I f the number and variety of versions—and widespread and enduring popularity—can be any criterion of greatness, the tale of Judith, it must be conceded, is one of the great stories of the world’s literature.”
— Edna Purdie, The Story of Judith in German and English Literature.
The staged musical production of ‘Judith’ by Katarina Livljanić and members of the ensemble Dialogos tells the biblical tale of the beautiful enchantress, Judith, who seduces and then beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes to liberate the Hebrews. The score also includes a medieval 5-string fiddle, a lirica (Croatian traditional stringed instrument, tuned in ‘archaic’ manner), and archaic flutes. The beauty and Croatian authenticity of Livljanić’s voice, the narrative and discursive power of the instrumental parts, the elegance of the staging and lighting, and the poetics of the carefully devised, historically informed Glagolitic text (and translation that is sympathetic to the needs of the audience, as opposed to Livljanić’s fellow scholars)—all of these combine to achieve a compelling artistic result, just as with ‘Vision of Tondal’ and other of Dialogos’s productions.
Character development in Livljanić’s version of ‘Judith’ is fuller than in the simplified accounts of the story that are familiar to us, and far more complex than in the synoptic artworks through which most of us are acquainted with it ... Klimt and Caravaggio and Reubens and so many others.
Holofernes, the general of the Babylonian King Nebuchadrezzar, whose decapitation by Judith is referenced in the Old Testament. Holofernes, the powerful general of King Nebuchadnezzar’s army. A number of provinces of the Second Jewish Commonwealth had withheld their assistance from Nebuchadnezzar and his government—had declined to join the coalition of the willing. So now comes Holofernes, the guy Nebuchadnezzar dispatches to give them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
The historical general did lay siege to Bethulia. The city was on the verge of surrendering but was saved by Judith, a beautiful Hebrew widow who preyed upon Holofernes’s huge vanity, deceived him, drank him under the table, sliced off his head in bed. Judith, she who then returned to Bethulia displaying the severed head, after which the Hebrews went on to beat Nebuchadnezzar’s now-generalless army. Morals: Be careful who you drink with, and be sure to drink responsibly.
Ensemble Dialogos- Katarina Livljanić (voice)
- Albrecht Maurer (5-string fiddle)
- Norbert Rodenkirchen (flutes)
- Sanda Herzic (staging, scenography and costumes)
- Marie Bellot (lighting design and direction)
Livljanić’s voice—alternately, narrator/seductress/warrior/mind/spirit—leads the listener through this biblical story of Judith, transformed here into historically-informed music theatre, instantiating characters who hail from the old biblical and Croatian Glagolitic texts to become amazingly relevant to contemporary society—both in terms of gender issues, and in terms of calling into question what is ‘justified violence’ and whether or not there is such a thing as a ‘just war’. Renaissance Glagolitic chant forms the musical structure of the performance. Accompanying Livljanić’s voice, the medieval lirica and 5-string fiddle and flutes give Marko Marulić’s Glagolitic text vivid, dramatic color.
Dialogos’s Judith is essentially ‘Eros and Thanatos’ rendered using fragments of medieval Glagolitic ‘disputationes’ that alternate with the main ‘Judith and Holofernes’ story. These interpolations are a narratorly gambit to reveal the characters’ thoughts; for example, as Holofernes’ head is severed, his thoughts ‘separate’ into a dialogue between his body and his soul. Another inner dialogue—between Judith’s mind and her soul, a sort of schizoid soliloquy—occurs as she prays for God to help her kill Holofernes.
According to Livljanić’s program notes, the ancient text of Judith survives without music, and the poetic metrical structure of the text closely corresponds to the meter of archaic Glagolitic melodies used for storytelling in medieval Dalmatia. The text refers to texts sung in the liturgical offices, and these clues enabled Livljanić to reconstruct, using Dalmatian and southern Italian musical sources, melodies plausibly correlated with indications in the original Judith text. This liturgical repertoire, sung in Croatian Church Slavonic, did function in the Latin mass, and was preserved over the centuries in manuscripts written in
Glagolitic in medieval Croatia.
