Little Match Girl Passion- Bridge Voices
The Falls Church Episcopal, 166 E Broad St, Falls Church, VA 22046
Bridge Voices presents the Pulitzer Prize winning work The Little Match Girl Passion, by David Lang. Lang writes: My piece is called "The Little Match Girl Passion" and it sets Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Little Match Girl" in the format of Bach's "Saint Matthew Passion," interspersing Andersen's narrative with my versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach's Passion. The text is by me, after texts by Han Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The word passion comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus—rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus's, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.