Fr. Hermann Cohen

Today is the 139th anniversary of the death of Fr. Hermann Cohen, a.k.a. Père Augustin-Marie du Très Saint Sacrement.

To celebrate his feast day, you can amuse yourself by playing Tetris with photographs of him.  Oh, those French!

So Much for the "Chouchou de Paris"

From Richard Cross's wonderful article about the conversion of pianist and composer Hermann Cohen.  I love that one of the monkeys on his back as a novice was . . .  coffee (I'm down with the malicious wit part, too).

When Hermann presented himself at the Carmelite convent in Agen he brought a great deal of emotional baggage with him. Here was a young man who only a short while ago had been a dandy and dilettante. He had bad habits to overcome: a malicious wit, a tendency to backbite and gossip. He was addicted to gambling, he smoked, he took snuff, he loved coffee. What he faced was bare feet in the winter, rising in the middle of the night for prayer, total abstinence from meat, fasting throughout the year, sleeping on a board without a mattress, long periods of silence in a small cell, and no keyboard during his novitiate. So much for the "chouchou de Paris."

Tantum Ergo Sacramentum

While doing my dissertation research, I made the acquaintance of an elderly laicized priest. I got in touch with him because, though not a professional scholar or musicologist, he had published an important piece of scholarship in the 1990s in a semi-obscure journal -- the only work on its subject written in English. I can't emphasize enough how invaluable his research was to my own, and I cited him copiously -- almost reverently -- in my dissertation, and sent him a copy when I was done.

He has put me on some sort of email list now, and forwards items about the usual sorts of things that appear to preoccupy elderly laicized priests -- the ordination of women and whatnot -- so I usually delete them without reading. Today, though, the subject line of his email caught my interest: "Real Presence and Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration." I have a great love for the practice of adoration, so I read the email, only to find that it was the text of a recent article by Fr. Richard McBrien, well-known professor of theology at Notre Dame, in the National Catholic Reporter. McBrien's article purports to analyze the revival of interest in Eucharistic adoration, and in so doing he descends from the theologically sound -- explaining that during the Canon of the Mass, the bread and wine, though they retain the properties of bread and wine, are changed sacramentally into the body and blood of Christ -- to the insulting -- scoffing at traditional beliefs and pious practices surrounding the Blessed Sacrament. Even so, I found his concluding sentence -- "Eucharistic adoration, perpetual or not, is a doctrinal, theological, and spiritual step backward, not forward" -- shocking, and in fact felt almost physically ill when I read it. This sort of thing makes me wonder if the Traditionalists aren't right when they hint darkly that the priests and bishops are actively seeking to destroy the Catholic Church from within.

The irony is that the musicological work my contact did in the 1990s was on Father Hermann Cohen, a.k.a. Père Augustin-Marie du Très Saint Sacrement, who initiated the practice of perpetual adoration at Sacré Coeur in Paris.

The Patches Make the Goodbye Harder Still

When I was dating the Stoner Carpenter Guy, I fantasized that we would get married and have children. (In fact, we broke up shortly after September 11, which seems to have been a huge crucible for New York relationships, separating the ore from the dross.) One day, as we were walking down West 14th Street, we saw a tiny glove lying in the middle of the sidewalk where it had fallen from a child's stroller. "Do you see that?" SC Guy pointed at it with uncharacteristic, near-histrionic despair. "If you have children, you have to deal with that EVERY DAY." I knew that he didn't mean the annoyance of children losing things, but rather the dreadfulness of life's quotidian losses and separations, the casual sunderings that time and carelessness bring and that remove us inch by inch from those we love, until they're so far away that we can only wave to them from the horizon and hope they recognize us. As Holden Caulfield noted, growing up means that you have to carry suitcases in elevators and miss people.

My hardest Lenten sacrifice this year, and in previous years, is striving to become aware of all the goodbyes that we say to those we love, especially the goodbyes we must say on a daily basis. Here is a song I've always loved, "Oh Very Young" by Cat Stevens (above), that describes those goodbyes.

(My dissertation is about an iconography of penitence in the Western art-historical tradition that employs music imagery, and thus I'm interested in penitent musicians, like Hermann Cohen, who's appeared on this page more than once. Cat Stevens might fit into the penitent musician category too, since he seems to have almost completely jettisoned music after converting to Islam. He was also, I'll admit it, the object of my first crush.)

