One of the perpetual criticisms of musicals that their detractors make is that they are so annoyingly unrealistic: “Why do they just burst into song in the middle of the action?” It strains the willing suspension of disbelief. Plus, it’s cringe.

Yet this will not do for a Theopolitan audience. When one is at a Theopolis conference or meetup– I’ve now been to two– bursting into song in the middle of going about your day is precisely what you do. Lauds, Sext, Vespers: You chant psalms, three times a day.

Indeed, in an interview I did with Brittany Petruzzi, the instigator of this Conversation, several months ago, she described her own Canticlear Project of YouTube psalm-chanting as fundamentally musical-theater influenced: What if we chanted psalms in a way that invited the emotional, rational, and narrative engagement that we more commonly (well, some of us) experience in listening to or singing musicals? Brittany is, in her chanting, deliberately introducing a musical-theater style, and this is suitable for what it is that psalm chanting in fact does.

Oklahoma, famously, is the first musical in which the songs don’t serve as emotional punctuation or summary, but instead advance the action of the play. Psalms, when we enter into them, do the same: Pascal notes that, though petitionary prayer may seem strange to us (why should we ask, when God surely knows what’s best for us and in any case governs the world by his own will, his providence?) it is in petitionary prayer that we see that God has “lent His creatures the dignity of causality.” We pray to “advance the action” of the Kingdom. And in chanting psalms, we do what Curly and Laurey and Ado Annie do: we sing to advance the action of the story.

As dismissive as people are about musicals, they are also often dismissive of heaven: Just being angels sitting around on clouds playing harps? That doesn’t sound very interesting.

Well, of course this is, and we are quick to point out that it is, any number of misunderstandings rolled into one: we are not angels and won’t become them; heaven is important but it’s not the end of the world; and we will surely be, as the Book of Revelation and as Christian anthropology imply, doing proper human work in this New Jerusalem, this city at the heart of a planet and a cosmos that are still just beginning to be what they ought to be.

But still: the tension between this Tim Kellerish “New Jerusalem with a theater district” and the Beatific Vision is there, and one place that that contrast or mystery shows itself is in the description of what is going on now in the Heavenly Throne-room. It is, as Brittany has pointed out, a participatory musical performance.

This is our telos: a musical-theatrical experience, a liturgy in which we participate as singers and performers, presenting our selves and our work. The work of the new Jerusalem is liturgy, the work of the people: it is a work that is play, it is a musical work that is presented before God.

It is also, it may be interesting to note, the work of the angels, who aren’t sitting around on clouds with harps, but who most definitely are singing along. My friend Urban Hannon, in a paper he presented last weekend in France, invites us to consider St Dionysus the Areopagite’s division of the angels into choirs.  “Do notice,” he says,

that the word “choir” is especially appropriate here, since the noblest work of all the angels—even more important than their purifying, illuminating, perfecting—is the laus perennis, the praise of God. The action of the good angels is first and foremost a liturgical action—as ours is meant to be too. And indeed, it is for the sake of God’s glory that the higher angels assist those subject to them in the hierarchy, inviting them to worship God and enabling them to do so as beautifully as possible.

It is this laus perennis that we enter into when we chant psalms at Theopolis conferences, that monastic orders enter into in their singing of the divine office.

This observation comes as Urban is writing about something that may seem unconnected: the “politics of hell.” The demons have a politics, he notes, because they are the same kind (so to speak) of creatures as the angels, and of course angels (contra James Madison) have a politics.

Angelic politics are precisely carried out in this shared liturgical music-service: the nature of all political authority, properly employed, is for the superior to draw the inferior towards God, towards his own fulfilment, and towards goodness. Angels do this, in their liturgical song, with each other all the time: this somehow goes on even while they’re doing all kinds of other things as well: fighting demons, sorting out earthly politics, announcing things to humans, paying incognito visits, plus all the innumerable other tasks of guardianship and communication and administration that they are given to do by God. 

