Vice and virtue

‘Can the ultimate betrayal ever be forgiven?’ screams the publicity for The Judas Passion, transforming a Biblical drama into a spears-and-sandals soap opera in a sentence. Thankfully, this really isn’t the premise of composer Sally Beamish and poet David Harsent’s new oratorio. Instead, the two authors pose a more interesting problem: is betrayal still betrayal when it’s divinely ordained, the price of salvation? A performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony this week celebrated the innocent joys of heaven; The Judas Passion invited us to count their sinful cost.

You see them before you hear them. The 30 pieces of silver catch the light as they hang suspended as part of the ‘Judas chime’, an instrument created especially for The Judas Passion. The sound is at once a warning jangle and a seductive shimmer of promise. It’s just one of several striking musical textures that punctuate Beamish’s new work. Jointly commissioned by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque, it takes the period orchestra of Bach’s passions as its toolbox, his musical structures as scaffolding, and constructs a contemporary work — a passion for our own age.

Three centuries on and the focus has shifted. The official gospel accounts are muddied by the problematic gnostic gospels; Judas, not Christ is the hero for our complicated times. Painted in more shades of grey than a Farrow & Ball catalogue, his betrayal becomes quite a different act, motivated not by the empty clatter of silver but by destiny and, even, love: ‘His hand in mine’ he repeats again and again. Mirroring and sharing lines between Judas and Jesus, Harsent guides us towards a reading that sees the men as two halves of a whole, each the equal and opposite of the other, two lives sacrificed to the same end.