Heavenly Hurt
I have so enjoyed perusing today John Holt’s book Never Too Late, an account both thought-provoking and heart-warming of his experience in taking up the cello in his forties. Since discovering Mr. Holt’s sensible and lucid prose in How Children Learn, I have been eagerly borrowing all his books from the library.
In Never Too Late, Mr. Holt describes many of the great works that wooed him to classical music, and I was especially intrigued by his special regard for Brahm’s German Requiem. I listened to two of the movements this afternoon for the first time—”All Flesh Is As Grass” and “How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place” are their English translations. I listened to each several times, and their beauty grew on me, especially that of the first. I would like to listen to the entire requiem some day, but I will wait until the others aren’t around; my siblings profess to “hate” choral music. I remember a time when I too found the weight of choral music oppressive, like “a certain slant of light, / On winter afternoons.” Dickinson was comparing the light to the music, but my own experience makes the reverse association.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
But we can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
“I Crisantemi” by Puccini has pained me with its beauty since I first heard it. My heart seems to burst as the strings swell and swell and then fall away unresolved. I am not sure that that will make sense to someone else who hears the same music, but it is how I have always felt about it. Sometimes the ache is too great, and I must listen to something else.
Someone has said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. She probably meant that we need to “shut up and enjoy the music” as someone else so forthrightly phrased it on YouTube, and so far I agree. Wordsworth now:—
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous form of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Yet (besides finding immensely interesting the idea of choreographing dances after various architectural styles) I find that I must sometimes write about music. We are not given beauty so that we may hoard it, but so that we can multiply and share it. I am a writer. and beautiful music urges me to write beautiful words, and sometimes those words must be of nothing other than that same music—an exercise in delight and a hope that others will find the beauty and share it too.
I’ll shut up now. Enjoy the music.
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HEIDI said...
The only thing better than listening to “How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place” is SINGING it. In a good choir. Oh! This might be in my top three all-time favorites!
I have sung it in English (though not in the German). Many musicians find it only appropriate for it to be sung in German, the language it was written in. Others, however, and I myself fall in this camp, deem it entirely appropriate to sing it in the local vernacular since Brahms himself wrote the mass in the vernacular rather than in Latin so that it would be accessible to the listeners.
My husband, a choir director, counts the German Requiem as one of his very favorites, as well. Perhaps we’ll get to sing it again soon!
Wednesday, February 2, 2011 10:52 PM
HANDMAIDEN said...
I found interesting your perspective on the German versus English debate, and I agree with you. As the Scriptures succinctly phrase it, “sing with the spirit, but sing with understanding also.” Both beauty and comprehension, elevation of the soul and use of the mind, are required in balance for the kind of whole worship God desires.
It is my intention to improve my singing voice so that it would be less offensive to myself—and, doubtless, to others. This hasn’t stopped me from singing now, though; and I am thinking of looking up the English lyrics for some of the Requiem and singing with a recorder choir, as I often do with Handel’s Messiah.
“God said to make a joyful noise,” Papa reminds us when our family laughs ruefully over a really terrible singing session. “He said nothing about making it sound good.” We do try anyway. ;-)
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 08:31 AM
Friday, January 21, 2011