Music, the most disembodied of the arts, knows the straightest way to the heart. A song can make you cry quicker than anything in the world: that is the secret of music’s dramatic power, even while it remains ungraspable. So it is natural that the events of Holy Week and Easter have inspired some of the deepest, most tragic and most joyous pieces of music the world has ever heard.

I grew up singing in churches, and have stark memories of performing Tomás Luis de Victoria’s almost deliriously austere sixteenth-century Tenebrae Responsories amid the cavernous shadows of a dark cathedral on Holy Week evenings. These 18 motets, six each for the evenings of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, were published in 1585 and have a brooding intensity that anticipates the dazzling death-cult gloom of Spanish baroque. Victoria was writing at a time when music attained astonishing levels of spiritual interiority, a pure polyphony whose apparently simple idiom allows for immense emotional effects.

The overwhelming emotion is grief, attended by a sort of hopeless anger. The texts combine scriptural narrative with reflection and first-person monologue, performed alternately by choir and soloists. Victoria writes with utter conviction: nothing showy, but the expressive possibilities of rhythmic and harmonic clash and conflict are used, sparingly, to create enormous, jarring effects: you feel, in your gut, the bite of physical and mental pain; this is the concentrated essence of Holy Week.
A world away, but sharing some of Victoria’s qualities of economy and unclouded directness of purpose, is Seven Words by Sofia Gubaidulina.