing in ecstatic counterpoint:
Mine and Thine, Thine and Mine?
Live in light! Live in beauty!
There is no life without dying into the One.
Where else to place your hope, your joy, your love?
One false world is ending,
The true one will soon arrive.
No fulfillment but in hunger.
No safety but through danger.
Ready yourself: the day is here.
In the building passacaglia, Rothmann works his way downstage to join John of Leiden. He asks the prophet to baptize him again, to give him the danger of rebirth. He and John sing a buoyant duet, each line based on a different tetrachord. John leads Rothmann to center stage and into the marketplace fountain. The singing stops and the orchestra falls silent.
A solo cello starts up Luther’s baptismal chorale, Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam. The two men enter the fountain up to their waists. A second cello harmonizes the first in simple fifths and thirds. The Dutchman lowers Rothmann until the preacher goes under. Strings now play all four lines of the chorale, its harmonies nudged by accidentals into a mad experiment. Rothmann stays underwater way too long. He lunges back up, gasping and dripping. The orchestra launches a triumphant treatment of the chorale in the driving harmonies from the early 1990s, the sounds of the falling Wall.
The spectacle awes the market crowd. An old woman asks for her own full immersion. She sings the most haunting aria of the first act: So near the grave, I find this birth. Together, John of Leiden and Rothmann baptize her. Two weeping girls in their teens demand to be next, while tradesmen stop to witness.
A trill in the flutes alerts the stage. The woodwinds rush forward through a flurry in the horns. A march unfolds, so forceful that even the skeptics are caught up in it. More bodies plunge into the fountain. The reborn emerge from the water and wander offstage in a state of grace. Once in the wings, they run back behind the flats, slip into dry clothes, and reenter stage right, as newcomers to the commotion. So the chorus multiplies until belief is everywhere.
The march carries the crowd along on a public flood. A clear key — E major — emerges, rich with the vengeance of shared faith. Believers and unbelievers, foreigners and natives, prophets and merchants, the elect and the damned, swirl together in a frenzied tutti.
By now even the untrained ear can hear how all the scene’s material — the opening theme, Rothmann’s aria, John of Leiden’s motif, and Luther’s chorale — fit together into this gathering chorus. As the ever-renewing crowd plunges into the pool, Rothmann and the Dutch messengers, lifted up by the circling strings, sing a simple, unison, Gothic lullaby drawn from the words of Saint Pauclass="underline"
Darkness is passing,
The night is over,
A new dawn makes its way.
My piece might be all around you, and you’ll never know. Cellular songs everywhere, by the hundreds of millions.
The terror of an empty auditorium, two weeks before opening. Two thousand five hundred empty seats. Four and a half rings of balcony, stacked up like a beehive. Scattered bodies dot the sea of red. Els cowers near the front of the house while, onstage, dozens of builders put the last touches on the City of God.
He has needed forty months to deliver 170 minutes of music. During those years, the war that has lasted since his childhood comes to an end. The evil empire crumbles into a dozen-plus countries. All the world’s data weaves together into a web. In the desert on the far side of the planet, Els’s country goes to war, made godlike by technology. The apocalypse of smart bombs and computer screens would all have made for dazzling opera if Els hadn’t already been busy with one — an opera as strange to the present as the present has become to him.