by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Some Good Things Must Come to Good Ends

Now that it’s a new year and the hopped-up calendar-induced sense of an ending is receding, some of the actual endings of the year just past stand out more distinctly.   Two of them figure into this essay, which I wrote as an Op Ed in the fall …

It took something like the New York equivalent of divine intervention – a favor called in by a person on the inside – but the impossible-to-get ticket was passed through the slot in the glass window and into my hands, and just like that, I was in.

No, I didn’t see Derek Jeter’s last home game at Yankee Stadium – didn’t get to join Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Jimmy Fallon and 42,000 others in witnessing the Captain’s game-winning hit.   No, I scored the other hot ticket of autumn in New York 2014: a ticket to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the Park Avenue Armory, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic and an extraordinary roster of singers and staged with great imagination by the director-provocateur Peter Sellars.   

Coming one right after the other, the two events were a reminder of why New York, if emphatically not the sports capital of the United States right now – have New York’s teams ever been this bad all at the same time? – is still our cultural capital, the place where the stories that really matter are still told with such grandeur and daring that they resonate worldwide.             

On September 25, as tickets for Jeter’s final home game that night were selling for an average of $845 on the secondary market, the Times reported that tickets for the St. Matthew Passion – the opening event in Lincoln Center’s White Light festival – were on offer for “between $750 and $2,999.99 a pop.”   To meet demand, Lincoln Center opened a Saturday rehearsal of the Passion to the public at a price of $75 … for half the rehearsal.  It sold out; and on Tuesday tickets for Wednesday’s performance were on offer for $745 on ticket-center.com.

Prices like those give the term “hot ticket” fresh meaning.  But on a deeper level, it seems to me, the two events commanded exorbitant prices, and called forth extraordinary passion from New Yorkers, because they took human drama to the level of archetype.   

The drama that played out at Yankee Stadium was of a good man coming to the end of his story.  His friends (the Core Four) were already gone.  His team (failing to make the playoffs this year, as last year) was not what it once was.  His body was diminished by age and injury.  But his extraordinary ability to seize the moment and make it his own: could he call on it one more time?   In a Tuesday-night game against the Orioles, with a man in scoring position in the ninth and the game on the line, he struck out on three pitches.   But in the same situation two nights later, with all the world’s cameras trained on him, he came through unforgettably with a walk-off single.

At the Park Avenue Armory, Sellars & Co. sought to present the biblical passion narrative as the story of a people “broken and bereft” after “their leader was executed in public following a sham trial by a discredited government.  How could everything have gone so wrong?”  To make us feel the wrongness of Jesus’s crucifixion, Sellars (reconstituting a production staged in Berlin and Los Angeles) bent the dramatic action toward archetype.   The Evangelist who generally narrates the story dispassionately here acted out Jesus’s tribulations in an unprecedented way – twisting himself into captivity, throwing himself to the ground, breathing his last, dying.  The “maidens” who usually lament their Lord’s plight from the side turned their lamentations into full-on caresses.  The black-clad choristers who sing the crowd parts ventured off the cruciform stage into the audience, making the audience the crowd – making their grief our grief as they returned to the stage and gathered round the fallen leader’s body.   This was the drama of a good man coming to the the end of his story – and of what the end means for those around him.

What should be we do when good things come to an end?   The two events together suggest an answer.   Baseball is perpetually said to be losing its claim on sports fans, young fans especially – but all it takes is a Derek Jeter, summoning one more late-inning surprise, to remind us why the game is the national pastime.   Live classical music is said to be threatened and irrelevant until a Peter Sellars turns to J.S. Bach – a composer whose music calls forth reinvention – and finds a way to reinvent Bach one more time. 

This drama – of an end postponed through reinvention – is itself archetypal;and the archetype fits New York well, because it’s by reinventing itself that the city keeps its place at the center of things.   The Jeter era has now ended, but it ended with unexpected grandeur; and as the Yankees rebuild without Jeter,  a new pro soccer team – New York City Football Club – is preparing to suit up at the Stadium and take a different sport forward for a new generation of fans.   Lincoln Center is not the citadel for classical music that it was in the sixties, but the Brooklyn Academy of Music is a new center, building on its Next Wave festival with an extraordinary run of programming –from Philip Glass’s 70th birthday to Nonesuch Records’ 50th anniversary festival, from a rhythmically reinvigorated Robert Plant to a lighter-than air Nutcracker – that shows the city to be, now as ever, a place of musical adventure.  

“Why do we live in New York?” New Yorkers ask ourselves from time to time.  This is why: it’s a dramatic place to live.   Jeter’s farewell and Sellars’ passion have shown New Yorkers – and our counterparts worldwide – what authentic drama feels like.                        

  1. etr-gu posted this