Drama of passion has inspired enduring music

A MAN is nailed to a wooden cross. His distraught mother kneels at his feet. The brutality of humankind is countered by supreme sacrifice and forgiveness. Good Friday is the most dramatic day in the Christian calendar.

Throughout today all over the world believers unite in recalling a story that has endured for more than 2,000 years. While war has dominated literature, the image of the dying Christ has inspired much of the finest music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Allegri's hauntingly beautiful Miserere mei Deus, Lord have Mercy on Me, a setting of Psalm 50, was sung each Good Friday by the papal choir in the Sistine Chapel. The score was so jealously guarded that when the young Mozart visited there in 1770, he secretly copied it down from memory, or so the story goes.

This evening in St Kevin’s Church, Harrington Street, the Lassus Scholars under Ite O’Donovan will perform it at 5pm as part of the Solemn Liturgy for Good Friday, with motets by Victoria and Lassus.

Later during the Stations of the Cross, the choir will again perform Miserere as well as Lotti’s Crucifixus with its spectacular clashing harmonies which suggest Christ’s agony.

Bach's Church of St Thomas's in Leipzig will this evening resound with the music of St John Passion(1724), while within the hour, the same work will be performed by Irish Baroque Orchestra and National Chamber Choir in St Peter's Church in Drogheda. The intimacy of St John Passion contrasts with the huge scale of the St Matthew Passion (1727), which is scored for double choir and includes some of the most sublime music Bach, a hard-working church organist, ever composed.

The Spanish composer and priest Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) is immortalised through his darkly atmospheric settings of the Tenebrae Responses. O vos Omnes, Oh All You People, in which the dying Christ asks mankind has it ever witnessed a sorrow as great as his, will be sung at Passion services throughout the country during the coming hours.