Refuge of Losers

As some readers of this blog know, a commenter recently took it to task for "[making] the Catholic Church into little more than a compensatory prize for the losers in life," and implied further that I was one of them.

I have no doubt that she is right on both counts. I have experienced devastating losses -- the loss of my first husband, the loss of four of my unborn children, the death of beloved friends, and rather many bitter heartbreaks -- some of them the results of my own ill-considered actions. I think it is safe to say that I have been completely broken by these losses, and will most likely never recover (does anyone ever really recover?). So, am I a loser? Indeed so.

In the midst of some of my most painful periods of loss, I kept singing. In fact, I usually did my best singing when I was going through some horrible crisis or other. My singing was my weapon, my tool in the world; I used it to attract, to deflect, to barter, to attain, to compete, to triumph over, and to escape from. And yet, at a crucial moment, when I was starting to build some career trajectory, had signed with opera management, and was getting auditions with important conductors (one of whom told my manager, though he didn't cast me, "she has everything"), I abandoned the career that seemed to have fed so much upon personal tragedy and impure ambitions, and decided to go into academic musicology instead. So, am I a loser? Undoubtedly so.

As for the Catholic Church, yes, again: I will admit that I have thought of it as a compensatory prize in my recent years of bitter pain. Since my reversion to my childhood faith in 2002, it has been a refuge I've clung to. If, as Christ said, we have to lose our lives in order to gain them, then the repository of wisdom and consolation that is the Catholic Church should be the compensatory prize for all believers, and we should all strive to become the kind of losers that Christ intended. (Mind you, I am not this kind of exalted, transformed loser; I'm more of your common house-and-garden sort).


Some of my readers also know of my great fondness for Fr. Hermann Cohen (a.k.a. Père Augustin-Marie du Très Saint Sacrement), above. Hermann is one of the subjects of my nearly-completed doctoral dissertation (I'm defending in October), which treats the subject of what I call "musical conversion" in the nineteenth century. I have studied the few extant sources on the life and conversion of Fr. Hermann, as well as his compositions, both published and in manuscript, from both before and after his conversion.

Hermann was acclaimed as a genius in the 1830s and '40s. Liszt wrote of his protégé, describing a concert in Geneva:

Hermann’s pale and melancholy appearance, his beautiful dark hair and frail physique, provided a poetic [image] . . . . The dear boy gave further proof of that precocious understanding and profound feeling for art which already set him apart from the ordinary run of pianists and lead me to predict a brilliant, fruitful future for him.

Perhaps this was true at least of his playing. The results of my study, however, have shown that as a composer, Hermann was pretty run-of-the-mill. Might he have become another Liszt, who was, along with Wagner, the arch-proponent of the Music of the Future? We cannot know, because Hermann abandoned the life of an adulated musician and retreated to the Carmel following an unhappy love affair. During his novitiate, he was forbidden both playing and composing; afterward, however, he was allowed to live as a musician again, but a transformed musician, offering praise in the form of sacred hymns and canticles, some of which remained in the liturgical repertoire in France until the turn of the twentieth century.

Was Hermann a loser? He was a loser in love, to be sure. He lost powerful and sympathetic friends, among them Liszt (with whom he much later reconciled) and George Sand. He was a compulsive gambler whose losses at the table were legendary, and produced the kind of dreadful consequences in his personal life that the behavior of addicts generally does. Could he have survived prodigy-hood to become a serious musician and composer? In my assessment, this question is unanswerable at best.

But was the Catholic Church a "compensatory prize" for him? Perhaps it might be alleged by those of us who don't like to think of ourselves as losers that he retreated to the Church as a refuge from his losses. What better thing could he have done? He found the compensatory prize to be the true prize, the "pearl of great price," and I believe that he is offering transformed musical praises in heaven right now.