Not quite. The religious reformer, best known for his doctrines about a depraved humanity and a harsh God predestining people to hell or heaven, would not dance or sing that night. But the show was one of a vast program of commemorations — theater, a film festival, conferences, exhibits, even specially concocted Calvinist wines and chocolates — described by some who have tasted them as somewhat bitter — of the birth of John Calvin 500 years ago.

“Our idea was to show Calvin so that people could see his personality in the richness of his thought and activities,” said Roland Benz, 66, the Calvin Jubilee chairman, as he watched workers preparing the stage, lights and costumes.

The musical is meant to resolve a quandary about Calvin, who was born Jean Cauvin in northern France in 1509 but forged his career in Geneva, where he migrated to escape Roman Catholic persecution back home. Though Calvin struck the roots of an incessant striving that fueled the city’s early capitalist economy, if he is remembered at all by Genevans it is as something of a dreary snoop who imposed on the city an unbendingly prudish morality that some say survives to this day in somewhat muted form.

“They see him as a nasty schoolmaster, always wagging his finger,” said Pierre Grosjean, a writer whose book “Calvin World,” a collection of biographies of people named Calvin, came out this year. “There’s no interest here; in the media, yes. But the city is very secular and doesn’t trust whatever has to do with religion. In my group, no one is interested.”

Indeed, the city fathers had to be coaxed and coddled to provide subsidies for the events. In the end, the canton of Geneva, the larger region around the city, put up almost $500,000. But the excitement fell short of that already generated for the 300th anniversary, in 2012, of the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a more celebrated Geneva philosopher and one of the spirits of the French Revolution.

“There was a hostile reflex toward celebrating Calvin; the public powers were very distant,” said Gabriel de Montmollin, 50, whose publishing house, Labor et Fides, released seven books on Calvin this year. “That was not so for Rousseau.”

Though sales of his Calvin books were brisk, Mr. de Montmollin noted that Geneva’s population had changed since Calvin’s day, when almost everybody was Protestant. Today, 40 percent of the city’s residents identify themselves as Catholic and almost 5 percent as Muslim. Only 17 percent are Protestant.

Yet some Genevans, he added, see similarities between Calvin’s time and events today. After Calvin arrived in Geneva, thousands of French Protestants, called Huguenots, followed him, fleeing persecution and often death in Catholic France; they were resented by the local population.

Today, there is a heated debate about thousands of French workers, known as “border crossers,” who live in France but work in Geneva. This migration has fueled a right-wing political party that wants to stop it, arguing that the French steal Swiss jobs. “Calvin led the party of border-crossers,” Mr. de Montmollin said.

To overcome the hesitance about celebrating Calvin’s birth and to reach a broad audience, festival organizers have sought to treat Calvin in a lighter vein. The poster for a theater piece, “The Deceits of Calvin,” features a cartoon figure of Calvin holding two cats by their tails in his extended hands. The play is about Calvin’s wife, Idelette de Bure, who brought two children into the marriage, her second, while Calvin brought his cats.

Some focus less on Calvin’s dour philosophy and more on his positive accomplishments — his promotion of education, organization of the economy, elimination of the Catholic Church’s ban on loans with interest — all of which laid the foundation for Geneva’s banking business.

Erica Deuber Ziegler, 67, a writer and historian, said that “they taught us a deplorable image of Calvin” in school. Students learned of an austere man who used physical repression to enforce morals and was intolerant in matters of theology, as when a fellow theologian, Michael Servetus, denied the Trinity and Calvin had him burned at the stake.

What was lost in that caricature, she said, was the side of Calvin that befriended and encouraged writers and scholars, who furthered education (he founded the school that was the forerunner of the University of Geneva) and the trades and opened religion to the common man by promoting individual reading of the Bible. Ms. Deuber Ziegler described him instead as an “agent of a true renaissance of ideas, part of the Renaissance.”

In the shadow of Geneva’s tall Gothic cathedral, a modest building houses the International Museum of the Reformation. The director, Isabelle Graesslé, 50, said the struggle for the soul of Calvin continued. “A battle is still waged between the golden legend and those who would make of him a tyrant,” she said. “As usual, the historical truth lies in between.”

Calling Calvin “a person of contrasts,” she related how the museum, which opened in 2005, was able to acquire at a Christie’s auction two years ago a letter Calvin wrote in 1545. In it, Calvin relates the conversation he had with a man who committed suicide, in the moments before he died. “We would expect a Calvin condemning, judging, admonishing,” she said. “Instead, his message to the man was, ‘Do not worry: the grace of God will forgive you.’

“I discovered a multifaceted person,” she said.

Many of the French Protestants whom Calvin brought to Geneva were among the founders of its banking and watchmaking industries. Calvin was, after all, a stickler for punctuality. But the city reflects to this day Calvin’s influence in its hospitality toward great international organizations whose missions are perhaps as much moral as political: the International Red Cross, the International Labor Organization and the United Nations (and before it the League of Nations).

John Tagliabue, The New York Times, 05.11.09

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/world/europe/05calvin.html?_r=1