Livljanić performs all of the roles and uses a variety of vocal effects and a few costume changes to keep the roles distinct. Surpassing the phenomenal scholarship that goes into preparing their productions, the musicianship and historically-informed performance of the members of Dialogos ensemble are iconic.
F rom the standpoint of the history of rhetoric, the presence of dramatic elements in discussions of torture presents a tremendous predicament for scholars, who have long been troubled by Aristotle’s casual inclusion of torture as one of the factual, ‘inartificial’, or extrinsic proofs to be discovered by orators during the inventional process... Inartificial proofs are those which ‘have not been furnished by ourselves but were already in existence, such as witnesses...’ What is so striking about the evidence ... is that, during rhetorical ‘inventio’, the ostensibly extrinsic proof that torture represents functions as an avowedly unreliable intrinsic proof. The rhetorician theorizes the inventional proof of torture as a verisimilar process that causes torture to appear to be an unshakable extrinsic proof, when in reality it is just as ‘intrinsic’, just as ‘creative’, just as fictional, just as ‘dramatic’ as other modes of rhetorical invention... Its ‘facts’ are evaluated on the basis of their potential persuasiveness as fashioned probabilities and then, in a process of reaffirmation, judged as factual on the basis of their verisimilitude. At issue, then, is less the truth of the law or the historical occurrence than the spectacular probabilities of the rhetorical presentation, which is born of materials extracted through punishment... Torture enters the scenario with its own role to play in the transformation of hypothesis into fact.”
— Jody Enders, Medieval Theater of Cruelty, p. 28.
Let’s do something I alluded to in the
previous CMT post: illuminate this musical performance by drawing parallels between it and several works of art. Most of us know the story of Judith primarily through the famous representations of ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ in paintings.
The Christian church fathers embraced Judith, but went to extra trouble to ensure that the story was cast in a certain light that was favorable to the Church. When the Church hierarchy commissioned paintings and sculptures of Judith, the artists were compelled to make Judith into not so much an allegory of faith as an allegory of Christian virtue writ large—especially that prototypical virtue that most fascinates priests, chastity (as in the Cranach the Elder painting above). And then came Artemisia Gentileschi. Artemisia, without the strings of any Church commission attached. Artemisia, who had herself been raped. Artemisia Gentileschi did not make ‘nicey-nicey’.
Artemisia Gentileschi in 1620 was the first to paint a ‘feminist’ Judith. Her father Orazio had also painted Judith—a conventional Judith. Michelangelo, Botticelli and Caravaggio had painted Judith. Donatello had sculpted Judith. Gentileschi’s painting is dark, darker and more dramatic than Caravaggio’s and others’ Judiths. A theatrical spotlight is trained on the action, on the struggling limbs. The shadows on Judith’s arms force us to acknowledge the sawing, crunching, ‘why-is-this-neck-gristle-and-bone-so-tough?’ sword action she uses to get his head off. The extent of the blood splayed around the scene gives us a pretty clear idea that Gentileschci believes this was not a quick death, nor should it have been. Nor was this murder a workmanly job ineptly done. No, there is a realist’s quality of gratuitous suffering; of ‘extraordinary rendition’ as they say; of cold-blooded torture. The feminist righteous violence of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting(s) is very close to the moral quality that Livljanić projects in the Dialogos production of Judith. Livljanić’s text has Holofernes’s dying going on and on...
