Rock Passion

By William Bender

A quasi-religious revival is stirring in pop music. Three of the biggest hit singles of 1970 bow deeply to religion--Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water, the Beatles' Let It Be, and Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky. Bob Dylan's latest album New Morning contains a new song. Three Angels, that chides everyday people for their indifference to God. Far and away the most ambitious pop venture into the Scriptures is a new English rock opera, Jesus Christ, Superstar, released last week in the U.S. on an 87-minute, two-LP album by Decca. As a musical retelling of the seven last days in Christ's life, it rivals the St. John and St. Matthew Passions of Bach--in ambition and scope if not in piety or musical exaltation.

With an appealing variegated score by Andrew Lloyd Webber and words by Tim Rice, Superstar builds to considerable impact and evocativeness, in part because it manages to wear its underlying seriousness lightly. What Rice and Webber have created is a modern-day passion play that may enrage the devout but ought to intrigue and perhaps inspire the agnostic young.

At 22, Webber, the son of a composer, is an articulate champion of all kinds of music who grew up on Bill Haley but customarily recommends Stravinsky's taut, granitic Symphony in Three Movements "as an object lesson to any rock band that wants to play with precision and tight sound." Rice, 25, attended Lancing College, then spent two years working toward a career in law. Together they have fashioned a clever, youthful blend of skepticism and romantic questioning. Early on, Judas reflects on Christ:

I don't know why he moves me He's a man--he's just a man He's not a king--he's just the same As anyone I know.

One of the closing choruses is full of questions:

Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Who are you? What have you sacrificed?

Judas has rarely been treated so sympathetically as he is by Webber and Rice. According to the Judas of Superstar, his friend Jesus is a charismatic mortal--much like an adored rock singer or the leader of a radical movement --who has begun to believe in his own press clippings. "You really do believe/ This talk of God is true." The Crucifixion is seen as the result of bungling self-indulgence, and Jesus' faith in his divinity, and hope of Resurrection, as delusions.

Greatest Story? To a large extent, Webber and Rice share Judas' doubts. "It happens," says Rice, "that we don't see Christ as God. but as simply the right man at the right time in the right place. It is a great and inspiring story, though." Shorn of the Resurrection, of course, the Passion and what preceded it are something less than "the greatest story ever told." Perhaps that is why Webber and Rice, both of whom were brought up in the Anglican Church but eventually rejected it, have not worked too hard in Superstar to get the Christianity out of Christ. Despite Judas, both libretto and music are provocatively ambiguous about Christ's divinity. At The Crucifixion, the slow, chromatic climb of the orchestra is a compelling suggestion that Christ's spirit is ascending. The opera's last line is "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

What Webber and Rice seem certain of is that Christ was a profoundly humanitarian radical thinker, not unlike Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Near the end of Superstar, the authors invite comparisons between radicals, old and new, using the voice of Judas, who appears this time as a kind of 20th century Everyman, not in a flashback, but in a 2,000-year flash-forward:

Why'd you choose such a backward time And such a strange land? If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation. Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.

Whatever the reaction to Superstar may be, Webber and Rice have fused words and music into such a convincing narrative style that rock may never be quite the same again. Webber's clever sounds and rhythms (such as Latin, soft rock, ragtime, Prokofiev four-step) not only do not drown out Rice's words, but actually show an awareness of their syllabic structure. Just imagine, listening to rock and understanding the words too. The musical depiction of Christ (Ian Gillan) is far too neutral to capture either a man or a myth. But Mary Magdalene (Yvonne Elliman) has been etched in melodically with Puccini-like tenderness, and the rollicking minstrel beat under the Apostles' chant, "What's the buzz? Tell me what's a-happening," is a Cakewalk of pure joy. The swinging gospel-rock music sung by Judas (Tenor Murray Head) brings him brilliantly to nagging, skeptical, near-paranoid life. Sound effects add to a building sense of drama: the listener hears the slap of 39 lashes over a satiric rock beat, as well as the noise of nails being driven into the cross.

Superstar occupies the same assimilative position in the pop world that Ginastera's Don Rodrigo does in serious opera. Webber and Rice do not outdo the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Prokofiev, Orff, Stravinsky or any other musical influence found in their work. But they have welded these borrowings into a considerable work that is their own. Tommy (TIME, June 22) was the first, flawed suggestion that rock could deal with a major subject on a broad symphonic or operatic scale. Superstar offers the first real proof. William Bender

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