Presentation of the Luther Musical for the Luther Congress
August 19th 2022
Preliminary items:
For the Luther Musical Presentation Playlist click on https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWi_IDFMdeOH8Pv2ill8N4eZhuyF3GOFQ and https://wordpress.com/view/peterkrey.wordpress.com
for my website, which has pictures of the Luther Musical: 1., 2., and 7. The Medieval Marriage Dance, 3. and 4. Mr. Kopp’s wagon with “herring” barrels 5. Kate von Bora and Luther in the dance 6. Where is Thomas Müntzer? (in the “Shakespearean” off-stage Battle of Frankenhausen) 7. See above. 8. Four links to the first performance in 2017. (Now it is more easily accessible on the playlist.) If you scroll further down, you will see the program and some of the steps we took on the way to the full performance. The last picture in that series is Joe, Mark, and I hitting the “money note”!
Notes on the Luther Musical
Creativity is another way to respond to God’s grace, according to Nicholas Berdyaev. In my ministry we often presented short plays during the sermon time of our church services with congregational members playing the parts. I joined the other Brooklyn ministers who went to the Luther Jubilee of 1983, in Washington D.C., celebrating Luther’s 500th birthday. After coming back I wrote a short Luther play for the next Reformation Day. (For Holy Week, I also wrote a short play for his name-sake, Martin Luther King, Jr., but I’ve not made that into a musical as yet.)
I made my Ph.D. in Luther Studies and my son, Mark graduated from UCLA in Musical Theater and we worked together for three years writing songs and making the Luther Play into a musical.
I can’t tell you how much joy we experienced being creative together. While composing the song, “Mendicant Monks,” Mark talked about having to hit the money note! We laughed and laughed. If you listen to “While Philipp and I drank Beer” or as it’s otherwise called, “Not Our Hands, but God’s Hands,” you will really hear Mark hit a money note! That one became rather serious, however.
Links to the two songs:
(Words from the Invocavit Sermons)
Luther’s theology entertains centripetal spirituality, not centrifugal spirituality; it could also be called marriage spirituality. Luther was like the monk, Shinran of Pureland Buddhism (1173-1263 CE). He also conjoined marriage with his spirituality and featured faith over excessive ritual, making the Jesuits arriving in Japan ask, “How did Luther get here before us?”
Robert Bellah, following Karl Jaspers, writes about the axial period of history. According to the axial theory, religious breakthroughs of that period have continued to form our lives for over two and a half millennia. It is all about the protest and replacement of a divine king by the people, who are lifted up in a direct relationship with God. As in the historical breakthrough from the archaic to the axial period (ca. 2,000 years before the Reformation), Bellah also spoke of Luther standing up against the emperor and the pope at Worms, like Christ versus Caesar, Moses versus the Pharaoh, Confucius versus the emperor of China, Socrates versus a democracy gone awry.
Bellah in Religion in Human Evolution shows how history of religion went from the mimetic to the mythic to the theoretic stages; from the archaic to the axial breakthroughs of religion.[1] Similarly, Luther as a professor of the Old Testament, like Augustine before him, as a professor of Rhetoric, became very theological about the faith. He asserts the priesthood of all believers, but also declared all believers to be theologians.[2] This emphasis also aligns with Bellah’s move from the mimetic and mythic to the axial theoretic stage of religion. Luther’s theologial faith comes up with the theology of the cross versus the theology of glory, with a theology of the Word that has continually proven to be exceptionally fertile.
When our American family was in Germany during World War II, we were refugees. I was born in Erfurt in 1943, in Luther Park, a-top the Steiger, with Luther Theater in the valley below the Parkhouse, in which our family had taken refuge. It was bitter cold that December and my father, a pastor, said, “You had to throw a blanket over the furnace to make it warm.” And my mother kept me alive with a hot water bottle in my diaper. My sister Tootsie would go down to the stage and sing songs and make believe she was an actress, when the winter weather came around and filled Luther Park with the warmth of spring.
Back to the musical. Mark and I patterned it after Les Míserables, because most musicals revolve around a few events, but Les Mís revolves around the whole life of Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean. We decided that we would go only up to Luther’s marriage and make marriage the musical’s bookends, because we have him avoiding an arranged marriage at the beginning with the lightning flash.[3]
The melodies of two of the songs, “Sin Boldly” and “While Philipp and I Drank Beer” were composed by my son Ashley and I put in the lyrics. I found putting words to the music difficult. Sin Boldly:
A Repeat: While Philipp and I Drank Beer
Mark wrote more songs than I did and, along with Arian Gashi and Sean Martin, added wonderfully creative accompaniment to them. I tried to use Luther’s own words in the lyrics of the songs, as well as for those of Thomas Müntzer, except that I, of course, added rhymes. I believe that using Luther and Müntzer’s real words in their correct historical context is a strength of the musical. (Friedrich Spitta would approve.) Check out the “Justification Song” and “Müntzer’s Song.”
Justification Song
Thomas Müntzer and his Song
When in a musical should the words break into songs? They are required in order to express important event’s in Luther’s life and in the events of the Reformation. Operas and oratorios do not face this issue.
