God is Not in the Music

     After my return to the Church in the early 2000's, I established a particular Easter tradition. At that time living by myself in Houston, away from my family, I elected to spend Easter alone, unless any of my really close friends were also alone, in town, and available for a nice dinner out.

     On Easter afternoon, in the quiet solitude of my apartment, I would put on my favorite CD of Handel's Messiah, as performed by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner. I'd sit on my couch, perfectly still with eyes closed, not moving a muscle for the entire length of the oratorio, which is over three hours. In this way, I reflected on the life of Christ, from Isaiah's prophecy of his birth to his eternal reign in Heaven as told by John in Revelation. Handel's music, far from being a distraction, or so I thought, only served to deepen the experience. Glorious as it is, inspired by God as it must surely have been, it illuminated the Scripture texts for me, compelling me to listen not just with my mind but with my heart. In that nascent phase of my spiritual life, it was the most prayerful way I knew to spend Easter Sunday, after Mass.

     In the monastery, Easter Sunday is of course very special, as is all of Holy Week. The communal celebrations of the day override any private, personal devotions. As for the rest of the year, listening to music in general is not an everyday indulgence, but one that's reserved for the evening meal every Sunday, which is also communal. In other words, private listening is rare. This was, admittedly, a great sacrifice for me, and most especially on Easter, when I sorely missed listening to Messiah.

     The afternoon of Good Friday in the monastery is the most intensely prayerful, most spiritually powerful time of the whole year. From noon till three, all the nuns shut themselves in their cells for silent prayer and meditation. There is no sound, save the birds in the woods. No sound – including music. My first year there, I asked my novice directress if I could, through headphones, listen to Messiah in my cell during those three hours. My request was denied. "It's a very holy time," she told me, "and we spend it in silent prayer, with absolutely no distractions." I was heartbroken. She just didn't understand, I thought, that for me music is prayer, that for me music is God's voice in another guise.

     It took me a good while, maybe a year, to realize that she was right. I had mistaken mood and feeling for meditation and prayer. Music may help to put me on the track, but it is not the track. It may turn me towards God, but it is not God. It is a gift, but it is not the Giver. As a religious in formation, it was vitally important for me to learn the difference. Just as God was not in the wind or the earthquake (1 Kings 19:11), he is not in the music – but in the still, small voice that is heard in the core of one's soul.

Blogging A to Z: "X" is for Xerxes

One of the most famous of Handel's near-countless works is this brief but glorious aria from his opera Xerxes, "Ombra mai fu," known also as simply the Largo from Xerxes. You might say this piece is one of Handel's greatest hits (remember that series of albums that came out a few decades back--Bach's Greatest Hits, Beethoven's Greatest Hits, etc.?) There are so many recordings of it, both vocal and instrumental. And there is even a (less than stellar) performance, given by the character of Mary Bennet, in the phenomenally popular 1995 mini-series Pride and Prejudice, which, I fear, remains in the mind's ear of anyone who watches that mini-series on a regular basis.

Therefore, to dispel Mary Bennet's performance from our minds, here is the piece as it should be heard, sung by the much-beloved and much-mourned Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson.

For those who read music, please disregard the sheet music shown on the video: it is a very outdated edition, and should not be considered accurate, musically or textually, by today's scholastic standards.

The Ever-Changing Music of Life

There is a well-known series of twelve novels by the British author Anthony Powell, called A Dance to the Music of Time. I've never read any of the books in that series, but the title intrigues me. Earthly time is a series of dances in which our lives are segments. Sometimes life is polyphonic, a complicated fugue in which some phrases stand out and some are less important, and there is a sort of relentless force driving all the voices forward together, disparate as they are. Other times, life is a homophonic 4/4, vertical, its harmonies and rhythms more aligned, ordered—one hesitates to say "predictable," but sometimes it is, whether the tempo is allegro or andante. And then sometimes we find ourselves dancing a slow dance, a sarabande, almost static, but not really—there is always an underlying meter, and we keep moving, even if it's only in a circle—the circular meter of three to the bar.



