Every now and again I come across a piece of music so frustrating, obnoxious, and musically lazy that I can’t keep quiet about it. Recently, I experienced these sentiments (and a few more) when I gave a listen to Karl Jenkins’s newish oratorio, The Peacemakers. Jenkins has been a bit of a conundrum to me ever since I first came across his name a year or two ago on the Boosey & Hawkes website: according to his bio, he’s an accomplished jazz musician, is the recipient of numerous awards and honors (including an OBE), and has written for a bewildering variety of musical forces. To top it all off, he’s supposedly the “most performed composer in the world,” and has a million-plus seller with his album, Adiemus: Songs of the Sanctuary, on the side. Not too shabby, you might be thinking, and you wouldn’t be wrong.
If only his biography lived up to his music.
The Peacemakers is in some ways a sequel to Jenkins’s The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (1999), a millennium commission that subscribes to the misplaced hope that an arbitrary turn of the calendar might somehow alter human nature and lead to an age of peace after countless years of war. Now, I don’t want to come off as a warmonger (because, among other things, I’m not) and I acknowledge that the quest for peace is probably the most noble of human ambitions, but if this subject is going to be addressed from a musical perspective, it needs to be handled by a composer whose musical abilities are up to snuff with the subject matter. This is especially true of something like The Peacemakers, which takes texts on the subject spoken or written by a range of historical figures (including Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi) and sets them for various combinations of chorus and orchestra. Conceptually, it’s a fine idea. Unfortunately, concepts only take compositions so far.
Musically, The Peacemakers is seventy-three minutes of mawkishly sentimental, mostly slow moving music that exhibits no ideas of any discernable value or purpose other than to sound pretty and be as gently inoffensive as the authors of the words are to the popular consciousness. This is apparent from the opening movement, a setting of Matthew 5:9 (“Blessed are the peacemakers…”) that vaguely recalls textures out of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem before lapsing into repetitious harmonic stasis: two-bar phrases alternate with four-bar phrases; G minor becomes E-flat major, and goes back again; innocuous, peaceful tedium reigns supreme.
It’s not all bad, to be sure: the choral writing is very straightforward and, for the most part, sounds good (composers take note: this is no doubt one of the reasons why Mr. Jenkins has become so widely performed). The orchestral writing features some colorful touches, particularly in the writing for percussion in the “African” movements (setting words by Nelson Mandela and MLK). But none of it adds up to anything convincing: one movement (“Evening Prayer”) wouldn’t be out of place accompanying scenes from a cartoon or a car commercial; another (the optional Interlude, “Solitude”) is a mini, neo-Romantic violin concerto (and arguably the most interesting music of the score, even featuring a modulation!); while the big, opening march-like section (“Fanfara”) attempts to ratchet up the emotional energy of a rather lackadaisical text (various translation of – big surprise here – the word “peace”) with tattoos that wouldn’t be out of place in, ironically, a military parade.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the score – and this is significant, considering the redundant quality of the music – is the organization of its text. Now I’m the last person to knock Anne Frank or Jesus, but lining up more than an hour’s worth of lines that run “Peace is the fragile meeting/Of two souls in harmony” (as in the seventh movement) or “Dove of peace fly here to find us/Feathers softly stroking the earth” (as in the twelfth) doesn’t do much for either narrative development or for providing some sort of meaningful application. How do we achieve peace? Why haven’t we been able to manage it these last how many thousand years? Yes, the end of the (musically) tendentious closing anthem, “Peace Triumphant,” includes the command “Embrace the spirit of peace and thousands of souls around you will be saved,” but the cumulative effect of The Peacemakers libretto is that of an impotent mass rally that, instead of offering new ideas to solve age-old problems, simply reverts to an attitude of “just stop and get along, already.”
This is a pity, really, because the subject of war and peace can be dealt with meaningfully, both musically and dramatically. Two of the best examples from the 20th century classical canon come from two very different composers: Benjamin Britten and Leonard Bernstein. Britten’s 1962 War Requiem is uncompromising in its musical and poetic values, setting Winfred Owens’s harrowing anti-war verse in juxtaposition with the Roman liturgy for the dead. Bernstein’s 1971 Mass is in many ways its polar opposite: vernacular in language and steeped in popular musical idioms. It possesses, in fact, very much of the “mass rally” feel of The Peacemakers, but with musical and textual conviction to boot – and even a proposed solution: Bernstein’s theme of putting faith into action is at once vivid and subtle, so subtle that it has often been lost on critics and commentators since the work’s premiere.
I got to the end of The Peacemakers wishing for much more of Lenny’s or Britten’s honesty, and a lot less of the bland commercialism that seems to pervade much of Jenkins’s music. Maybe he just needs some more time to mature: if universal peace doesn’t come about in the next decade – and the evidence suggests that it won’t – he can write a third sequel to The Armed Man: this a nice, gritty, dramatic one that tells us what, exactly, to do to finally get it. Wishful thinking? Perhaps – but no more hopeful than much of what drives The Peacemakers.
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