As portrayed by Gentileschi and by Livljanić, Judith’s violence is righteous—premeditated but justified—vigorously justified ex-post facto by Judith. But not some pious, patriotic perp intent upon pleasing the patriarchs. This is cool, calculated, cathartic revenge by a woman who has been raped. ‘You, Asshole, are not f’ing getting away. You are f’ing going to die, right here, right now.’ And, naturally, heroic, cathartic righteous horror is invariably exciting. After all, ‘bloodied virtuosity’ is titillating, as American (and other—) filmmakers seem to know so well. The ‘pride goes before the fall’ tragic position of Holofernes’s arrogance and hubris just seems not to have many ‘takers’ these days. Nobody views the character and deeds of Judith as subversive and offensive anymore. Nobody thinks of Holofernes. We are all self-vindicating terrorists now. We are all Judiths or would-be Judiths if given the chance. Just not as chaste as a Church father or an Imam might prefer...
Gustav Klimt’s Judith paintings have instead a wasted, absinthe-debauched, sybaritically-bedecked golden Judith-the-Ho tucking the still-astonished dead head of Holofernes under her arm as if it were a handbag. The dramatic lighting is completely lacks the excitement and action of Gentileschi. Judith is here quiet and sated, as though she were a tiger or other predator? “Or the Hillbilly of Wasilla, Sarah Palin,” as one of the commenters in the discussion group that preceded the Kansas City Dialogos performance last night said. “What?! What are you looking at! I did not order these clothes from Neiman Marcus! No, siree! They’re goin’ back. Givin’ ‘em to charity.” Palin’s face and hair even look quite a lot like the Klimt Judith... Yikes.)
Klimt’s Judith gazes off beyond us; she has no regard for us. She appears to be daydreaming, and it is not likely that she is dreaming of murdering generals to save her people or build an actual oil pipeline. She is detached from the damage she has wrought. Klimt shows us not only Judith-the-Ho but also Judith-the-Psychopath and Judith-the-Jihadist. Klimt’s Judith ‘had’ to do what she did, just as Anthony Perkins ‘had’ to kill Janet Leigh’s character in ‘Psycho’, complete with her schizophrenic interior dialogue and ‘disputationes’.
By contrast, Caravaggio’s Judith is a tentative, horrified, ‘how-can-I-manage-to-finish-this?’ withdrawing, backward-staggering, agast Judith. Not a ‘psycho’ at all. And totally not ‘ho’. She stands back from Holofernes, disgusted—as much by her apprehension of her moral ‘dirtiness’ in the situation as by the physical horror of it. Whereas Gentileschi’s and Klimt’s Judiths are entirely self-assured—self-possessed with feminist and psychotic conviction, respectively; righteously unafraid—Caravaggio’s Judith comprehends that no one comes home ‘clean’. Righteous though your cause may have been, well-intentioned or not as you may have been before embarking on your project, your act has inscribed you now, marked you for life. You will never again be the same. You can never roll back the clock. The deed was morally dirty; ‘just war’ was an elusive myth, not a black-and-white certainty as you might have thought before. Livljanić manages to import some of this feeling into the Dialogos Judith performance. Various reviewers use words like ‘metamorphosis’ or ‘transformation’ or other literary expressions to describe it. Me, I don’t buy it. To me, Livljanić is a realist, one who considers that the historical Judith was—and all of us today are—complex, highly spontaneous ... concurrently ebbing and flowing with various motives and reasons and conflicts. Our confusion and messiness and internal conflicts in general don’t tend to resolve in transformative ways. We’re perpetually ‘becoming’ but we seldom transform or metamorphose. We just extemporize; we just act; we just live then with the consequences. As one of the
‘disputationes’ between Judith’s mind and her soul tells us, our abstract souls and embodied minds are old and not likely to change or suddenly become un-confused:
W hy are you confusing me, my soul? And her soul answered: Oh, how greatly you confused my heart … I have been given to the body to live with it, and the body cheated me… The mind responded: My soul, your excuse is not good, because your body is made of earth, and you are made of wisdom… Therefore, [you must] overcome your body. The soul said: Woe to me that I hoped to receive from you a consolation, and instead I receive even bigger sadness. You know I have been living on this world for many years… I cannot overcome my body. It is older, cannot move, and cannot do any good...”
