Ester, Liberatrice del Popolo Ebreo

In 1673, lending his considerable genius to the formidable propaganda machine of the Counter Reformation, the brilliant and provocative Roman composer Alessandro Stradella, in collaboration with librettist Lelio Orsini, sets to music the story of Esther, a story of a timid girl, secret Jew, and Persian Queen, who finds the bravery to save her people from annihilation. In its original form, the Book of Esther tumbles forth with intrigue and scandal, fragrant with enough eroticism and inebriation to fill a steamy mass market paperback. It contains the first known mention of genocide against the Jewish people, and has been subject to debate from practically the moment of its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible, otherwise known as the Masoretic text, (to distinguish it from the later Vulgate Christian text.)

What the story does not do, not even once, is mention God. This has caused centuries of conjecture and countless bottles of spilled ink in debates over its origin, inclusion in the Bible, and its lessons, if any, for the Jewish reader. Various questions reach us from across the centuries — Why is the Book of Esther in the Bible at all? Was the Book of Esther written by a woman? What does a book that mentions God not even once have to teach us? How could a girl who becomes Queen by winning what is, in effect, a sex contest, be elevated as an ideal of virtue?

Some commentators have viewed The Book of Esther as an undercover instruction manual for wielding agency in the diaspora, in which the subaltern must learn to navigate around rather than directly confront centers of power. Others see the absence of God in the story as a way to instruct the reader how to find moral direction deep within themselves at difficult times when God seems to be hidden. Others talk of the centrality of “masking” and disguise in the story — not the literal carnival masks and costumes of the Purim holiday that commemorates Esther’s triumph, but rather of the dichotomy between those who hide their identities and those who “come out” to embrace their true selves, and the rewards that await the latter. After all, Esther’s true, Hebrew, name is Hadassah. She takes the Persian name of Esther (derived from Ishtar) in order to hide her true identity.

Esther’s strategy for approaching the King and thwarting a genocide has been derided as weak and manipulative by some feminist critics. Others praise the brilliance of her canny strategy, navigating the only path open to her at a moment in history when any direct confrontation would meet with inevitable failure. The men in positions of power in her story are unwaveringly foolish. Haman, the king’s malevolent viceroy, is so unstable in his lust for supremacy that he enacts a decree of genocide against an entire people because just one of them, Mordechai, refuses to bow to him out of deference to God. Ahasuerus, the king himself, is constantly drunk from non stop banquets and cedes to almost any request made of him.

The monarch, the figure in the story with the greatest temporal power, is the most easily manipulated and vulnerable to flattery. The ostensibly weakest figure becomes a savior. The would-be instigator of a genocide is executed on the scaffold intended for his enemy, his sons along with him, his dreams of supremacy reversed and his entire family annihilated. Haman’s downfall and Esther’s triumph show a tidy reversal of fortune, the perfect Aristotelian resolution (referred to as peripeteia in the Poetics) to a seemingly inexorable tragedy.

As if keenly tuned in to this study of reversals, our gleefully provocative composer toys with our expectations by making the disturbed and evil Haman rather than the heroic and virtuous Esther the primary character of this sacred work. Haman’s boundless music tests the limits of virtuosic technique, his perseverating runs, precipitous jumps, and illogical intervals presenting not only a formidable challenge to the singer portraying him, but a masterful depiction of a deeply troubled mind.

The story of a diffident young woman who finds her power and becomes a hero after undergoing a challenging process of self reflection resonates deeply for many modern readers, not only those of us in the Western world, but for the Iranian women of our own time who, on the same soil as Esther’s Persia, reenact Esther’s bravery, engaging boldly in resistance against an oppressive dictatorship. As Esther did two and a half millennia ago, today’s Iranian protesters take their lives in their hands in the active confrontation of despotism. The story of Esther distills down even to our own American popular culture, manifesting in the putatively frivolous but deeply revelatory superhero genre, in which hidden identities mask extraordinary powers that are put to benevolent use in the fight for justice and the public good.

With her compelling mix of vulnerability and steel, Esther captured the imagination of countless Renaissance and Baroque artists and musicians. We have paintings by Lippi, Veronese, Gentileschi, and Rembrandt, to name the best known, and musical settings by, among many others, the brilliant, scandalous, and confrontational Alessandro Stradella (1643 — 1682). A musical Caravaggio, Stradella produced, in his tragically truncated life, a wealth of vocal repertoire that supports the drama of the text with bold and daring compositions that challenge the musical status quo. He lived as he wrote his music, tempting fate and courting danger through a lifestyle brimming with romantic impropriety, until it all finally caught up with him. He was murdered, most likely on orders of a jealous husband of one of his paramours, bringing to a premature close a life as lurid as it was brilliant.