What angels do for one another is, according to St. Dionysus, described in three terms: purging, uniting, illuminating. The higher angels draw the lower angels ever upwards, purifying them and uniting them to God. They also illuminate them: and the means of this illumination is speech. They communicate. And their communication, we may suppose, is in speech set to music.

It is suitable that this cooperative musical performance serves as a vehicle for or expression of politics. After all, when political theorists describe the nature of the common good, the concept at the heart of Christian political theology, the most frequent illustration that they use is that of an orchestra. A common good is the kind of good where you can’t take your own part of it away and enjoy it by yourself; it is an experience of mutual enjoyment and delight. In singing in a choir, playing in an orchestra, you are enjoying something that you can’t enjoy on your own. Imagine singing only Jean Valjean’s opening line in what you were under the impression would be a “One Day More” flash mob at a mall in Florida, and then no one else joins in. But when they do…

This is the common good of musical theater: the political common good is that kind of good but transposed to living together in a polity, in the justice and friendship of a city.

It’s an appropriate metaphor as well because musical performance is the go-to illustration for how virtue ethics works, and how freedom does: you are, before you learn how, not free to play the piano. As you go through the arduous and often annoying task of scales and lessons, painful, constraining and uncreative as they seem, you are in fact becoming free to play: and it begins, as you grow in skill, to feel like play, to feel natural. This is your second nature. This is what growth in virtue, including political virtue, is like: it’s annoying, it can be hard– until it’s not, until you begin to be able to be free.

In watching a live musical performance, we are, by a pure gift, put in the position to almost participate in this, though we don’t have the skill of the performers: they give us their skill, their experience. It is a common expeirence in watching and listening to musicals to feel as though you are yourself part of the action, and indeed, as Brittany points out, in some sense we are: by the strange alchemy of theater, the audience gives back to the performers. We “participate in and even shape the action, even if the actors never break the fourth wall,” as she writes. You probably can’t sing like Terry Mann. But you might, listening to him, forget that. As Brittany quotes Eliot, this is the “music heard so deeply / that it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts.”

We have always known that musical theater is the appropriate representation of and vehicle for both political and religious life. The origin of musical theater was in the Greek liturgical/civic performances such as the Dionysiads: the city is re-dedicated to its various patron deities in a creative and complete performance. If you’re going to be reading Sophokles or Euripides, please don’t forget that when the playscript says “Chorus,” it means it. Herakles does not make sense unless you understand it as a piece of musical theater: the wailing of the aulos is what brings on the madness that leads him to kill his family. It was very effective, apparently: it won the City Dionysiad in 416 BC.  It was this kind of experience, this offering, that Wagner sought to recreate in his reinvention of the opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk, “total art,” offered for the rededication of Germany to its old gods. 

But we are not Athenians, and we are not proto-fascists. And so I’m going to turn now to looking at two musicals that are very distinctly Gesamtkunstwerken for Christians.

Listen to me, I have beautiful dreams I can spin you…

Muscials do the thing that nearly every body of art or human endeavor does: they speak to each other. They are in a tradition; they are what Alasdair MacIntyre would call a “practice.” People who write musicals love them, and have listened to them, and so it is a rare musical indeed that doesn’t include easter egg references, whether musical or lyrical, to others.

Within the subgenre of political musicals this almost seems to be more common: Hamilton is absolutely addicted to these, calling back to a key scene and song in the earlier American Revolutionary musical 1776 with a line in “The Adams Administration;” [NOTE: MARGINALLY FAMILY FRIENDLY] apparently an earlier version of the show had had an entire anti-John-Adams rap [NOTE: NOT FAMILY FRIENDLY].

The most compelling of these conversations to me is not about the American Revolution but the French: that between Nan Knighton and Frank Wildhorn’s Scarlet Pimpernel and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Les Miserables. If Les Mis is moderately anti-revolutionary– certainly more anti-revolutionary than the novel, and the English version of the musical is more anti-revolutionary than the French– The Scarlet Pimpernel, like nearly all Knighton, Wildhorn and Jack Kelly’s musicals, is decidedly so: it is all-but-reactionary, in the most joyful and life-affirming way.

