Messiaen and Suffering

I am reading (or, more accurately, trying to read, being interrupted by many distractions of a loud nature) a review of several new books on the great French composer Olivier Messiaen that were published in 2008, his centennial year.  The article is by Messiaen scholar Robert Fallon, and appears in the new issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (to which, unfortunately, I can't link here). Messiaen was noted, among other things, for his expansion of his mystical Catholic theology into his musical lexicon and for his use of bird song in his compositions.

Messiaen's widow, the organist Yvonne Loriod, is quoted by Fallon as saying that her husband "was a man who suffered greatly," which causes Fallon to muse over the fact that, since

many of [Messiaen's] works can be read as autobiography, the notable lack of anguish in his music at first seems puzzling.  But I suspect an answer lies in Messiaen's favorite biblical passage, the Last Supper discourses in John 14-17, where Jesus tells his disciples:  "You will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy" (John 16:20).  Messiaen, it seems, followed his faith and turned his grief into joy, which he expressed musically through ecstatic dances, tenderhearted melodies, and jubilant birdsong.  "In Saint François [d'Assise, his only opera]," he said, "there is a tight imbrication between sorrow and joy.  But where sorrow is present, where it is greatest, I have always placed the song of a bird."

Here is one of the movements of Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus (Twenty Gazes upon the Infant Jesus) for solo piano, no. IX:  "Première Communion de la Vierge."

Mourning and Purification

Karen Edmisten writes movingly on the loss of children and the Feast of the Purification.

Those who sow in tears
       will reap with songs of joy.
 He who goes out weeping,
       carrying seed to sow,
       will return with songs of joy,
       carrying his sheaves with him.  (Psalm 125:5-6)

 As always, Brahms says it so well.

Mourning Into Joy, Part 3: Is There a Doctor in the House?

Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose sin is covered. Blessed is the one to whom
the Lord shall not impute sin.
-- Romans 4:7-8

I'm going back to New York in a couple of days to defend my doctoral dissertation, "Music, Sin, and Redemption in Victorian Visual Culture." It's an exploration of a mostly-forgotten aspect of the portrayal of salvation history in the visual arts -- a trope dating from the patristic era that equates music with sin, and its abandonment with redemption. This trope, or so I contend, for various reasons reapppeared in 1850s England, and can be seen in certain paintings (as well as literary treatments) of fallen women from that time. The preeminent example of the music-sin-redemption conflation, however, as I have discussed in previous posts, is no woman, but rather David, the great musician who became king, the egregious sinner who was nevertheless a man "after God's own heart" (Acts 13:22). David, after being awakened by Nathan from denial of his sinfulness (adultery with Bathsheba, resulting in a son who dies in infancy, and the contrived murder of her husband Uriah on the battlefield), casts down both harp and crown in mourning, or so he was commonly portrayed as doing in medieval illuminated incipits of Psalm 51 (the "Miserere"). David is shown above, in a sixteenth-century painting by Lucas Cranach, spying upon Bathsheba as she bathes; note that he has his harp with him; having not yet seduced Bathsheba, he has not yet discarded it in grief.

I am honored by the presence of Thomas H. Connolly, the authority on Cecilian iconography, on my dissertation committee, especially because his work has been a revelation to me both in my scholarship and in my journey towards God. His book Mourning Into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia is nothing less than a chronicle of salvation history, and his friendship has been a great gift. I was led to his work by various inexplicable events in my first week of graduate school, and to him personally seemingly by chance by a young woman who'd left the novitiate of the Sisters of Life to become a nurse, whom I met once and never saw again; she had been a member along with Connolly of a Catholic student-faculty consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, where Connolly taught until his retirement.

When I was confirmed, the bishop asked, upon hearing my confirmation name, if I were a musician. When I answered in the affirmative, he instructed me to "pray to Saint Cecilia often." I have often forgotten to do so; Cecilia is so far away from our own time and experience, and my main man these days is Fr. Hermann Cohen, like David a sinner, a Jew, and a musical penitent. But I would like to ask those readers so inclined to please speak to Cecilia about me, even if just one word, between now and October 31. I hope that my defense will not only earn me my degee, but will also afford glory to God, the true author and revealer of all beauty. Please also ask for help for my son, from whom I've never been away before, and his father, who'll be taking care of him solo.

Mourning into Joy, part 2: Tisha b'Av

Yesterday was the anniversary of my abortion. I mentioned this to Really Rosie, and she pointed out that this year it was also the Jewish fast of Tisha b'Av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, and also other tragedies that have befallen the Jews, from the failure of Bar Kokhba's second-century revolt against the Roman empire to the Holocaust. On this day, a day of great mourning, the Book of Lamentations is read, and, in Sephardic temples, the Book of Job.

According to Orthodox Jewish belief, however, when the Messiah comes, this day of mourning will be transformed into one of great joy. God asserts in Jeremiah 31:13: "I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow." This is my prayer for all men and women who've suffered the tragedy of abortion.

Mourning Into Joy

A few years ago, in the first week of my doctoral studies, I came across a fleeting reference in a footnote to the book Mourning Into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia by Thomas H. Connolly. I immediately knew that I had to read it. I was preparing for Confirmation at the same time (although a cradle Catholic, that sacrament had gone missing during the time of my family's first heady, later sad and sodden, experiments with aggiornamento), and considered taking Saint Cecilia's name as my Confirmation name, for the obvious reason that she is the patroness of music and musicians. But that seemed a little corny to me, and I was unsure. When I read Connolly's book, however, my mind was made up: Cecilia would be my name -- not just because of her association with music, but also because of her much more ancient association with the profoundly Christian concept of mourning turned to joy, and, thus, with radical spiritual conversion. Connolly links the history of Saint Cecilia's portrayal with musical instruments to the history of the iconography of King David: the image of David-in-Penitence, with his crown and harp cast down in mourning for his adultery with Bathsheba and his de facto ordering of her husband Uriah's murder, was a popular one in the Middle Ages, and even Henry VIII had himself painted as David-in-Penitence to advertise his humility. David's life and words, through the Psalter, made up the meat of the early and medieval Church: seven times a day, monastics prayed (and still pray) the Psalms, thus identifying themselves and the Church with a man whose ethos was not only penitence, but even the paradox of complete reversal: David was a shepherd and a king, a "man after God's own heart" who was also a grievous sinner, an unarmed boy who slew a giant, the great musician and poet who sang and danced before the Lord, and the penitent who cast down his harp and crown in grief and recognition. That mysterious paradox of reversal, it seems to me, is essential to the Christian message: the words of Christ in John 16:20 -- "Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy" -- exemplify this paradox.

While searching for something else, as always seems to be the way, I came upon a lovely post about living the Psalms of David on a blog evocatively called Cloud by Day, Fire by Night, referring the guises under which God led Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt. The blog's author, Kirsten, beautifully emphasizes David's iconography of holy paradox as she writes:

I do not know whether we need to experience the infinity of grief in order to know its counterpart in joy, but I do know this: David’s heart held the breadth of it and did not seek to contain it, this heart that was said to be like God’s own.

And that is truth I can grab onto.

(P.S. Kirsten has images of some of the female Roman martyrs named in the canon of the Mass along the right side of her blog, including Saint Cecilia.)