Christmas Oratorio “El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered” Restores the Miracle to the Familiar
Few stories are known as well worldwide as that of the Nativity, and with it the many traditions — oral, musical, visual — of its telling. While revered and far-reaching, these accounts don’t often exude relatability, with arcane, ancient narrators tracing mythical characters through the unfathomable story of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Christ’s birth.
Last week, I was thrilled to see John Adams’s Christmas oratorio El Niño shake these heavens. Produced by American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) in an abridged version at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered combined cross-cultural libretto compiled by Peter Sellars with deeply felt performances to amplify the maternal voice within the Christmas story and embrace such human realities as childbirth, violence, and hunger. Far from theoretical, the production honored common physical experiences, mingling them with the spiritual to bring within reach a sense of the miraculous.
The acclaimed soprano, curator, social change agent, and AMOC roster member Julia Bullock first conceived this version of El Niño, which she aptly describes as a “distilled rendering,” to be performed at the Met Cloisters for her 2018 artist residency with MetLiveArts. The collaboration was one of many to date with Adams and Sellars, who themselves have been working together since the mid-80s; it bore Bullock’s signature as an invitation for collective meditation centered around rigorous musical artistry.
In creating El Niño, it was imperative for both Adams and Sellars to infuse the Nativity with lesser-heard viewpoints — particularly a female perspective. Himself a parent and grandparent, Adams had lamented that traditional tellings offer “only passing awareness of the misery and pain of labor, of the uncertainty and doubt of pregnancy, or of that mixture of supreme happiness and inexplicable emptiness that follows the moment of birth.”
While Sellars’s libretto draws on a myriad of texts including common biblical Nativity passages and the little-known Gnostic Infancy Gospels, it articulates this female focus most poignantly through Latin American poetry. In El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, stunning verses from two female Mexican writers — the celebrated 17th-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and 20th-century novelist and activist Rosario Castellanos — cohere to form the work’s beating heart and emotional core.
To Bullock, El Niño was always “centered on women, children, and life.” This lens is now all the more resonant as she and her husband, the conductor Christian Reif, welcomed their first child just eight weeks ago. (Reif conducted this production.) Bullock shared that this performance — her first since giving birth — was “an invitation to no longer sing from a place that is theoretical or abstract [but] rooted in reality.
“To sing this iteration of El Niño that unabashedly opens with a perspective and reflections from a pregnant person communicating to her child in a direct, honest, quiet way (which is also the bond I feel with [our son]), was very special and affirming.”
The performance began from this place of intimacy, with the soft words of expectant Mary to her unborn son in Castellanos’s poem “The Annunciation”: “Because since the beginning you were destined to be mine.”
Bullock read her own translation of this Spanish text, which goes on to mix heavenly wonder with earthly pain: “You exalt my humility / Your gaze, benevolent / Transforms my wounds into ardent splendors.”
Later, with the inclusion of Castellanos’s poem “Speaking of Gabriel,” the libretto directly addresses the physicality of childbirth — not Christ, or Mary, or any angel, just the burden of pregnancy:
I felt him grow at my expense,
steal the color from my blood,
Add clandestine weight and volume
To my way of being on the earth.
In the dark of the Cathedral, I sat with the pain of this very real and human experience. The music and sense of the sacred expanded to hold it until, finally, it dissipated into mystery.
At a certain point I forgot all about following the translations, lost in the way in the way that Bullock and mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson breathed life into every word. Their voices wrapped colorful curls around every syllable, with a lushness that at times recalled other musical expressions of the sensuality in the divine — not something I had encountered in say, The Messiah.
Adams’s frequent use of low string drones and text painting evoked the shimmering desert, Christian rituals of chant, and, seemingly, time immortal. He framed Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s carol “Because my Lord was born to suffer” in an aquarium of sounds, filled with the light of piping woodwinds and plucked strings and encircling the voices of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. In the orchestra’s capable hands, planes of surging rhythm opened into ecstatic harmonic changes made all the more dramatic through a well-considered lighting design. At this point, a baby some rows behind me erupted in tears; it felt additive.
Upon this landscape, the singers — as both soloists and ensemble — drove the familiar story through fresh iterations of feeling. I was thrilled by the sudden burst of energy heralding Bullock’s exquisite Magnificat. Baritone Davóne Tines characteristically commanded the room and score, whether as a wondering Joseph, thundering God, or malicious Herrod. Portraying each of the Three Wise Men and their gifts in turn, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo vaulted luxurious arcs of expression into the resonant space; the haunting line “I am Gaspar” rings with me still. Through the words of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario and over a deep trembling chord, Costanzo’s Gaspar directly addressed the audience with palpable sentiment: “I have come here to say that life is good / That God exists. That love is everything.”
His Melchoir, though, mused: “The whitest flower is rooted in the mud, / And all delights are tinged with melancholy.” (I thought of Mary.)
Then with a clang of chimes and sinuous double reeds, the savage side of the Nativity overthrew sweetness. To portray the violence of Herrod’s murdering the male children of Bethlehem, Sellars turned to “Memorial de Tlatelolco,” a poem Castellanos wrote in response to the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City in which Mexican Armed Forces opened fire on a group of student protestors, killing hundreds.
With this depiction of a recent crisis, accompanied by Spanish-inflected dance motifs, the work thrust the twin marches of senseless slaughter and crusades for justice across all time and peoples into uncomfortable proximity. Once again darkness reigned (“Darkness engenders violence / and violence demands darkness / to manifest the crime”) but now its mystery evoked terror instead of reverence. The clamorous music and thrilling light change rushed into silence in which I dared anyone to clap.
Melting from one dreamlike episode to another, El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered ended with the singers peacefully murmuring “poesie” (poetry), the last word of Castellanos’s “Una Palmera,” and swaying with the tall palm trees that Jesus has ordered to bend to share its fruit with his mother, recalling distinctly the magical realism of Latin American authors. I did not want to leave it.
And as in all the tableaux of this work, I feel I am back there still. Sellars has noted that El Niño is “like one of those multi-paneled altarpieces you cannot possibly take in all at once.” I look forward to the next opportunity and hope it becomes a tradition.