Musical Saints: John of the Cross

Today is the feast day of the great Carmelite Saint John of the Cross. The Carmelite Order, which traces its origins to the prophet Elijah, is notable for its ethos of close listening -- Elijah himself had to discern the voice of God on Mount Horeb in the midst of a soundscape of terrifying power -- and so it is fitting that the order has attracted holy men and women of a musical bent, incuding Father Hermann Cohen and Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity.

Saint John of the Cross himself spoke of the search for and mystical union with the Savior in musical terms. In his Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, he described the fleeting moment between night and day as a time charged with the "silent music" of this encounter:

The tranquil night
At the time of the rising dawn,
Silent music,
Sounding solitude,
The supper that refreshes, and deepens love.

Musical saints of Carmel, intercede for us, that we may receive the gift of true hearing!

Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Pro-Life Movement

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas and also of the unborn. The pro-life movement has taken her as its own patroness for this latter reason.

I have no wish to delve into the politics of the pro-life movement here. To do so would be to duplicate the content of countless other blogs, but would do nothing to advance the cause. My fellow blogger Kyle Cupp, who has written extensively about pro-life politics from surprising and provocative angles befitting his background as a philosopher, is a good place to go for commentary that advances the dialogue toward the ideal state of healing.

All I have is my witness as a penitent post-abortive woman. This witness has been condemned by some commenters on this blog, who have suggested that, because I continue to speak of and to mourn my sin in spite of having had much else restored to me, I provide a destructive example to other post-abortive women. Although I do not know these commenters personally, I do know this: they are not post-abortive. And they do not read blogs written by other post-abortive women. If they did, they might find this one downright cheerful in comparison.

As my beloved Father Hermann Cohen, a fellow penitent and a great devotee of the Blessed Virgin, once said in a sermon, "We have been nailed as signposts before the Gates of Hell, warning others, 'Do not go this way!'"

My prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe today is that she might move the hearts of the virtuous members of the pro-life movement to accept and embrace the fervent witness and participation of women like me. For there are many of us in the movement, including many who are not open about their penitence and its cause. Their reticence is the result of the reality that many others in the movement -- like many faithful Catholics, sad to say -- have an attitude toward penitence not unlike that of the Prodigal's older brother. It would do us all well to ponder the great mystery inherent in the fact that God forgives even great sin, and remembers it no more. Moreover, He rejoices more over the return of the penitent than over those who have no need for forgiveness.

I suspect that women like me could be the future of the pro-life movement, especially as the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens become more and more complacent about the sanctity of life. Indeed, it's not impossible that penitent post-abortive women could even in some way revitalize the Catholic Church in America.

H/T for the quote from Father Hermann: Fallen Sparrow

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.

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.

Silent Noon (John Stewart Allitt in memoriam)

After five and a half years, I am finally nearing the end of my doctoral studies. I expect to defend my dissertation next fall, and I have my dissertation recital scheduled for the end of April, which is giving me serious pause, since it’s been a long time since I’ve sung an entire evening-length concert; motherhood has eaten its way into both my chops and my ability (and desire) to maintain them. Nonetheless, it must be done, so I am hoping and praying that I’ll be able to do a passing job, and trying to practice in short increments whenever I get them.

The recital program is going to be heavy on twentieth-century British art song. I’m singing a song cycle by the young Scottish composer James MacMillan (a Catholic, incidentally, who’s written a lot of interesting sacred music), and also a group of early twentieth-century songs in the English pastoral vein, including the ravishing “Silent Noon” by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a setting of a sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Yesterday I was sitting at the kitchen table listening to a wonderfully-sung and straightforwardly-interpreted recording of English art song by Bryn Terfel and Malcolm Martineau , and when “Silent Noon” started, I found myself in tears. My two-year-old son exhorted me to be “happy, happy!” But the tranquil opening chords brought back powerful memories of my dear friend John Allitt, who died almost exactly a year ago, and whose last published work was a book on the English composers written in Italian for his Italian publisher.

John’s obituary tells who he was far better than I ever could. We first corresponded in 2000, when, in the course of researching esoteric influences on nineteenth-century Italian music (a project that, probably quite rightly, ended up falling by the wayside), I came across an allegorical/Arcadian poem that the early nineteenth-century composer Giovanni Simone Mayr had copied into one of his notebooks. The author of the anthology in which I found the poem put me in touch with John, a prominent scholar of Mayr and his circle. However, this was not the first time I’d come across John’s work. Several years earlier, while still a soprano, I had been double-cast as Lucia di Lammermoor in a production of Donizetti’s opera, and one day the other Lucia brought some fascinating pages to rehearsal, an analysis of the opera from the perspective of Christian mysticism, which turned out to have been photocopied from John Allitt’s book on Donizetti.

