THE BINDING OF ISAAC: A new solo cantata by Delvyn Case

Delvyn Case * Bruce Herman * John Skillen

Sunday 10th October 2021
All Saints Church, Friend Street, Amesbury, Massachusetts

All Saints Church (Anglican) in Amesbury, in collaboration with the Studio for Art, Faith & History, hosted the world premiere of a musical composition that places us in the midst of God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac (as recounted in Genesis, chapter 22).

The video of the complete cantata (duration 22 minutes) is now available on YouTube at this link:
"The Binding of Isaac According to the Elohist" by Delvyn Case.

For three millennia, the scriptural story—known in Hebraic tradition as the “binding” of Isaac—has provoked Jews, Christians, as well as Muslims, to explore questions central to their lives as People of the Book. What is faith? What is the nature of God? What does God require of us? How do our Scriptures reveal those answers?

This new solo cantata by Boston-based composer Delvyn Case distills this powerful story into an unflinching dramatic depiction of the dialogues between a father, a son, and the Almighty God.

Written for an ensemble of six instruments and a single soprano voice, this brief cantata can be performed in a concert hall. But our premiere version places the musical drama in the liturgy of the Sunday morning worship, adding a deeper resonance to the Sacrifice of a greater only-begotten Son, a Second Isaac, remembered in every celebration of the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Providing the backdrop of both liturgy and cantata is the twelve-foot-high painting of the Crucifixion by contemporary painter Bruce Herman. In Herman’s evocative image, Adam bends over at the foot of the Cross, hands raised. The figure of Mary stands in deep meditation on both sides of the Cross, young in one side, older in the other. Herman’s altarpiece deepens our understanding of Jesus as the Second Adam, and of Mary—she who said “Be it unto me according to Thy Word”—as the obedient Second Eve.

Conducted by the composer, the sung texts are performed by soprano Rose Hegele, one of Boston’s most sought-after performers of contemporary music, and six musicians drawn from ensembles such as the Handel and Haydn Society and the Boston Pops.

Visit Dr. Case’s website for his own account of “The Binding of Isaac according to the Elohist,”
including the texts from the scriptures, set for solo soprano. Case has also made available the score of the cantata.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

DELVYN CASE is a composer, conductor, scholar, writer, speaker, and educator whose work explores the intersections between music and the Christian faith. His works have been performed by over 80 orchestras across the world, as well as by numerous Grammy-winning artists, and have been heard at the Kennedy Center and on NPR’s Performance Today.

Case is the founder of Deus Ex Musica, an international, ecumenical organization that promotes sacred music as a resource for learning and spiritual growth. He has collaborated on projects with the Yale Institute for Sacred Music, Harvard Divinity School, Gordon College, Hebrew College, and the Parish of St Martin in the Fields (London), among many others. His essays have appeared in The Christian Century, Sojourners, Books and Culture, and numerous online magazines.

A graduate of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, Case has served on the music faculties of Eastern Nazarene College, Boston College, Northeastern University, and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Music at Wheaton College in Norton, MA, and is a member of historic Old South Church in Boston.

BRUCE HERMAN is gifted not only as an artist and teacher but as an author and public speaker. He is recognized as a leading figure in recovering the place of artists of faith in the public square as well as in the life of the church.

To bring together a painting and a musical composition is not new to Herman. Recent projects have been a collaborative response to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, with painter Makoto Fujimura and composer Christopher Theofanidis, and a stunning collection of portraits of Ordinary Saints, with poems by Malcolm Guite, and musical responses by J.A.C. Redford.

Herman’s art has been shown nationally in all major cities in the United States and internationally in Italy, England, Japan, and Hong Kong. His work is in many public collections, including the Vatican Museums in Rome, Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts, Hammer Museum in L.A., and many regional museum and university collections.

Herman’s essays are found in numerous books and journals, including IMAGE, Comment, Books and Culture, and most recently in God in the Modern Wing: Viewing Art with Eyes of Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2021). Much of his art and writings are published in Through Your Eyes: Dialogues on the Paintings of Bruce Herman (Eerdmans Publishing, 2013). Herman has taught for three decades and curated over 100 exhibitions for Gordon College as Gallery Director and Art Collection manager. He holds the endowed Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts, and serves presently on the Board of Directors of IMAGE journal.

In his notes for the installation of Second Adam in All Saints Church, Herman writes:
As an artist of Christian faith, I’ve found myself and my work to be culturally homeless due to the loss of a place in our culture for sincere religious painting. As the art historian James Elkins wrote in his book On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, there is essentially no room in current art discourse and practice for “meant” religious imagery, whereas the quotation or “appropriation” of religious works of the past with an ironic edge is considered normal. As a painter who desires above all else to give glory to our Lord, this has created a fruitful tension: it has become counter-cultural—“taboo”—to pursue imagery that overtly investigates Christian iconography without irony or sophisticated double entendre. Suddenly I am a rebel!

Herman offers these notes on Second Adam:

Central panel: The iconography of Second Adam is taken from Scripture—Jesus is the second or “final Adam” (1 Cor.15:45ff). Whereas Adam sinned, breaking faith with God the Father, Jesus is sinless. Adam played at being a god by providing for himself a forbidden fruit, but Jesus is truly God-man, obediently depending for his wellbeing upon the perfect provision of the Father: “My food and drink is to do the will of the Father” (John 4:34). In the foreground of the altarpiece Adam is bent-over with the hardship of labor to provide food (Gen.3:17ff), bitter fruit of disobedience—whereas Jesus is “lifted up” upon the Cross drawing all people to himself (John 3:14) and his body and blood become “true food and drink” for the Church (John 6:55). Adam holds in his hands a large vine, a kind of “tree of knowledge,” which doubles as a great snake—curling and rising to become the Tree of the Cross and the bronze serpent which Moses lifted-up in the wilderness as a cure for the deadly snake bites—Israel’s punishment for rejection of God’s perfect provision: manna (Numbers 21). Christ is the real manna and final sacrifice (in place of Abraham’s dear son Isaac) God’s dear son, providing the only possible redemption from the catastrophic Fall from grace that besets us.

Left panel: Mary is shown in an enclosed and gated garden (traditional symbol of her virginity) and standing in contemplation. She ponders all things and treasures them in her heart (Luke 2:19). In this panel she is a young girl at Cana—where the first of Jesus’ miracles was to happen—surrounded by large water jars for used for purification. Those same jars will be filled someday with perfect wine, made by the original vintner and inventor of grapes—an adumbration of the coming wine of the Eucharist.

Right panel: Mary is shown here, later in life, as Mater Dolorosa—sorrowful mother—mirroring the younger Mary on the left, still a contemplative but now remembering the ultimate gift that her Son gave: his life for the life of the world. In front of Mary is Eve, also bent over like Adam, having experienced the hard labor of childbirth—also the result of the Fall—with the “second Eve,” the Blessed Virgin Mary, Theotokos or God-bearer having given birth to the One who liberates us all from the curse.

Herman describes on his website the genesis of Second Adam as one of two large altarpieces, entitled Magnificat, the “fruit of several years of studio work and research/meditation upon the life of the Virgin Mary and her Son, our savior Jesus Christ.” The paintings “were begun in a bottega-style course that I taught in Orvieto, Italy in 2003. The panels were prepared by apprentices in the traditional manner: many layers of traditional marble-dust and chalk gesso, with each layer carefully sanded and prepared for painting. Townsfolk from Orvieto posed as models, and students participated in my research for the project.” The two altarpieces were installed at the Monastery San Paolo in Orvieto for two years between 2009 and 2011, after which they were shipped to the States, where they have been exhibited in places across the country, not yet with a permanent home.