Medieval Dramas Resemble a ‘Concert in Fancy Attire’

Most adults can recall the Christmas pageants of their youth, complete with bathrobed Wise Men and shepherds. These low-budget rituals based on the Nativity story were common even in public schools before various Supreme Court rulings over the last decade deemed them too sectarian for a strict interpretation of the First Amendment.

Few people realize, however, that these pageants are rooted in medieval drama originally performed not by children, but by clerics and trained musicians. New York City’s Ensemble for Early

Music will present a pair of these 12th-Century music dramas--also called mystery plays--”Herod and the Innocents,” tonight at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral.

“The chronology of these two plays neatly dovetails,” explained Ensemble for Early Music director Frederick Renz. “In the first play, the Wise Men leave by a different route to avoid returning to Herod. In the second play, Herod orders the slaughter of the innocents, followed by Rachel’s lament and the miraculous resurrection of the innocents by an angel.”

Renz and his cohorts unearthed these two mystery plays from a 12th Century French manuscript, the “Fleury Play Book,” and mounted their production for the 1988 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. Besides transcribing the music in archaic notation, the ensemble consulted scholars to ascertain the appropriate period costume and gesture for ecclesiastical performance. (For example, there is no evidence that strong arm gestures were employed then, and only sinners or devils were permitted to engage in dramatic gesticulation.) According to Renz, the highly stylized medieval dramatic conventions do not provide a stumbling block for modern audiences.

“Actually, our audiences tend to be more interested in the music than in the drama. Our sponsor is usually an early music series, so the audiences tend to view our presentation as a concert in fancy attire. Because the text is in Latin, we try to make the dramatic action easy to follow.”

Renz explained that although all the music in the “Fleury Play Book” is vocal music, he has added some instrumental music to his production.

“We’ve interpolated some instrumental motets from other French manuscripts of the period. There are no instructions in the plays to use instruments, but we have decided to add them based on the evidence of period artwork: stained glass depictions, statuary, and manuscript illuminations.

“It’s not that the a cappella singing doesn’t stand on its own, but in some halls the dry acoustics require the addition of instrumental color to compensate.”

Since the plays call for no musicians, Renz has cleverly introduced his musicians into the drama by making them shepherd-musicians. Early in the first play, they enter playing rustic instruments with the shepherds, then retire to stage right where they sit and play like the musicians in a Chinese opera.

On its West Coast tour, the ensemble will include 15 singers and three instrumentalists, a bagpipe player, a lutanist, and a percussionist. Typical of early music groups, each instrumentalist is responsible for several instruments from the same family, e.g. the bagpipe player also plays the natural trumpet and the cornamuse(an antique double-reed instrument).

Renz’s early music group has been performing together since 1974, when the ensemble rose from the ashes of the late Noah Greenberg’s trail-blazing New York Pro Musica. The Ensemble for Early Music’s early December tour is a prelude to the drama’s New York City premiere at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Dec. 29. Tonight’s curtain is 8 p.m.

Oriental fare. Among the offerings of films and lectures included in San Diego State University’s four-day Spotlight on Japan mini-festival (Dec. 8-11) will be a concert by the Yokohama Chamber Players at the Kingston Hotel on Dec. 10. Although the conference is devoted to current issues in Japanese-American relations, the musical program will be quite traditional: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio, the Martinu Cello Sonata and Debussy’s Violin Sonata. The 5:45 p.m. concert will be followed by dinner at the hotel.

Open House. SDSU’s Community Music School, which opened its doors as a community conservatory earlier this semester, will present its first crop of students Sunday at 3:30 p.m. in the university’s Smith Recital Hall. According to music school director Marsha Wolfsberger, the range of students begins with 2 1/2-year-old Suzuki violinists and extends through senior citizen piano students.

In the Spirit of the Season. Concert-goers who plan to attend San Diego Symphony concerts this month can extend the holiday spirit beyond their immediate musical enjoyment. The symphony will supervise a food drive that will turn over all donations to the San Diego Food Bank. Non-perishable foods may be deposited at the Symphony Hall doors before each performance.