The Opera Jesus Christ, Superstar Decca Records

BLASPHEMY is easy to come by these days, it seems, and mediocre rock music is even more abundant; for those who have objections to either, there's a lot of objectionable material in Jesus Christ Superstar. This recorded "rock opera" makes an honest and often very interesting attempt to do three difficult things: reinterpret the events of the last week of Christ's life, set the new interpretation into the idiom of mass culture with modern language and characterizations that carry parallels in rock-culture and contemporary politics, and put the result into the form of conventional opera, orchestrated with rock music.

Superstar reacts to the notion of Christ as that willowy young man with the far-away look in his eyes, the meek but confident son of God who, disguised as Jesus, mild-mannered converter to a great Middle-Eastern religion, preaches a never-ending sermon for Love, God, and the Eternal Life. Webber and Rice fight the traditional characterization by being anti-traditional: they put Jesus (rather uncertainly) into the role of a mass-culture hero, make Judas a sort of cautious road-manager, cast Mary Magdalene as a groupie in love with Christ, and Simon Zelotes as a politico who wants to co-opt Christ into a revolution against the Roman occupation. The point of all this is to make it clear by analogy that Jesus was a man, a man who had worries and faults, who had to deal with the same problems all men have to deal with, and who offered his flesh-and-blood body up to crucifixion in the face of very human doubts; the Superstar analogy is just a more or less appropriate metaphor for Messiah. In one of Superstar's climactic songs, "Gethsemane," Jesus sings a doubting, defiant prayer to God (who has an offstage role):

Why should I die

Can you show me now that I would not be killed in vain?

Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain

Show me there's a reason for your wanting me to die

You're far too keen on where and how and not so keen on why. . .

He finally gives in to God's plans, a little unwillingly; and even with the weak lyrics it's clear that Jesus is facing human doubts.

Superstar has a fundamental aura of reverence; Christ's last words are verbatim from the Bible, and the last song in Superstar, an instrumental piece that follows "The Crucifixion," is titled "John Nineteen Forty-One." a reference to the point in John's Gospel where the narrative describing the discovery of Christ's resurrection begins. But it has a few half-concealed implications that are wide-eyed blasphemy for those who see the Last Supper, for instance, as a sacred event. Webber and Rice, with a neat bit of circular logic and some imaginative rewriting, transform the Last Supper into an open fight between Jesus and Judas. While this goes on, the Apostles sit calmly by getting into their cups, oblivious of what is going on, singing a drunken ditty that gets raggeder each time they sing it and that implies that the Gospel accounts are inaccurate:

Look at all my trials and tribulations

Sinking in a gentle pool of wine

What's that in the bread it's gone to my head

Till this evening is this morning life is fine

Always hoped that I'd be an Apostle

Knew that I would make it if I tried

Then when we retire we can write the gospels

So they'll all talk about us when we've died.

The implication is that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all hopelessly drunk at the Last Supper (and the overall implication that the Apostles were generally out of touch with what was going on) is very clearly blasphemous. Otherwise it's a needlessly clever justification for the liberties Webber and Rice take with a few scenes from the Gospels.

The score of Superstar, in its weakness, spells out the problems of any attempt at "rock opera"; the closer "rock opera" comes to conventional opera, the more structured the form of the work has to be, and the more difficult it is effectively to employ rock music in the score; opera has to develop plot and characters verbally-with the words sung by the characters. The tendency, then, is for the music to become somewhat subordinate to, and tied to, the structure of the words. The Who's Tommy avoided the problem by keeping very close to pure rock performance; but Tommy's pretensions to being conventional opera are even weaker than Superstar's. Despite some capable back-up musicians and a particularly good performance by Ian Gillam as Judas, Superstar mixes rock with pop and produces too much schmaltz. The brightest moment of the whole show is an intentionally schmaltzy one, that comes when a chillingly ironic Herod mock-playfully challenges Jesus in a sleazy ragtime:

So you are the Christ, you're the great Jesus Christ

Prove to me that you're no fool-

Walk across my swimming pool

If you do that for me then I'll let you go free

C'mon King of the Jews.

Any serious try at retelling the events leading up to Christ's death (and Superstar is a serious attempt) has to make a coherent statement. Neither consistently reverent nor consistently irreverent, neither consistently traditional nor consistently anti-traditional, neither rock nor opera, Superstar just doesn't hold up for very long. If reports that Superstar is being played over the Vatican radio station are true, then someone has exercised his tolerance before exercising his taste.