Let’s start with Pimpernel: Chauvelin, the Jacobin confederate of Danton and Robespierre, is hunting, in these latter days of the Terror, the elusive Englishman who has been spiriting French aristocrats out of Paris. He’s bitter at his abandonment by the actress Marguerite St. Just, who had been his comrade and lover in the heady earlier days of revolutionary conspiracy: one can picture them, several years earlier, in an 1780s version of the Cafe ABC, the coffeehouse to which Enjolras and Grantaire would, in a later revolution, bring Marius.

The zeal of revolutionary political philosophy is in the background of the musical, and at the heart of Marguerite and Chauvelin’s own backstory. They are part of the generation that the Communards of Enjolras’ June Rebellion of 1832 looked back on as their inspiration. And Chauvelin looks back as well:

I remember days full of restlessness and fury
I remember nights that were drunk on dreams
I remember someone who hungered for the glory
I remember her, but it seems she’s gone…

Marguerite, don’t forget I know who you are
We were cut from the same surly star
Like two jewels in the sky sharing fire
Where’s the girl so alive and still aching for more?
We had dreams that were worth dying for
We were caught in the eye of a storm…

But Chauvelin’s own inspiration is gone, drowned in the blood that he’s shed since those coffeehouse days. He recalls his earlier idealism, the revolutionary fervor that once fired him: the idealism is gone but the fire remains, the distillation of the revolutionary spirit. In his own “I Want” number, he sings:

I wasn’t born to walk on water.
I wasn’t born to sack and slaughter.
But on my soul, I wasn’t born
To stoop to scorn and knuckle under.

A man can learn to steal some thunder
a man can learn to work some wonder,
And when the gauntlet’s down, it’s time
To rise and climb the sky…

This song is a parallel, a quite deliberate parallel, with one written twelve years earlier for the character of Javert. Chauvelin, here, is, even more than a parallel with Enjolras, a parallel with Javert: fifty years earlier than Javert, serving a cause utterly opposed to Javert’s, having passed through the disillusionment that Javert has not yet faced, not when we meet him in the first act of Les Miserables.

Javert’s politics are about as far from Chauvelin’s as they might be. A police detective under the restored Bourbon monarchy, his commitment to justice and order is precisely what drives his pursuit of Valjean, and, later, his opposition to the Friends of the ABC, the communards.

In his austerity, his commitment to justice despite all bloodletting, he is not entirely distant, even in our initial impression, from Robespierre, the Sea-Green Incorruptible. But unlike Robespierre, unlike Chauvelin, he surely would have thought of himself as a good Catholic. Indeed, his “I want” song is in the form of a prayer:

There
out in the darkness,
a fugitive running
Fallen from God, fallen from grace
God be my witness
I never shall yield
Till we come face to face
Till we come face to face

He knows his way in the dark
But mine is the way of the Lord
And those who follow the path of the righteous
Shall have their reward
And if they fall as Lucifer fell
The flame, the sword!

Stars
In your multitudes
Scarce to be counted
Filling the darkness
With order and light
You are the sentinels
Silent and sure
Keeping watch in the night
Keeping watch in the night

His worldview is in many ways that of St. Thomas; his stars are, at least implicitly, something like the angelic intelligences of the angels whose serried ranks stretch in precise hierarchy from low to high in St. Thomas’ adaptation of St. Dionysus: as Hannon writes,

As for the relations between these perfect substances, since each is a species unto himself, no two are alike, and—see Metaphysics Book Eight—therefore no two are equal. Each one is either higher or lower than any other one, such that they all come together to form a great linear hierarchy, a single-file line from the highest seraph down to the lowest guardian angel, with an innumerable multitude in between.

Or, paraphrased:

You know your place in the sky
You hold your course and your aim
And each in your season
Returns and returns
And is always the same
And if you fall as Lucifer fell
You fall in flame!

