"Il Canto della Passione"
(Carpaneto May 14 2005)

Testimonial by Monsignor Angelo Busi
          Tonight 'canto' will take us all by hand in a 'discrete exploration' of Christ's feelings and emotions during the obscure days of His Passion and Death. Christ's Passion is obviously not a show that one attends to. Perhaps it needs a community of interpreters necessary not to make it into a dramatic evocation, pure background noise like all the messages we've got used to receive by the 'civilization of sounds and images' we live in.

          The mysterious identity in between the hate of humanity and the man known as Jesus, capable of an unbelievable love bigger than life, attracts the poet-composer Beppe Cantarelli in this fascinating journey that has the power to involve whomever is willing to listen once more to that Passion, 'canto' of a love that never stopped to light up the world's darkness.

          I have participated to the premiere of the "Canto della Passione" the evening of Palms Sunday, the beginning of the Holy Week during which the Church remembers the Passion, Death and Resurrection of its Saviour. I was immediately impressed by the concentration climate that so spontaneously permeated the church full of listeners. The lyrics and the music, so miraculously intertwined, promptly recreated that suspended atmosphere that we find once more in the Gospel tales: no granted curiosity nor excess, a narration deliberately sober and contained. Therefore, through this suspension, the writer-storyteller on one hand participates to Christ's painful journey, and on the other hand it narrates it with a certain detachment that emphasizes the objective novelty of that suffering and dying for the love of every man.

          The "Canto della Passione" does not leave us the way we were. A story, the Christ's one, so famous and well known, sometimes it looks like it could be foreseen and predictable. On the contrary, Cantarelli's work is successful in 'pulling in' everyone who, as a 'bystander', becomes a humble disciple of the school of the Love of that Christ offended and crucified.

          A Love, the one that emerges from the biblical story, that does not give us a moment of respite, so much is the desire to love that marks Christ's path. It is not a coincidence that, in St. Luke's Gospel, Jesus Himself admits to be 'anxious' to be baptized with the baptism that is waiting for Him, as a matter of fact at Chapter 22 we can read these words of His: "I have fervently desired to eat this Easter with all of you, before my passion..."

          Jesus shares this desire of His with His disciples. It is the Easter's desire, in other words the death's and resurrection's one. So Jesus has so much wanted to be in the last spot that no one has been able to take it away from Him. And it is exactly from the 'last spot' that tonight 'canto' takes place. Who participates and listens is immediately transported in that last spot of the story to which Christ has so much wanted to be faithful. Therefore the audience immediately feels that it is not a show that one attends, but it is a mystery that one lives with thankful participation.

          When you listen to Beppe Cantarelli's 'canto' you are pervaded by that same Christ's desire: the wish to be at that very last spot where usually no one wants to be. Exactly from that spot, the last one, it materializes the decisive discovery: "No other do I have than this good that gives me life...;" this way it is how it recites one of the most intense compositions of this evening.

          No other do we have than this Love that gives back colours to an empty and opaque existence: to attend an evening like tonight it is a much different thing than to listen to a regular recital about Christ's Passion: it is the invitation to take ourselves out the indifference that sometimes envelops the experience of the faith itself...to take ourselves out of the indifference, gifting us with the unexpected possibility to rediscover the 'difference' between that crucified Love and our undifferenciated mediocrity.

           Tonight's gift it is nothing more than the possibility to relive that Chirst's desire: the wish to love each other until the end. A desire sometimes not understood even by he who, forever practicing, does not feel anymore the call of that Easter's desire, and exhausts himself with that religious practice that seems to have lost its soul.

          Our thanks to Beppe Cantarelli and his choir are not only for the high quality of his artistic proposal, never banal nor foreseen, but especially because it gives us all, right on this Whitsun eve, the possibility to relive the experience to be visited by the mystery of the Love that is breath of life, Spirit that you do not know where It comes from nor where It goes. Words and music tonight that will help us to enter into the Whitsun and to accept that breath that, from His cross, Jesus has sent to us all, in order to give us life once more, and repaying us with hope.

Monsignor Angelo Busi