MJ Walker wrote:
> Actually, Ken, Fauré was not so religious as all that; I quote from a
> convenient website
> (http://members.macconnect.com/users/j/jimbob/classical/Faure_Requiem.html):
>
> >Fauré spent much of his life in the service of the church, but his
> personal views on religion were unconventional at best, downright
> cynical or agnostic at worst. These are his thoughts on spirituality
> in the /Requiem/:"Everything I managed to entertain in the way of
> religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated
> from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal
> rest."< Nox est perpetua una dormienda. And Verdi was an atheist, I
> believe. Berlioz wasn't too croyant, either, so that more or less
> wraps up 19th C requiems of genius...(Well, OK, Cherubini, Dvorak...)
No surprise. Spirituality ain't religion, but religion can be useful to
spirituality. I'm not sure what the hell Verdi was. Probably started
out Catholic, but the way I heard it, his out-in-the-open relationship
with Strepponi alienated him from the Church. The Crusades that Verdi
showed in I Lombardi (pre-Strepponi) look like the greatest thing since
sliced bread: Muslims being converted, Christians taking solemn vows,
etc., etc. It's a good thing he didn't write about Simon de Montfort
and those nasty evil Cathars:-). Even after he caught heat for living
unmarried with Peppina, it is hard to read his attitude. Forza del
Destino has Padre Guardiano, a bit monochromatic but undeniably decent
and faith-filled. But Aida has Ramfis the high priest, a real swine.
Francois Poulenc I gather really WAS a committed Catholic who returned
to the Church in the late 1930s. His Dialogues of the Carmelites is a
difficult opera based on the (really happened) martyrdom of a convent of
Carmelite nuns in 1793. It is somewhat hard going until the end: the
Salve Regina sung by 17 women whose voices disappear one at a time as
they are beheaded, the diminishing song punctuated by the deliberately
amplified thud of the guillotine. Later, Poulenc adapted Cocteau's La
Voix Humaine for his favorite soprano, Denise Duval, who had created
Blanche de la Force in Dialogues. The punch line: after Poulenc died in
1963, someone is supposed to have asked Duval--an extraordinarily
beautiful woman--whether the rumors were true, that she and Poulenc had
been lovers. "I made the offer," she said, "but he liked men." I
wonder how the RCC hierarchy reacted when Ms. Duval dropped that into
the conversation....
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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