In 2001 I made my first recital appearance in England, and it was then that I met John for the first time. He and his lovely wife Eleanor came to the performance, and a few days later I traveled to their home in the Midlands, where I was a guest for a week. Over the course of that and two other visits, intermittent telephone calls, and many, many dozens of letters (the real, hand-written kind), John and I became great friends. A scholar of art history, Dante, and Thomas Traherne in addition to nineteenth-century music, in many ways John was responsible for my going to graduate school and taking up academic music studies, although he never suggested I do so. And, though a fervent convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church, he was also in many ways responsible for my returning to the Roman Catholic Church. My first published article was dedicated to him, and my dissertation will be as well. Not long before he died, I found out, amazingly, that the two-hundred-year-old cottage where he lived had been a building on the grounds of the estate where the Princess Belgioioso, an important patron of Fr. Hermann Cohen, stayed while in England, and from which she sent several letters to Liszt discussing Hermann. My last correspondence with John was on this matter.

When his wife sent me the news of his death, I was shocked, but not surprised. It had been almost three years since I’d last seen him, and, though I kept hoping to be able to return to England after my son’s birth, there was never the chance. There wasn’t the money for me to fly to England for his funeral, and a few days later, I lost the baby I was carrying, along with one of my ovaries, when the pregnancy turned out to be ectopic and ruptured through the tube, requiring me to have emergency surgery. I prayed and prayed to John to save the child, but it was not to be.

Now when I think of him, I feel a desolate sinking in the pit of my stomach, the way I feel at take-off when I have to take a trip by plane: the sense of being impossibly far from home and unable to return there of my own will. I don’t know how one ever reconciles the losses and leave-takings of this life with St. Paul’s injunction to “rejoice always.” I miss John terribly and long for his friendship and guidance.

To listen to "Silent Noon," go here.

From the Salon to the Carmel

Yesterday was the anniversary of the birth of another “musical saint,” Fr. Hermann Cohen (1821-1871, pictured above), known in religion as Père Augustin-Marie du Très Saint Sacrement. Hermann, a brilliant child prodigy pianist from a liberal Jewish family in Hamburg, came to Paris at the age of thirteen to further his studies, and became the friend and protégé of Franz Liszt. Liszt gave him the pet name “Puzzi,” meaning cute or darling, and Hermann grew his hair to his shoulders in emulation of the master and made the rounds with him of the fashionable salons of Paris It was in the salons, he later wrote, that he discovered the mid-nineteenth-century philosophies of

"atheism, pantheism, Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, socialism, riots, the massacre of the rich, the abolition of marriage, terror, sharing of goods, the common enjoyment of all the pleasures; these notions soon found a place in my fourteen-year-old head . . . . I soon became one of the most zealous propagandists of those sects which had vowed to renew the face of the earth."

In Paris, Hermann also became hopelessly addicted to gambling. He and Liszt eventually parted ways after Hermann was accused, most likely unjustly, of embezzling Liszt’s concert proceeds. Hermann’s career continued in England, where he became the recital accompanist of the superstar tenor Mario (scruples about his noble birth discouraged this singer from using his last name).

Little by little, conscious of a great spiritual longing, Hermann was drawn to the Catholic Church, and was baptized in 1847. He entered the Carmelite novitiate in 1849, and was ordained a priest in 1851, a remarkable act considering his recent baptism, and one which required a papal dispensation. Hermann (now Fr. Augustin-Marie) was soon well-known throughout France and the continent for his fiery preaching, and in 1862 was asked by Pope Pius IX to restore the Carmelite order to Britain. He sailed for London, where he established several convents and led the first Marian procession England had seen since the Reformation. Fr. Hermann also initiated the practice of nocturnal adoration, which soon spread throughout the world.

Fr. Hermann died in 1871 of smallpox contracted while ministering to wounded French prisoners of the Franco-Prussian war at Spandau Prison. I had heard that his cause for canonization is being examined, but a Fr. Hermann scholar I know has reason to believe that the process has stalled at the Vatican. For more, see this article which originally appeared in the Journal of the American Liszt Society in 1994.