— ‘Disputatione’ (‘Agony’; a schizoid Glagolitic soliloquy between Judith’s ‘soul’ and her incarnate ‘mind’), ‘Judith’, text by Marko Marulić, adapted and extended by Katarina Livljanić.
W hat more can we make of this—in attempting to understand this production through parallels we can find in other works of art? Well, Livljanić’s rendering of Judith is not a ‘play’. It is instead an act of political-activist remembrance, just as Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings are acts of protest and activist remembrance. It is an 80-minute meditation on ‘wars of choice’ and ill-conceived pre-emptive wars, as contrasted with necessary wars and ‘just’ morally-defensible wars. Livljanić’s vivid exhortations are not mere scholarly play-acting for us to ‘admire’ for their aesthetic value. No. They are powerful admonishments for us to engage in Shoah-like ‘remembering-so-as-never-to-forget’.
W hy is it more important to remember acts of genocide than simply to learn about them? If literary works are truly the bearers of ontology, then what must be our conduct toward them?”
— Amy Hungerford, Holocaust of Texts.
In other words, this is not a docudrama that enables us merely to learn about an historically-explicit, militarily important act of dudicide by some hot chick in ancient Bethulia in the mavericky Second Jewish Commonwealth. No, this historically-informed artwork comes fully armed, locked-and-loaded as a bearer of political ontology: Livljanić is ballistically instructing us about what our conduct ought to be toward our ontology of justice—and about how we ought to be maintaining that ontology (and that justice) in a coherent, continent way. This is not art-as-entertainment or scholarly historiography tarted up as elite musical theater. It is beautiful and diverting, yes. But, more than that, it is art that advances specific and important political, moral, and ontological viewpoints—ones that Livljanić and her colleagues want audiences to take to heart and act upon. It is Art with an Agenda. It is a powerful essay on feminism through the ages, directly relevant to contemporary issues having to do with ‘just war’ as an abstract concept, and with specific unjust wars in-progress today, and with civil society and the problem of terrorism (terrorism that is sponsored by governments, like Nebuchadnezzar’s government or other ones in modern times; terrorism that is undertaken by groups other than the State; or terrorism that is undertaken by individuals, psychotic/psychopathic or otherwise). If you have an opportunity to attend one of Dialogos’s performances, do not miss it!
D id an on-stage execution really take place in 1549 in the city of Tournai? According to somewhat questionable evidence about the production of Judith and Holofernes in that city, the actor playing Judith actually beheaded a convicted murderer who assumed (ever so briefly——) the role of Holofernes, just long enough to be killed during the play, to thunderous applause.”
— Jody Enders, Medieval Theater of Cruelty, p. 202.
- Katarina Livljanić’s ‘Judith’ at Friends of Chamber Music
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C ahun also questions Judith’s response to the applause she receives when she emerges from Holofernes’s tent holding his head—horrified at having killed the man she loves and at their response, which she experiences at first like ‘a child whom one mistreats.’ ‘People!,’ she exclaims without much heroism, ‘What do we have in common? Who allowed you to invade my private life? To judge my acts and find them beautiful? To burden me—I who am so weak and weary, eternally hunted—with your infernal [God-sappy] glory?’ How can we know for certain, Cahun seems to be asking, what Judith’s motivations and desires were—the only person in her town willing to enter Holofernes’s tent? How can we know that Judith lost interest in sex once she was widowed, and that she became pious and chaste and shared her townspeople’s dislike and disdain for the enemy commander? Are not these assumptions based on clichés tied to sexuality? In Cahun’s telling of the Judith story, Holofernes is bestialized before he is dismembered. Judith is portrayed as ‘terrible,’ although Cahun sees her also as ‘abject’. Leiris later admiringly labels her a ‘patriot prostitute,’ but Cahun sees neither patriotism nor prostitution in Judith’s desire.”
— Kate Conley, From Sadistic Judith to Human Frontier, 2004.
