There is no Bach in my story and there is no Jesus—rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus’s, elevating (I hope) her suffering to a higher plane.
That’s how one of my favorite contemporary composers, David Lang, ends the program note for his 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning piece The Little Match Girl Passion. It’s also how I’ve been thinking about Holy Week this year.
Lang based his piece on Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Match Girl,” which is one of those deeply disturbing Andersen classics that not even Walt Disney could’ve made into a fun romp. On a frigid New Year’s Eve, a poor young girl tries to sell matches in the street but fails to make a single penny. Too afraid to go home to her abusive father, she curls up against a wall and tries to warm herself with her matches. She sees visions in the tiny flames: a roast goose, a Christmas tree, and then her dead grandmother, who invites her up into heaven. When the sun rises, she is found frozen to death, half-burned matches in hand.
(See if you can write a Broadway show-stopper about that, Alan Menken.)
Andersen tries to end with something other than tragedy, some hopeful sense of the comfort the little girl experienced in her dying hours: “No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, and how happily she had gone with her old grandmother into the bright New Year.” But there’s no escaping the story’s deep sorrow, the feeble light of a match against winter, against poverty, against human indifference and cruelty.
In calling his choral version of the story a “passion,” Lang is echoing some of the grandest pieces in the classical canon: Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous St. Matthew and St. John Passions, plus more recent “Passions” by big-name (trust me) composers like James MacMillan and Sofia Gubaidulina. (If this is all Greek to you, you probably know Bach’s most famous Passion chorale, sung in English as “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.”)
The end of MacMillan’s St. John Passion is a good example of what a musical passion often sounds like. As Jesus dies on the cross, strings, winds, and high brass play a flurry of chaotic dissonant melodies, a musical representation of the visceral pain of Jesus’s followers. Amid the cacophony, a hymn-like melody rises from the French horns, insisting on some kind of divine order or heavenly presence despite the scene of torture and betrayal. It’s a musical atonement theory, a promise of redemption when all seems lost.
But that is not the passion that Lang gives us. When his little match girl dies, all we hear is a single voice chanting the story in an awkward rhythm as a soft glockenspiel sparkles in the background. When more voices join, it is dissonant but not chaotic: a straightforward report of suffering rather than a grand theological statement. “Rest soft,” the voices repeat in the piece’s unsettling last movement: a desperate plea that the girl’s final rest might be more like the visions she’d seen than the hard world she was born into.
Suffering, Lang seems to suggest, more often looks like the match girl’s than like Jesus’s—or at least than how Christian tradition has remembered Jesus’s. Maybe Jesus’s suffering was in fact quite a bit like the match girl’s: an all-too-everyday defeat of soft humanity by the world’s cold-hearted powers. If there’s an atonement theory here, it’s in the way the girl makes visible the world’s heartlessness, makes us desperate to reject the society we’ve given our souls to.
More than ever before, Jesus’s suffering doesn’t sound too unusual to me this year. It sounds like what empires do when they’re threatened, or just when they’re bored. It sounds like what we do to immigrants, Palestinians, prisoners, Iranians. It sounds like the world the little match girl found herself in, the one she had no way out of.
If the passion of Jesus saves us, maybe it’s in part by polarizing us against this kind of world. That’s what I hear in Lang’s piece: infinite love for the little girl and absolute revulsion at the world around her. And that, too, is what I heard in the Holy Week readings this year: love that cannot bear for things to go on as they are, love that whispers furiously (and maybe hits a glockenspiel) when it’s told to be silent, love that will hold a match to the world’s cold cruelty even as it freezes to death.
___
Postscript: I discovered while searching for a cover image that Disney did actually make a short animated version of “The Little Match Girl” in 2006. I can’t watch it now or I will never finish this post, but… stay tuned for a sequel I guess?
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
