Darkness

I am sitting in a small room as evening slowly descends, in one of my dearest cities, where only a handful of people still celebrate Easter according to our tradition. But even if they did, I could no longer hear the Wednesday evening service of Holy Week, the Tenebrae, which has disappeared from Catholic tradition since the Second Vatican Council—to such an extent that chances are most Catholics today have never even heard of it.

I am obsessed with seeking out cities whose populations have been replaced, whose many centuries of history are now remembered only by a ruined synagogue, a Saxon fortified church, or an empty Polish cathedral. The memory of the Tenebrae is the darkness that settles silently on Wednesday evening. Since the days of Gregorian chant, the fifteen candles of the triangular hearse were lit one by one in the darkened church, while fifteen carefully selected verses from the Psalms and the Gospels were sung—verses that, through a succession of blows familiar to every human life, illustrated the darkness of the human soul and foreshadowed the darkness that the liturgies of the following days would unfold in full. After each verse a candle was extinguished, and after the fifteenth the church was left in complete darkness.

• darkness fell upon the earth when they crucified me
• the sign by which my friend betrayed me was a kiss
• one of my disciples will betray me today, though we dipped into the same dish together
• you said you would die for me, yet you could not keep watch with me even for one hour
…

The Tenebrae itself was extinguished some fifty years ago, and I have never had the chance to hear it performed live. Besides the darkness descending on Wednesday evening, its memory survives above all in the Renaissance settings composed for it, the best known by far being the Tenebrae of Tomás Luis de Victoria, a contemporary of Saint Teresa. But since I have been speaking of hidden things, I would rather introduce the less familiar setting by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, which I love most in the performance by Gérard Lesne. Since that recording is now several hundred kilometres away from me, I shall instead post here its opening section as performed by Le Parlement de Musique, in complete darkness, illuminated only by the glow of my laptop screen.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704): Tenebrae factae sunt, performed by Le Parlement de Musique