In the thick of the Counter-Reformation, a fascinating point in European history during which the rigid oppression of a reactionary impulse within Catholicism commingled with an artistic output of stunning sensual splendor, Stradella composed his music dramas in the service of propaganda. At a time of oppression made even more horrendous than usual for Italy’s Jewish population by the construction of ghettoes up and down the Italian peninsula, our dissolute composer sets to music the stories of several Jewish heroines known for their bravery, agency, and what could be seen through modern eyes as feminism.

While Italy’s Jews are being herded into cramped urban spaces and locked in nightly behind ghetto walls, the Inquisition’s flames spark with renewed fury, devouring those who refuse to bend to its iron will. While forced conversions or exile chart the only path to survival for religious minorities, Catholic aristocrats, luxuriating in lavishly decadent Roman palazzi, enjoy parades of exquisite private entertainments, veritable banquets of virtuosity that set stories of flinty Jewish women engaged in unimaginable acts of resistance to power. How do we explain this paradox?

The answer has to do with the ways in which, over the centuries, Christianity appropriated and repurposed the Old Testament. Through a complex and multifaceted process of translation — both linguistic and cultural — stories such as Esther’s (but the same could be said of Judith’s, just to mention another famous Jewish heroine widely celebrated in the Christian context) were interpreted as allegorical pre-figurations of the events narrated in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels. Within this context, Esther (read by the Catholics not in the original Masoretic text, but in the Vulgate version that Jerome translated from the Greek Septuagint) became a “figure” — that is, an anticipation — of both the Catholic church itself and the Virgin Mary. As such, Esther’s story would eventually fit particularly well the cultural and theological agenda of the Counter-Reformation.

Stradella’s oratorio stands out as an eloquent example of this process, depicting Esther in terms that resonate with Jerome’s interpretation of the character: Esther is to be understood as the personification of mercy — misericordia — and as Ecclesia gentium (literally, church of the people). She is favored by God because of her faith and the chastity that she keeps concealed in her heart. In line with this reading, followed by numerous Christian authors, including Isidore of Seville, Alcuin, and Rabanus Maurus, the villain Haman is a figure of evil, while Esther’s coronation and intervention with Ahasuerus foreshadow the coronation of Mary and her intercession with Jesus in the day of the judgment, respectively. Within this framework, as Esther obtained grace for her people, so will Mary obtain the grace for humankind.

Explicit indicators of this interpretive frame are found in Orsini’s libretto. Consistently with the features of the oratorio tradition, which often included allegorical characters, a theologically relevant role is assigned to Speranza Celeste, Heavenly Hope, who frames the story by both challenging Haman and — differently from what happens in the Masoretic version — by mentioning God’s power on multiple occasions. Similarly, the Christian appropriation and repurposing of the narrative is enhanced throughout Esther’s own speeches: when she confronts Ahasuerus, for instance, she presents herself as “her lord’s afflicted and humble servant,” where the Italian phrasing (“Ecco ai tuoi piedi, o mio Signore, se’n viene / la tua serva dolente”) echoes not only the Septuagint, but also key moments in the Gospels such as the annunciation (Particularly instructive is, from this point of view, Esther’s use of the word “ancella,” which evokes Mary’s reply to Gabriel, “ecce ancilla domini”.)

Crucial to Esther’s refashioning — and one of the reasons for her appeal to Baroque aesthetics — is the rhetorical dimension of her endeavor, which comes to full fruition through Stradella’s music. Indeed, key to the characterization of Esther in the period is the notion that her successful mission is accomplished by means of her eloquence. Yet, in line with the Baroque taste for conflicting emotions, Esther’s ability to speak out is the result of a transformative process, which Stradella shapes effectively through his musical setting of the libretto.

Unsettled by her own thoughts, torn between different states of mind, Stradella’s Esther voices her psychological turmoil by means of a rather fluid compositional strategy that moves swiftly from free flowing recitative to rhythmically heightened arias via arioso sections that mark the increasing pathos of her feelings. Emblematic of Esther’s rhetorical progress is the sequence that includes the recitative “Si, si, ardita e costante,” the quick-paced aria “Su, dunque a ferire,” the recitative “Che pensate, o miei pensieri?” and the arioso “E perché?”

If this climactic moment stages the heroine’s internal struggle, thus making us sympathetic towards her, it is her address to Ahasuerus that wins Esther’s audience over. And when her audience is aware — as we all should be — of the many layers that, across time, space and religious confessions, have informed her story as portrayed by Alessandro Stradella and Lelio Orsini, the powerful narrative of a woman capable of subverting an oppressive patriarchal order can’t help but resonate with many of the conflicts that are still ravaging our modern societies today.

— Jessica Gould and Eugenio Refini