Dona nobis pacem (?): John Neumeier's Choreomusical Translation of Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B Minor

Abstract

Abstract:John Neumeier's expansive choreographic output includes an unusually large number of ballets set to Bach's sacred music. Dona nobis pacem (2022), his most recent evening-length Bach ballet set to the monumental Mass in B Minor, was intended to serve as the last of his creations for the Hamburg Ballet, thus crowning an impressive fifty-year tenure with the company. "This title is of great importance to me," Neumeier noted in the program. He also felt the need to clarify that the genesis of the ballet's concept and title came before Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022: "Unfortunately, the title has acquired a stronger relevance since the beginning of the terrible war in Ukraine," he concluded. Even though conceived earlier, by the time of the work's premiere in December 2022, audiences inevitably associated the onstage scenarios of war, loss, and despair with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.Indeed, Dona nobis pacem may be Neumeier's most explicitly politically inflected work. In this essay I argue that, through his choreographed narrative, Neumeier offers an apophatic vision of peace: Since it has never fully existed, we are left to apprehend peace by what it is not. Consequently, wartime images saturate the stage and dancers' bodies convulse with trauma. Soldiers in military uniforms, child soldiers, widows of fallen soldiers, and a traumatized refugee—the main character designated as an anonymous "HE"—visually perform and synecdochically represent onstage the collective trauma of generations of conflict.In this essay I focus my choreomusical analysis on the Missa, the first part of the Mass, which Bach completed in 1733. The Kyrie and Gloria sections of the ballet epitomize how Neumeier utilizes an extensive choreographic vocabulary to establish narrative threads of past (and present) wars. As a whole, the ballet's plotlines do not adapt the music's perceived stylistic ethos into embodied movement. Rather, they appear embedded in wider cultural and social contexts that Bach's music occasionally matches, but most often contradicts.Recent studies in choreomusicology have embraced multimodality as a central premise of dance-music relationships, and have affirmed the communicative fluency of all media involved. Following on the work of Stephanie Jordan, Helen Julia Minors, and others, I use the recorded performance of the ballet's premiere to analyze the interrelationships among music, movement, text, costumes, and gesture. The Mass's liturgical text occasionally indexes recognizable liturgical motifs onstage that blend with images of war; I demonstrate, though, that the ballet media and multimodal collaborations predominantly work synergistically to create and communicate a web of cross-references and intertextual meanings. In line with Erinn E. Knyt's recent observations, Neumeier's ballet also partakes of the changing reception of Bach's music that emphasizes "the humanity of the composer." I conclude that Neumeier's choreographic translation of the Mass constitutes an aestheticization of the ritual—contemporary audiences experience Bach's music as a nominal liturgy, in a space that physically and musically functions as a cipher for wider humanistic ruminations that respond to, and also question, our unsettling historical present.