As the song develops we see something dark, something off at the heart of it. Terence Mann performs this impeccably: it is the beauty and goodness of the vision of order, the careful, Bach-like metrical scales in the earlier part of the song that provide a contrast to the harsh edge that comes in later:

And so it has been
For so it is written
On the doorway to paradise
That those who falter and those who fall
Must pay the price!

Lord let me find him
That I may see him
Safe behind bars
I will never rest
Till then, this I swear
This I swear by the stars!

The darkness that the music hints at is expanded and explained in the reprise. Valjean has spared Javert’s life, has rescued him. And Javert can’t bear it:

Damned if I’ll live in the debt of a thief
Damned if I’ll yield at the end of the chase
I am the law and the law is not mocked
I’ll spit his pity right back in his face
There is nothing on earth that we share
It is either Valjean or Javert

He is invited, as Valjean was earlier invited – and the music is a deliberate echo of Valjean’s own conversion – to receive mercy, to receive his life as a gift. And he won’t. His love of the law was hollow: the heart of his motivation is revealed as not charity, but pride. As Father Serge-Tomas Bonino, Urban Hannon’s professor at the Angelicum in Rome, describes Satan’s own response to the invitation to take his place in the celestial order:

Satan, in his pride, considered the conditions humiliating…. He preferred to stick to the enjoyment of his own natural perfection insofar as, first, it belongs to him by right of nature as if he were its master, and, second, it distinguishes him from others. He preferred to remain first in the lower order instead of becoming one among others in the higher order.

All those who follow Satan, Hannon points out, have the same motivation:

They too want to be like God, totally self-sufficient. “Non serviam!” is not just the slogan of their rebellion against the old order, but it is also the animating political philosophy of their new order itself.

And so Javert sings:

How can I now allow this man to hold dominion over me?
This desperate man that I have hunted
He gave me my life, he gave me freedom
I should have perished by his hand
It was his right
It was my right to die as well
Instead I live, but live in hell

And my thoughts fly apart
Can this man be believed?
Shall his sins be forgiven?
Shall his crimes be reprieved?
And must I now begin to doubt
What I never doubted all those years?

My heart is stone but still it trembles
The world I have known
Is lost in shadow
Is he from heaven or from hell?
And does he know
That granting me my life today?
This man has killed me, even so

The order that he had loved, he finds shattered, because he never really understood or embraced its principle: he had been all ordo, no amoris.

I am reaching but I fall
And the stars are black and cold
As I stare into the void
Of a world that cannot hold

I’ll escape now from that world
From the world of Jean Valjean
There is no where I can turn
There is no way to go on

​​At this moment in the earlier version of this song, Valjean had died to himself, had received the life of Christ. Javert simply dies, a suicide.

Chauvelin (played those dozen years later by Terence Mann once again) had had some of that same legalistic political idealism. He had lost it, in part, but he’s not quite as lost as Javert – not yet:

And soon the moon will smolder
and the winds will drive.
Yes, a man grows older,
but his soul remains alive.

All those tremulous stars still glitter,
and I will survive.
Let my heart grow colder
and as bitter as a falcon in the dive.

If there’s a song that one would sing to at least complexify, if not counteract, the revolutionary spirit, the blood that “Do You Hear The People Sing” stirs up, it is surely this:

There was a dream – a dying ember
There was a dream– I don’t remember
but I will resurrect that dream,
though rivers stream and hills grow steeper.

For here in hell, where life gets cheaper –
Oh, here in hell, the blood runs deeper
And when the final duel is near,
I’ll lift my spear and fly…

Chauvelin is an explicitly Satanic figure here: he’s the Gustave Dore illustration of Milton’s Satan, in fact. Remember, musicals can be dangerous.

You say you want a revolution?

Even more than “Falcon in the Dive,” the opening number of the musical subverts “Do You Hear The People Sing” and “Look Down:”

[SANS-CULOTTE]:
I know the gutter and I know the stink of the street!
Kicked like a dog, I have spat out the bile of defeat!
All you beauties who towered above me
You who gave me the smack of your rod–
Now I give you the gutter!

