Meditation on Gethsemane

motet for SSAATTBB choir

The Story of Christ’s Agony in the Garden has always compelled me. Here is a man who walked on water and calmed the seas, who cured the sick and raised the dead, yet He is afraid. The sins of the world and the looming cloud of death itself overwhelm Him. He is sweating blood, and He has only one place to turn. Jesus, fully God and visibly fully human, comes before the Father in supplicaton, asking that the chalice be taken away.

In fall of 2019, soon after completing my first choral work (“Before the Paling of the Stars”), I began to explore this passage musically. I wrote a very basic poetic adaptation of Jesus’s prayer, and a little tune to go with it:

Father if this cup may pass before me,

Take it from my hands and set me free,

Yet not My will but Yours be done,

I shall remain Your faithful Son.

Not realizing another composer had beaten me to the subject matter, one named Ludwig van Beethoven no less, I hoped to create a large-scale choral work around this scene. But lacking the poetic chops and musical experience, I set aside the sketches.

In spring of 2020, I – along with 8 billion of my closest friends – found myself home on lockdown. To complicate matters, a dear friend of mine had cancer, and his condition was taking a turn for the worse. They were dark times, and the story of Christ on the Mount of Olives, long a source of interest on the dramatic level, became deeply resonant on a personal one. And from that place, I found the perfect collaborator with whom to continue the project in the seemingly unlikely place of my chemistry teacher, Sam Pell (Mr. Pell to me, of course).

I sent Mr. Pell my brief stanza and melody, and he soon sent back 3 pages of verse organized around my words as a refrain. His interpretation of the story profoundly deepened the project into a meditation rather than mere retelling, a concept on which we zeroed in throughout our collaboration. 

The beginning of the piece is centered in a quiet chapel as a modern day individual, sung by sopranos and altos alone, contemplates the story. They are transported to that fateful night in the first century as the tenors and basses deliver Jesus’s words in the first refrain. Though unintentional at the time of composition, the music follows a rondo form, with the framing vision becoming increasingly vivid. The meditation and supplication themes are intensified through harmony and imitative texture with each repetition, ultimately climaxing as Jesus commits to God’s plan with the very words He taught us to pray: “Thy will be done!”. When Jesus is ultimately arrested and taken away, the vision fades to nothing, as the original meditator and the audience are left alone to think about their own places in the story. 

And what is that place? We share in causing God’s suffering when we fail to love: to love Him, ourselves, our neighbors, and creation. In the same token, we share in the experience of that suffering when those around us fail to love, when inexplicable challenges arise and the weight of it all becomes too much. We are left with the choice to share in one final aspect with Jesus: to trust in God and in those who love us. To drink from the cup. To do what we can to love others and make the world better for it.

I certainly wrote this work from a Christian liturgical musician’s perspective. It is a prayer to feel closeness to Jesus in His humanity and strength in His selfless courage. Yet I hope it can offer something to people of all backgrounds and musical environments. Perhaps it is a reminder that we’re all human. We all feel the weight of the world in unique ways others may never understand. Yet, we can choose to love one another through it. At the end of the day, this life is out of our hands.

Due to the many emotional and technical challenges of this project, it took me nearly 2 more years after receiving Mr. Pell’s words to write the music. I was honored to conduct the premeire myself, a first in my career, on May 25, 2022 at Bishop O’Connell High School. I offer my endless thanks to my poet collaborator for embarking on this project with me and so radically broadening my experience of this story. I extend it to the musical mentors along the way, including Mrs. Elena Prince and Mr. Mike Maher, who helped me see the piece to completion.

-Matthew Thomas Brown