TAMA MATHESON speaks to Lara Zammit about his piece of musical drama.

LZ: The upcoming Maltese premier of Johann Sebastian – The Life and Passions of JS Bach is the latest in a series of collaborative musical plays on the subject of lives of the great composers. How have the lives of renowned composers become a topic of such interest for you? Can you give us an overview of the series thus far?

TM: I always felt the power music has to speak to the full stretch of the human soul – intellectual to emotional – and longed always to find a way to pass this feeling on to an audience (especially nowadays, when classical music is slipping further and further out of the public consciousness).

Among my various collaborations with orchestra, I happened upon the notion of inserting a full drama (fully realised with costumes, sets, and lighting) into a full orchestral concert. By doing this, I was able to merge two art forms into a single unity.

As such, the music took on a new life, and new meanings, and became as visceral and exciting as any dramatic idea. In essence, biography and music mingled into an explosive and heady admixture – a fresh format of music and drama that deserves to be seen as its own independent genre: the musical-play. 

So far, I have written about 10 of these plays, and the form continues to prove itself devastatingly effective. Among the subjects I have covered are Benjamin Britten, J.S. Bach, Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Andrsej Panufnik, Gustav Mahler, and Ludwig Van Beethoven, and, along with these I have also explored (from the non-musical world) Lord Byron, William Shakespeare, Nancy Wake (Australia’s greatest war heroine), and Australian poets, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. 

LZ: How have you endeavoured to add a theatrical layer to the life and works of Johann Sebastian Bach? What elements particular to his music and temperament have trickled down into this upcoming performance?

TM: The chief conundrum for any playwright is how to organise the disorganised and random elements of a life into a coherent drama – how, that is, to find a beginning, middle, and end in the disjointed episodes and elements of a person’s history, and how to sew those episodes and elements into a cogent and methodical whole. 

This, of course, is a process of choosing and winnowing episodes of the composer’s life for their dramatic potential, and finding the emotional, ideological, or artistic urges that drove the artist’s creative endeavours. 

In Bach’s case, there was the continuous through-line of passionate religiosity, which sings through all his music, but which begins to wane and fade in the latter part of his life. Here, then, was a superb, ready-made internal conflict that could govern the whole of the composer’s life, and which beautifully tied together his music and biography. 

There was also, in Bach’s case, a healthy strain of impatient cantankerousness – a querulous and plaintive disposition that I feared at first would be merely irksome, but which I soon came to realise could form the basis for a central strain of irascible humour. Bach’s curmudgeonly nature thus becomes, in essence, the comic relief of the whole play.

There is also one dramatic liberty I have taken: a speculation as to why Bach’s final work – which was so important to him – remained unfinished at the time of his death.

LZ: Interlaced throughout with Bach’s incomparable music, Johann Sebastian is a performance that is half-concert, half-drama. You will be accompanied onstage by tenor Thomas Birch, pianist Gisèle Degiorgio, violinist Tatjana Chircop and cellist Simon Abdilla Joslin. How did you harmonise music and drama in your production from a directorial standpoint?

TM: I wanted the music to be as integral to the drama as the story of the play itself. Music, after all, is an incredibly powerful tool of communication, and a natural source of drama and emotion, and I found that the addition of music – that is, not just background music, but significant orchestral performances – could hugely heighten the dramatic tension of the play. 

I found that, if the drama was structured shrewdly enough, it could transition directly (and almost logically) into music: the music would actually take up the dramatic thread of the play and carry it forward, moving the audience through time, feeling, or thought, and depositing them in another state of being and a later period in drama. Music could thus actually move the whole play forward. 

Moreover, the constant alternation of words and music meant that neither had a chance to become tiresome or repetitive. Each element is augmented by the other, and the combined effect is dazzling. As such, there is something at once sophisticated and primal about this type of storytelling, and I have come to prefer it above all other forms of theatre. I can only hope the audience in Malta feels the same!      

Johann Sebastian is showing on April 29 at 11.30am and 7pm at Palazzo Parisio, Naxxar.