A Passion Play is the sixth studio album by British progressive rock band Jethro Tull, released in July 1973 in both the UK and US.

The album's concept follows the spiritual journey of a recently deceased man (Ronnie Pilgrim) in the afterlife, exploring themes of morality, religion and good and evil.

[4][5] Following the release of the critically and commercially successful Thick as a Brick in 1972, Jethro Tull made the decision to record their next album at the Château d'Hérouville studios in Hérouville, France, known in the 1970s for being frequented by artists such as Pink Floyd, Elton John and T. Rex.

[6] The band planned to make a double album, with concepts as varied as the meaning of life, music criticism and the comparison between the man and animal world.

Guitarist Martin Barre recalled the sessions as being "long" and "very intense" with Anderson stating that the album needed to be "written and recorded in one block, very quickly".

Eliot's The Waste Land with the music a "dazzling mix of old English folk and classical material, reshaped in electric rock terms".

Anderson described his conceptual inspiration for A Passion Play as: A fascination that I had about the possibility of a hereafter, that touches upon the conventions of popular religion, and Christianity in particular.

[6]Ronnie Pilgrim recognises his own death and, in ghostly form, attends his own funeral, before traversing a purgatorial desert and "icy wastes", where he is visited by a smiling angel guide (Act 1).

[10] After a long-winded and bizarre evaluation process, the sardonic jury concludes that they "won't cross [Pilgrim] out", suggesting that he has led a mostly decent life and so will be admitted into Heaven, which corresponds with the sudden start of a cheerful "Forest Dance" melody (Act 2).

At this time, the main plot is interrupted by an unrelated, spoken-word comedic interlude (narrated by Jeffrey Hammond with an exaggerated Lancashire accent) backed by instrumentation.

Presented as an absurd fable, the interlude details (with much wordplay) the failure of a group of anthropomorphic animals to help a hare find his missing eyeglasses.

He speaks with a Magus Perdé[12] about his dilemma and, having sampled and rejected both extremes of his afterlife options, he finally stands on a Stygian shore as a "voyager into life".

The final triumphant lyrics include the phrases "ever-burning fire", "ever-door", "ever-life", and moving "from the dark into ever-day", so that the play concludes with a strong implication of eternal rebirth (Act 4).

Stephen Holden, writing for Rolling Stone, was broadly negative, saying that the album "strangles under the tonnage of its pretensions — a jumble of anarchic, childishly precocious gestures that are intellectually and emotionally faithless to any idea other than their own esoteric non-logic"; feeling, overall, that, despite the band being "truly virtuosic in the manner of a polished chamber ensemble" and some moments, such as "those interludes that feature Anderson’s extraordinary flute playing" and two "short pastoral sections" that were "especially lovely", the album was "expensive, tedious nonsense".

[25] Jethro Tull's business manager, Terry Ellis, announced in Melody Maker that the band would retire from live performances in response to negative reviews of the album and concerts.

[26][27] A three-star retrospective review by Bruce Eder for AllMusic was gentle in its judgement, saying that "the music puts it over successfully, a dazzling mix of old English folk and classical material, reshaped in electric rock terms.

[28] Paul Stump, in his History of Progressive Rock, said that "the writing is militantly episodic", with some beautiful moments but an overemphasis on novelty and an overall incoherent sequence of themes that makes the album bemusing and disorienting rather than engaging to the listener.

In 2014, commemorating the 40th anniversary (slightly belated) of the album, it was released a box called A Passion Play: An Extended Performance, which contains the complete Chateau d’Herouville sessions and brand-new mix by Steven Wilson.

The discs are packaged in a box set along with a book featuring interviews with Wilson, dancer Jane Eve, spun man Chris Amson, plus the memoirs of the Reverend Godfrey Pilchard.