Jill Jones wrote:
> Thank you Stephen. I hope that, and am sure that, the things that need
> to be said get said.
>
> I wish it had been like that yesterday. At least we had the Paradisum
> section of Faure.
>
> Best,
> Jill
Comment deferred is not comment denied. It's just hard for me to say
anything coherent and not a brain-dropping about something so lovely.
Whatever. Is it okay to describe the tone as "plaintive"? Indeed, it
reminds me of the Faure music: sadness, sweetness, and consolation hold
each other in balance. This keeps coming back at me:
"but of the things
no-one can know
can we sing?"
I suppose the answer is yes, otherwise only the dead would have voices.
I'm tempted to try to get into the issue of how deeply our (or any?)
culture struggles with coming to terms with death. Not "understanding"
it--just struggling to cope with the absolute Unknown. The New York
Times today has a story on Stanley Kunitz, who is about to turn 100. He
seems unafraid: "I don't want to think about anything, except to become
language."
Faure faced it in the way of religious consolation. How many others
have composed music based on the Latin Requiem Mass? And there are
poets: *Timor mortis conturbat me*--and it goes back how far before
that? I don't know how effectively the written or simply spoken word
actually gets us over timor mortis or a sense of loss, even Donne's
defiant sonnet which has its eyes on the 2nd birth in which people may
or may not believe. Maybe song is the only way to surmount fear or
grief? Ben Jonson has those two wonderful brief elegies on his son and
daughter that almost have the music built in, and I'd not be surprised
to find that they've already been set as art songs or choral pieces.
Though music itself is no guarantee; it too can present answers that
seem all but intolerable. Arrigo Boito, the Italian poet/composer who
created the libretto for Verdi's *Otello*, created a "Rule of Life" for
Iago, a solo that parodies the Credo, expounding his belief in a "cruel
God," concluding with "And after all this illusion...death. And then?
And then? Death is nullity, and Heaven is an old lie." Verdi's 1874
Requiem for Alessandro Manzoni, unlike Faure's, seems to have to fight
its way to consolation and hope: the Dies Irae is a raging brass-driven
vision of terror and Hell that modulates over its length into a
desperate plea ("Libera me, Domine!").
I've joked that I wanted the Faure Requiem at my funeral, not the
Verdi. As it is I'll settle for a few Barbara Cook recordings.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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