Only a few composers of the post-war avant-garde, writes Stefan Fricke in the booklet, sought their way into the church, and quite a number of them came to grief on its musical conventions; “Magnum Mysterium” is one of the exceptions. Religious subjects were nothing new for Becker, who lived in Greece from 1956 to 1968: “Meteoron” (1969) for electronically processed sounds, organ and percussion is based on Pentecost chants of the Greek Orthodox Church, “Apeiron” (1972) for ten choral groups, live-electronic ensemble and tape on fragments from very different religions, and “Epiklesis Alpha” (1976) on liturgical vocalises by the Orthodox protopsaltis Lykourgos Angelopoulos.
Becker received the commission from the Evangelische Kirche im Rheinland in 1978. He asked himself how, as a composer of his time, he could approach the subject of the Resurrection, and took into account that a church choir of amateurs would take part alongside professional musicians. The result was a work in three parts, each of which can also be performed separately, for speaker, mixed choir, twelve solo voices who also play bells, organ, woodwind and brass, percussion and tape. Part I is based on chapter 28 of St Matthew’s Gospel in Luther’s translation: the speaker reads the account, choir and solo voices sing the collects for Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, and brief electronic insertions heighten individual passages. Part II sets chapter 15 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians against passages from St John’s Gospel and the First Epistle of Peter. Each of these parts ends with a chorale, “Jesus Christus, unser Heiland” and “Wir danken dir, Herr Jesu Christ”, in which everyone present joins.
In the third part, in an ecumenical spirit, Becker incorporates Gregorian chants from the Proper of the Mass, such as the gradual “Haec dies”, which are heard on tape and electronically transformed; he quotes Wipo of Burgundy’s Easter sequence “Victimae paschali laudes” in its first polyphonic version from the Codex Las Huelgas and uses, likewise electronically transformed, chants and prayers of the Eastern Church in neo-Byzantine and Greek Orthodox tradition, all referring to the “Anastasis”, the Resurrection. An excerpt from the Jewish shaharith prayer is recited by the speaker without accompaniment or electronic processing. The ringing of metal idiophones at the beginning and end recalls Greek Orthodox Easter rites that Becker experienced himself; the work closes with the chorale “Christ ist erstanden”, sung by all.
The recording is the WDR’s live recording of the premiere on 4 May 1980 in the Johanneskirche Düsseldorf. Oskar Gottlieb Blarr conducted the Chor der Neanderkirche Düsseldorf, a group of twelve solo singers and an ensemble of wind players and percussionists; the speaker is Henrik Koy, the organist Nancy Poland. In 1984, for Becker’s 60th birthday, Blarr called the work “the most important contribution to the theme of Easter and the Resurrection in contemporary German music”.