The Devil and Penderecki

Man's worst moments seem to fascinate Poland's avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki. In his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Dies Irae (an oratorio in memory of the dead of Auschwitz) and The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ According to St. Luke, Penderecki treated mass annihilation and murder with moving intensity, stretching the limits of orchestral and vocal range so far that he had to invent new notational symbols for his score (TIME, Oct. 14, 1966). Thus it was only appropriate that for his first opera he chose as his subject a tale of mass hysteria and political murder.

Hell on Earth. Penderecki based The Devils of Loudun on both Aldous Huxley's historical essay and John Whiting's play The Devils. The libretto sketches the facts surrounding the torture and execution of a Jesuit priest in a 17th century French provincial town. Sister Jeanne of the Angels, prioress of St. Ursula's Convent, asks Father Urbain Grandier (sung by Baritone Andre Hiolski) to become the cloister's confessor. When the worldly, sensual priest declines the offer, Sister Jeanne has a series of hysterical sexual hallucinations that soon infect other nuns in the convent. Eventually, the sisters accuse Grandier of indecent and immoral behavior, which has led to their being possessed by the devil. The charges coincide with certain local political and ecclesiastical intrigues that find Grandier an ideal scapegoat. Despite agonized hours of torture, the priest denies that he is a diabolic instrument, but is burned at the stake anyway.

As performed at its world premiere by the venturesome Hamburg State Opera, the three-act music-drama is a lurid vision of hell on earth. Horror builds to a crescendo as sacral scenes of church and cloister are followed by wild orgies of the possessed nuns and a ludicrous exorcising ceremony in which the crazed sisters howl, shriek and twitch like wolverines in heat. Present in nearly every scene is a revulsive chorus of guttersnipes, beggars, epileptics and whores who leap and leer with a demonic joy reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch.

Boos and Bravos. Penderecki scored the opera for an 80-voice chorus and a massive orchestra: 32 woodwind and brass instruments, 42 strings, an organ, harmonium, electric bass guitar and a diverse array of percussion instruments, including timpani and musical saw. Though it produces the now familiar range of Penderecki sound--semi-tones and quarter tones, tone clusters, glissandi and primitive knocking noises--the orchestra plays a secondary role to the chorus, which is constantly busy humming, singing neo-Gregorian chant, screaming, laughing, muttering and yelping.

Some critics complained that Penderecki had wasted an expense of talent in illustrating a bizarre footnote to history, and had failed to provide his opera with any sense of contemporary relevance. The audience response at the Hamburg premiere was a blend of boos and bravos, although applause predominated at a different production of the work in Stuttgart last week. Penderecki was unfazed. Isn't opera an archaic form for modern composers? he was asked. "Only people who don't have the brains to write one think so," was his answer.

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