Sarabande

Nothing-time is a sober pace,
     A solemn sarabande;
Its days step with reluctant grace,
     Yet fear to stop or stand.

Nothing-time has a halting beat,
     As though it hoped to hear
That chord whose consonance so sweet
     Charms even Charon's ear.

Mark the meter, three to the bar,
     But then—there is the rest—
Just space enough to hang a star,
     A quaver, brief but blest.              (March 2008)

 

"Sarabande" © 2008 Leticia Austria. First published in The Eclectic Muse.

Handel and a Turning Point

     The San Antonio Festival's production of Handel's Saul (sometime in the mid-1980's; I can't remember exactly when) was an invaluable learning experience for me. Although I had already played recitatives in performances of Mozart and Rossini operas, Handel is another animal altogether, and I had zero experience with him going into rehearsals. Nor was I well-informed at that time about the world of Baroque scholarship and performance practice, or about the musicians who specialized in these things. Nicholas McGegan, who was to conduct Saul, was simply a name to me; I had no idea that he was and is one of the world's foremost Baroque specialists. I suppose being ignorant of this was better for my nerves.
     He had no quibbles about my playing of the arias and other set pieces; Bach was one of my specialties as a solo pianist and this helped me in playing Handel. But I was playing the recitatives (recits) as I would have played Mozart recits. McGegan taught me the correct way to do Handel recits: play chords only where indicated, no adding extra chords or improvising; the chords should be short and solid, or rolled quickly, or rolled moderately slowly, depending on the text and dramatic situation. They should never be sustained for long, and your cellist sustains the bass note only as long as the you sustain the chord. I have never forgotten this teaching, which served me well when years later I played continuo for such luminaries as Christopher Hogwood, Craig Smith, Patrick Summers, and once again for McGegan himself.
     I should say that the woman who sang the role of Michal was a still unknown Lorraine Hunt (later the great Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, whose too early death from cancer left a deep void in the music world). That production of Saul was the beginning of her long, successful collaboration with McGegan and her reputation as a specialist in Handel, though she sang anything and everything with uncommon grace. I remember being particularly impressed, even at that early "soprano" stage of her career (she became a mezzo later on), with her liquid legato and warm, unforced sound.
     It was around the same time as Saul that I began serving as coach/repetiteur for Opera Theater of San Antonio. One season, we did The Barber of Seville and our Rosina was the delightful Stella Zambalis, who at that time had recently completed two years with the prestigious Houston Grand Opera Studio. She was impressed with my playing, and told me I should consider auditioning for the Studio, which trains coaches as well as singers. Being a master procrastinator and all-around yellow-bellied chicken, I mulled over her suggestion for a few years, meanwhile continuing to freelance. Despite Stella's confidence in me, and the encouragement I received from my teachers and elder coaches at AIMS (the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, which I attended for three summers), I myself was still unsure about my abilities. In my own mind, I was merely a big fish in a very small pond. The thought of testing the waters of a much larger pond, i. e. the Houston Grand Opera, brought out my extreme fear of drowning. Was I a good enough swimmer?
     On a particular day in the late '80s, around tax time, I was organizing the piles of receipts and paycheck stubs from all my freelancing jobs, when I came across a note from a coach whom I considered to be a mentor. This coach, who during the regular season served on the music staff of Lyric Opera of Chicago, was one of my teachers and my sounding board during the first of my three summers at AIMS. At the end of that summer, she left a note in my box which closed with, "You should have a great career in opera, if you want it."  I read the note again, sitting on the floor that spring day, surrounded by receipts and check stubs, and thought of all the piddly little jobs I was doing in order to scrounge up some sort of living -- a living which mostly got eaten away at tax time. I thought of all the tedious hours I spent coaching voice students who had little or no talent, who certainly had no hope of ever making a career in opera. I thought of all the miles I drove from job to job, burning up tankful after tankful of gas, grabbing fast-food lunches on the way. And I said to myself, "What the hell am I doing?"
     When annual auditions for the Houston Grand Opera Studio were announced later that year, I sent off an application.