(no subject)

[tree_and_leaf]

St Matthew Passion with the Freiburg Bach Choir under Hans Michael Beurle excellent, tremendously moving even giving the people who insisted on whispering through the quiet bits. Three, or near enough, very intense hours, and as always, the Passion Chorale made me tear up. Possibly one of the most moving bits of music ever written (it is the music: 'American Tune' has the same effect on me, and I'm not a patriotic left-wing American).

It struck me forcibly how oddly the SMP ends, though. Not, I mean, that it stops at Christ being laid in the tomb - that's logical, given the original performance context, and is definitely not to be read as a secret sign of Bach's doubt as to the truth of Christianity - but all the business in the final aria about laying Christ in one's heart, and chasing out the sinful world so that he can rest there for ever. Followed by the Evangelist describing how the authorities had the tomb sealed, and a final recitative in which the chorus mildly and rather sentimentally wishes Christ peace, promises to weep over him, and calls the holy sepulchre a soft resting place for the frightened conscience.

But Christ does not stay in the tomb: and there's a strange parallel between the wish of the authorities to kill this rebellious troublemaker and keep him out of sight, and the pious determination of the believer in the aria to make Christ at home in the tomb. Life and love comes into the world - uncompromising good, which will not use the weapons of the will to death and destruction, even to oppose it, for in the end 'those who live by the sword perish by the sword'; an uncompromising love which the structures of power and all the easy lies and half recognised compromises with which we make ourselves at home with injustice cannot endure it. So love is killed, and how could it not be, if it will neither make its peace with evil nor try to fight back in its own way, and those - like the voice at the end of the SMP - who had almost begun to hope that there might be another way to live are heart-broken, and yet perhaps almost relieved. The world goes on as it must, idealism must give way to pragmatism. But we are people of fine feeling, and rich enough to allow ourselves to be sensitive: so we take love and wrap it in white linen and costly spices, and we weep over it, and lay it away, and sometimes we remember its sad beauty and are touched. But it is safely dead; it makes no demands on us; we protect it from the dirt of the sinful world, and retreat to it when we feel bruised and dirtied by what we need to do out in the world.

Thus religion may be, and if it is thus, then for all the fine sentiment it is only a covering, a shroud for the will to death, for complicity in the warped nature of the world, for acceptance of the world as it is, rather than as it should be.

But love, life will not stay dead, and Christ breaks free from the tomb, and opens the sealed chambers of our hearts to the world and its needs, so that we may live and love with him in the world he has made, and so renew it.

It's not as tidy, but I always felt order was overrated.

Comments

[scionofgrace.livejournal.com]

Beautiful and true. Thank you.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

there's a strange parallel between the wish of the authorities to kill this rebellious troublemaker and keep him out of sight, and the pious determination of the believer in the aria to make Christ at home in the tomb.

It struck me that this is music written by a man who (as was usual in the period for composers of Bach's rank) had held a succession of civic and court appointments, and composed within this context. I'm not sure how relevant that is to your argument, though.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

people who insisted on whispering through the quiet bits

If people are capable of being barbarous to such an extent, what, in the name of Heaven and all the Saints in Paradise, are they doing listening to one of the peaks of our culture? Surely they cannot be enjoying it. The Passion is one of a few works of music - Verdi's Otello and the Last Quartets are a couple of hours - that I approach in something like fear and trembling, because of the immense intellectual and emotional demands they make.

I don't think I agree with much of what you said otherwise. Maybe I'll post something about it some time.

[tree_and_leaf]

Thank you - I'm glad it made some kind of sense, as posting late at night on complex topics can be a bit dangerous. Though I also find it's the time when you start to see things in a new light.

[tree_and_leaf]

It's certainly not a very fair reading of the St Matthew Passion; but then it wasn't intended as such, merely as a reflection on a particular temptation of the religious life; not that faith in Christ's atoning work isn't vital and/ or comforting. I'm not advocating what Lewis called 'Christianity and', either; it's just that there is - or can be, and I'm prone to it myself at times - a tendency to think of God and faith in God as merely a sort of refuge†, rather than someone who sends us out into the world, and can be found in the world as well as in the church. If the Christian life is to mean anything at all, it has to affect the whole person, and not just for an hour and a half on Sundays and five-to-twenty minutes a night.


I did wonder if some of the audience had realised what they were letting themselves in for; they certainly weren't physically prepared for sitting for three hours in a freezing cold cathedral, which, to be fair, doesn't help one concentrate.

† Which he is; it's just it's only part of the picture.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I'll think about it. Perhaps I failed to understand you properly. At any rate, you will notice that I was speaking in a tentative manner - I don't think, maybe I'll.

P.S.: who is the silver-haired Victorian gentleman with a rather sweet expression on your icon?

[tree_and_leaf]

It certainly wasn't the most clearly expressed post I've ever made! But I'd be interested to hear what you think when you have decided (and also what you thought I meant).

The Victorian chap is John Keble; it's the portrait that's in the Oriel dining room. I've always been very fond of it.