It was with great daring that the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki^[1]Pronounced roughly: “Shishtof Penderet-ski.” scored “St. Luke Passion” in 1966; the occasion was the 1,000th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity into the Duchy of Poland in AD 966–the irony being that by AD 1966, Poland was firmly under the thumb of the officially-atheistic Soviet Union. Though there had been a mild free-speech thaw under Khrushchev (if we’re grading on an very generous curve here), Josef Stalin’s nightmarish purges were still a recent memory, and the USSR had disappeared other dissidents for far less.

Probably Penderecki could get away with composing a Passion piece at the height of the Soviet Union because: 1) he’d recently won international acclaim for “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (legit one of the most terrifying pieces of music I’ve ever heard), which the Politburo perhaps thought useful as a piece of anti-Western propaganda^[2]And in fairness, for all of Russia’s saber-rattling, only the U.S. has ever actually used nuclear weapons on a civilian population before.; and 2) the radical, avant-garde, atonality of the piece^[3]This is also the same music genre that features in 2001: A Space Odyssey whenever the monoliths appear, after all—a film that is also about the divine interceding in our world in a redemptive yet … Continue reading was perhaps enough to convince the censors that Penderecki was merely deconstructing, maybe even parodying, the Passion of the Christ.

These are all of course just speculations. In any case, the enthusiastic public response that the piece received in Poland (and continues to receive long after the collapse of the Soviet Union) should be enough to assure anyone that Penderecki was entirely sincere when he composed “St. Luke Passion”; he really was by all appearances trying to faithfully represent, through terrifying atonal discordance, the full trauma that the Savior of the World experienced when he underwent the infinite and eternal Atonement (an event that, per the Gospel of Luke, caused Him to sweat blood from every pore).^[4]Luke 22:44 It is a performance that even the torture-porn of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ couldn’t touch.

But then, Gibson is a Hollywood star, a trafficker in surface-level images, with only a superficial understanding of what genuine suffering would even look like (as though physical suffering were the only kind available); Penderecki, by contrast, was a denizen of Poland–home of Auschwitz death-camp and some of the most unrelenting repression of the Cold War–so he would’ve understood better than most just how monstrously awful the sins of this world really are. Adorno once said that after Auschwitz, it is impossible to write poetry; atonality is how Penderecki found a way to still compose symphonies after the Holocaust. “St. Luke Passion” channels all of that horrible history.

Not that it’s all doom and gloom: “St. Luke Passion” does finish with an absolutely staggering, faith-affirming, major-chord resolution at the very end–the sort of power-chord that makes even the faithless want to believe again–but you have to sit through an hour-fifteen of ghostly, haunting, atonal minor-chords to get the full payoff. It’s the sort of piece that understands the Atonement doesn’t come cheap.

We talk so frequently about the Atonement of Christ in our faith that I fear we sometimes get casual about it, forgetting just what it cost, failing to even try to imagine what it might have felt like to take on the full sins of the world (let alone our own sins). Especially here in materially-prosperous America, so many of us like to reduce the Gospel down to just the “warm fuzzies,” as though Christ were a life-coach, the scriptures a self-help book, and the Atonement therapy—this, despite how our own D&C declares that this “suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink—”.^[5]D&C 19:18

I don’t mean to pick on anyone, I sometimes fall unthinkingly into these assumptions as well, even when I know better. That’s why I personally find Penderecki to be a useful corrective and reminder for me, of what the Atonement cost. “St. Luke Passion” is a fantastic example of art defamiliarizing the familiar, to help us consider anew. Hence it makes for an excellent listening experience during Holy Week in particular.