Check out Mark acting Luther’s Anfechtung on the night before his second appearance before Eck in the Diet of Worms:
Luther’s Anfechtung at the Diet of Worms.
We do present Luther in a positive light, but we throw a gray blanket over the angry Luther after his outrageous outburst during the Peasants War. (We put the Peasants War in where Les Mís had the revolutionary barricades and used Shakespeare’s strategy of having the battle mostly take place off stage.) We would have had to throw another dark blanket over Luther for his anti-Semitism, but we ended the musical in 1525, before he featured his sinful side over his saintly one.
Note according to the New Oxford Luther Encyclopedia, Luther should not be stereotyped as a villain or consummate hero, but the more modern biographies even trying to downplay him, cannot gainsay a whole encyclopedia published about him and this international congress considering him, as well.
We realized that the characters were mostly male, so we decided to make a woman be the narrator and then have her be a jester. Luther presented himself as a jester in the Christian Nobility.[4] That way we balanced the dominant male role of Luther with the strong female role of the jester.
We proudly featured the diversity of Berkeley in the musical. The last role unfilled in our cast was that of Melanchthon. A trans seminarian applied for the role. They had taken the name Mel, short for Melanchthon! After playing in the musical, they wanted to know if we had given them that role because they had taken the name Melanchthon.
“No,” we answered. Imagine that! That is just how it happened!” Mel also played the violin for the Black Bear Inn and the Devil-ink-spot scenes. What a contribution!
Mel on the violin
We began the second act, in the Black Bear Inn with Luther composing “A Mighty Fortress.” “A Mighty Castle?” That brought some real humor, especially our identifying with the way we too worked out the songs till we got them right. Words and music become engaged and then married after subsequent revisions.
One actor also choreographed two medieval dances for the musical. You’ll notice how the melody for the last dance came from Der Freischutz by Carl Maria von Weber. The idea of the flower garlands also comes from that opera. You’ll also notice that we borrowed some melodies: not from Mozart. Luther had to be more like Beethoven. Thus the “Monastery Song” was a take-off on Beethoven’s Fifth.
“Monastery Song”
We know, of course, that the nuns could not have escaped in herring barrels, but as the jester said, “Scholars spoil everything!” We used some poetic license and barrels became the theme of the musical. Home Depot, a hardware store, lent us a whole lot of them. So the nuns jumped out of barrels to the humorous delight of the audience.
We only had three performances, with the second and third receiving standing ovations. A mix-up in the scenes of the first performance, had the cast dwell on “Long live the excellent Luther!” (Es lebe der treffliche Luther![5]) They continued till the imperial herald could get to Worms with him. The left-out scene took place, however, in the next performances:
As opposed to Luther in Worms, the procession of the imperial herald, Kaspar Sturm, with Luther into Worms was not emphasized. When featured in the next production, it would add a lot.
The cast continually came up with new ideas – like Oliver as Tetzel trying to sell indulgences to the audience and Mark as Luther soliciting suitors for Katie right from the audience.
Mark directed the musical and played a superb Luther. Daniel Alley did a wonderful job directing the music and accompanying the whole musical.
A musical would need many more directors. They would have been helpful for publicity, box office, venue, casting, costuming, sound effects, sets, lighting, and scenery. We used large slides on the back wall to good effect. A musical requires so much! For example, production, publicity, financing, etc. Someone has to be in charge of costumes, props; one needs a stage manager for cues, not to speak about all the particular music needing to be ready for each actor and transposed in the keys for the different instruments. Mark and I tried to do almost all of it ourselves, which really took a toll. Because there is so much to a musical, we had to do it in steps, until we could finally put it all together. It cost over $18,000 to produce and in 2025, I hope to have it performed again, not in a shoe-string production this time, but in a real theater with professional actors. But I need to find a corporate sponsor, have an extended run and hopefully have a performance featured on KQED, that is PBS, Public Broadcasting System on television, to celebrate clergy marriage as well as Luther and the Reformation. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”
The Nuns Escaping and Duet of the Marriage Song: Katie von Bora
Medieval Marriage Dance from Carl Maria von Weber
Peter D.S. Krey, 7th of July, 2022
See the Luther Musical
by Mark and Peter Krey
peterdkrey@gmail.com
[1] Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), for example, p. 65.
[2] Oswald Bayer, Martin Luthers Theologie, (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2003), pp. 15-16. Peter Krey, “I Am Joseph”: Luther’s Last Lectures on the Last Chapters of Genesis, (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, December, 2022), pp. 158 and 300-301 for my translation of Luther’s Sermon (WA 41:11).
[3] Thomas Kaufmann, Martin Luther, (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2006), p. 32 and translated as A Short Life of Martin Luther, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016), p. 27.
[4] Derek R. Nelson and Paul R. Hinlicky, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther, in 3 Volumes, (2240 pages), (Oxford University Press, 2017). Also See Peter Krey, “I Am Joseph,” op. cit., p. 38.
[5] In the Alsatian theatre of the Peasants’ War of 1525, the forces of Duke Anton of Lorraine slaughtered 20,000 unarmed peasants and townspeople of Saverne, after the peasants, who had been promised safe-conduct, shouted: „Es lebe der treffliche Luther!” (Long live the excellent Luther!)
