Pergolesi: The Seven Words – Jacobs

Somewhere between the Naples of the 1730s and the reading rooms of German musicology, a devotional cycle went missing for the better part of three centuries. Now it has turned up, wearing a name it may or may not deserve. Whether Giovanni Battista Pergolesi actually composed the Latin cantatas gathered under the title The Seven Words Uttered by the Dying Christ on the Cross is a question I’ll leave to Reinhard Fehling and the paleographers. What matters, on the evidence of this recording, is that the music is very good indeed, and that René Jacobs has recorded it as though his life depended on it.

A little context. Pergolesi died at twenty-six, in 1736, of tuberculosis, in a Franciscan friary at Pozzuoli, having already composed the Stabat Mater that would become one of the most reprinted scores of the eighteenth century — pirated, arranged, padded out with extra movements, milked by every publisher in Europe for a hundred years after his death. He was famous well past the point of being able to enjoy it, and that fame generated a small industry of misattribution: works by Latilla, by Duni, by nobodies at all, sold under the Pergolesi imprint because the name moved copies. So a newly surfaced score claiming him as author arrives under a cloud of prior fraud. Fehling’s detective work — on paper, hand, style — has apparently cleared the air. I’ll take Jacobs’s word for it. So, I suspect, will most listeners once they’ve heard the fourth cantata.

The structure is plain and slightly severe: seven cantatas, each built from a pair of arias rather than a duet, Christ answered by “the Soul” rather than joined to it. No blending of voices, no consummation. That intimacy, as Jacobs’s booklet note rightly says, would have to wait for Bach, or for heaven. The effect within each movement is almost liturgical in its formality, call and response stretched into aria-length reflection, and yet the writing avoids the monotony that a text this repetitive in shape could easily fall into. Pergolesi — or whoever this is, and I’m inclined to believe it’s him — reaches for the orchestra to vary his palette rather than the vocal line: a harp threaded through the second cantata like a shaft of pale light, a pair of horns lending weight and a kind of tragic pomp to the third and seventh, a solo cello singing under the bass voice in the sixth. The viola obbligato in the fourth — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — is the finest stroke in the whole score, dark, halting, circling beneath the voice like something that can’t quite bring itself to resolve. I played that movement three times before moving on. Not often a “discovery” earns that.

Jacobs’s conducting here surprised me. I’ve spent a fair number of column inches over the years complaining about his tendency toward the hard-edged and the demonstrative, the harpsichord continuo hammered out like Morse code, tempos pushed past the point of eloquence into mere assertion. None of that here. This is Jacobs in a different register: patient, warm, almost tender, as though he understands that he is not just conducting a piece but presenting it to the world for the first time and doesn’t want to get in its way. The B’Rock Orchestra plays with a burnished, slightly veiled tone that suits the penitential subject far better than crisp period brilliance would have. Harmonia Mundi’s engineers deserve credit too. The sound has air in it, a churchly bloom around the strings without smearing the details, so the obbligato instruments emerge from the texture rather than sitting on top of it.

Konstantin Wolff sings Christ with a bass that has both gravity and a kind of worn tenderness, not the granite authority some basses bring to sacred repertory, but something more human, a voice that sounds tired unto death, which is rather the point. Sophie Karthäuser’s soprano carries most of the “Soul” music with real purity of line, though there are moments — the long melisma near the close of the fifth cantata — where I wanted a touch more abandon, more sense of a soul actually in extremity rather than well-behaved grief. Christophe Dumaux’s counter-tenor is reedy and focused, occasionally thin against the string writing but dramatically alert throughout, and Julien Behr’s tenor supplies welcome variety of color across the later cantatas, singing with an easy, unforced Italianate line that suggests he’s spent real time with this repertoire’s French cousins.

There’s no rival recording to weigh this against, which is itself remarkable in an age when even Telemann’s occasional cantatas have three versions apiece. This is a genuine premiere, not a rediscovery of something merely neglected. Compare it, if you like, to the Stabat Mater Jacobs himself recorded decades ago: harder-driven, more theatrical. This newer project shows an older maestro, wiser about restraint. Two and a quarter hours is a great deal of penitential sameness to ask of a listener in one sitting, and I won’t pretend the piece doesn’t sag slightly around the fifth and sixth words. But taken a cantata or two at a time, in the spirit of the Good Friday devotion it was almost certainly written for, this is music of real and unexpected power.

Authorship questions aside — and I suspect they’ll rumble on in the journals for years — this album earns its place. Strongly recommended, Pergolesi or not.