[MOB]
I give you the judgement of God!

[WOMEN]
Vengeance victorious! These are the glorious days!

[LEAD WOMAN]
Women of Paris, come gather your bloody bouquets!

[MOB]
Now gaze on our goddess of justice
With her shimmering glimmering blade!
As she kisses these traitors
She sings them a last serenade!

And the song turns into a bloody, terrifying hymn to Madame Guillotine.

Of course, it’s not the case that Les Miserables leaves “Do You Hear The People Sing” unsubverted itself. It can’t: and in an act of profoundly wise musical-writing, Boublil and Schoenberg, and in some ways above all their Jewish atheist English lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, allow the revolutionary thumos that they have sown in the hearts of their audience to be transmuted in the finale.

It is astonishing. It’s astonishing because it doesn’t only transmute the passion of their own earlier song, but of what is by far the most blood-stirring real-life revolutionary anthem ever written. Those lyrics too were originally written in French, by Eugene Pottier, several months after the 1871 Paris Commune – he had been one of the communards, the heir to 1848, to 1832, to 1789. If you don’t know this song, you have no idea what the history of the 20th century has been about: you do not know the plot.

Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C’est l’éruption de la faim

Du passé faisons table rase
Foule esclave – debout, debout!
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien soyons tout

C’est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain.

The English translation that Kretzmer was playing with was an early one; it is the one that most English-speaking children of leftists grew up with: 

Arise ye prisoners of starvation
Arise ye wretched of the earth
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world’s in birth!

No more tradition’s chains shall bind us
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall;
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We have been naught; we shall be all!

’Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
The Internationale
Shall be the human race!

Given this background, Kretzmer’s finale to Les Miserables is probably the most effective aesthetic tool I know of for converting red diaper babies, with near instant effect, to Catholicism:

Do you hear the people sing, lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people who are rising to the light
For the wretched of the earth, there is a flame that never dies
Even the darkest night will end and the sun shall rise!

Running into that lyric in this context: it is a one-line political-theological education; it is an unanswerable argument. It’s Chesterton describing the Christian story as the story of an underdog– but that’s God with his back to the wall; it’s our heritage as counter-revolutionaries with all the joy and passion and comradeship that revolutionaries thought were theirs alone; it’s a promise of the most thoroughgoing political overturn that has ever been, as this world’s principalities and powers and the human tyrants who serve them meet their end, which is our beginning:

They will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord
They will walk behind the ploughshare, they will put away the sword
The chains will be broken and all men will have their reward!

And it builds and builds, and by the end of this song if you’re still only hoping to take Paris, all I can say is you don’t have nearly enough ambition:

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes!

Of course it’s unrealistic, as John Ahern points out, that a motley band of Iowan kids with no training could actually break into perfect orchestral unison in the finale of The Music Man. It’s just as unrealistic that a batch of Parisian communards, the majority of whom are dead, could find a much, much better new world to fight for.

And the whole thing is unrealistic: we can’t normally and spontaneously express ourselves with wit and beauty in music and words and dance; we usually don’t have the virtue, the cultivated power, to do so on an individual level; we usually don’t have the political virtue, the high levels of common good praxis, which would allow us all spontaneously break into song in harmony, in clever counterpoint, in a final swelling and satisfying finale.

But the thing is, that’s Christianity: that’s what Christian political theology teaches us to expect. We are going to be singing with those choirs, joining in that laud perennis in all its political meaning. “Don’t you know,” St. Paul asks the Corinthians in exasperation, “that we are to judge angels?” As Hannon writes, “Our politics should be practicing for that ascent, and indeed helping to accomplish it, by ordering us together toward our true good.”

That moment of transcendence, of transformation, of common good erupting in joyful music: that’s the heart-swelling finale that we call the Apocalypse. And that’s musical theater.

Susannah Black Roberts is the Senior Editor of Plough Quarterly.