A night to remember: 22 Dec 1808

On the night of 22 December 1808, one of the great musical evenings in our history took place in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. It was on this night that Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 and Symphony No.6 and Piano Concerto No.4 and Choral Fantasy had their premieres. Three of these are among the greatest compositions of their kind in our musical tradition. Also on the programme were a few movements from his C major Mass, an aria, and a piano improvisation. Beethoven himself played the piano that evening, and it was the last time, on account of his hearing loss, that he would ever perform one of his concertos in public.

Contemporary accounts say that the night was something of a disaster: the orchestra badly rehearsed, the theatre frigid. The concert lasted 4 hours. Read more about it here.

Imagine, though, what it might have been like to be there that night, and to witness the entry into the world of these great masterpieces.

I thought it would be fun to recreate the concert here, as a way of celebrating Beethoven’s anniversary year. Here are the pieces that were played that night, in the order in which they were played:

Symphony No.6 (played by the Vienna Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann)

Ah, perfido! (sung by Birgit Nilsson, with the RAI Orchestra of Rome under Wolfgang Sawallisch)

Mass in C major: Gloria (UCLA Chorale and Orchestra under Donald Neuen)

Piano Concerto No.4 (Mitsuko Uchida with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons)

…Intermission…

Symphony No.5 (West–Eastern Divan Orchestra unde Daniel Barenboim)

Mass in C major: Sanctus (UCLA Chorale and Orchestra under Donald Neuen)

Piano improvisation (Of course, we don’t know what it sounded like, but it seems likely that it was something like this.)

Choral Fantasy (Leif Ove Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra)

**

A night to remember! I’d like to think that, had I been there, I’d have left in a state of admiration and gratitude.

 

 

Arden of Faversham

Arden of Faversham
Anonymous
(Methuen, 2014) [c.1592]
160 p.

Arden of Faversham is, to borrow an apt phrase, a “shabby little shocker”. It came to the English stage in the early 1590s, and told the more-or-less true story of how Alice Arden and her lover plotted to murder her husband, Thomas Arden, events which had occurred about 40 years earlier, and about which tongues still wagged. It belongs to a genre I’ve not encountered before in Elizabethan drama: the “true crime” tale.

I was prepared, therefore, for it to be bloody, but I did not expect it to be so funny. Thomas Arden is a marked man, surrounded on all sides — though he knows it not — by people determined to see him dead. Yet much of the action of the play dramatizes thwarted attempts on his life, as he guilelessly avoids the knife time and again — until he doesn’t. But the effect on stage would, I think, be quite comical, with an undercurrent of violence ready to burst forth. The play is something like an Elizabethan Fargo.

*

Written mostly in blank iambic pentameter, the verse of the play is often excellent. Consider this passage, from Act III, in which Arden meditates on the bad character of his wife, whom he knows to be an adulteress:

If love of me or care of womanhood,
If fear of God or common speech of men,
Who mangle credit with their wounding words,
And couch dishonour as dishonour buds,
Might join repentance in her wanton thoughts,
No question then but she would turn the leaf
And sorrow for her dissolution;
But she is rooted in her wickedness,
Perverse and stubborn, not to be reclaimed;
Good counsel is to her as rain to weeds,
And reprehension makes her vice to grow
As Hydra’s head that plenished by decay.
Her faults, methink, are painted in my face,
For every searching eye to overread.

Or consider this passage, in which Alice’s lover, in a moment of moral clarity, considers how his scheming to murder and supplant Arden has destroyed his own happiness:

My golden time was when I had no gold;
Though then I wanted, yet I slept secure;
My daily toil begat me night’s repose,
My night’s repose made daylight fresh to me.
But since I climbed the top-bough of the tree
And sought to build my nest among the clouds,
Each gentle stirry gale doth shake my bed,
And makes me dread my downfall to the earth.
But whither doth contemplation carry me?
The way I seek to find, where pleasure dwells,
Is hedged behind me that I cannot back,
But needs must on, although to danger’s gate.
Then, Arden, perish thou by that decree.

This is a fine reflection on how it might feel to be trapped by and soured upon one’s own ambition.

*

The characters in the play are, in a certain sense, stock characters: the unfaithful wife, the jealous lover, the jilted husband, the crafty servant, the hired gun. But there are numerous touches here and there that render them more interesting. The relationship between Alice and her lover, for instance, is a passionate one, but also one prone to lurking suspicions and violent eruptions of bitterness. Though the characters seek happiness together, for the audience there is no expectation that they will find it.

And in the final act, when once the deed has been done, the playwright very deftly shows us Alice cracking under the strain: feigning ignorance of Arden’s whereabouts (for he actually lies in a side room, “smeared in blood and filthy gore”), she repeatedly asks aloud where he might be, awkwardly invites her lover to sit in her husband’s chair at the table, and starts at every mention of his name. It is a quite masterful portrait of a guilty conscience.

*

One wonders how a play as good as this can be anonymous. It seems an injustice. I am told that over the years it has been attributed to Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, among others. The 2016 edition of The Oxford Shakespeare actually attributes it partly to young William himself, who was just launching his playwrighting at about this time, and actually I find this attribution, while not obviously right, at least not obviously wrong, for the use of asides and monologues reminded me frequently of Shakespeare, and, as I’ve already said, the verse is often very good. In any case, whoever it was wrote the thing did a fine job, and the play is an entertaining read. I would jump at the chance to see it on stage.

The tidal flood beneath the lunar sway…

… but in Latin.

Reading Seneca’s essay On Providence I came across a surprising passage in which, in an aside, he says:

If anyone observes how shores are laid bare as the sea withdraws into itself, and yet are covered again in the shortest of time, he will believe it is some unseen fluctuation that causes the waves now to diminish and flow inwards, now to burst forth and with a great surge reclaim their former home; but in fact the waves increase by degrees, approaching to the hour and day proportionately larger or smaller in volume as they are attracted by the star we call the moon, whose power controls the ocean’s surge.

Now, it is true that the translator (John Davie) does not use the word “tide” here, but that must be what he is talking about. This is fascinating to me, because I had thought that the connection between the moon and the tides was a post-Newtonian discovery.

For instance, in his defence of a heliocentric model, Galileo argued that the tides are caused by the rotation of the earth. This was wrong; I’d thought it was put forward in the absence of a better explanation. But apparently not. Fascinating.

Mosebach: The Heresy of Formlessness

The Heresy of Formlessness
The Roman Liturgy and its Enemy
Martin Mosebach
(Angelico, 2018) Second edition.
xviii + 199 p.

“I admit quite openly that I am one of those naive folk who look at the surface, the external appearance of things, in order to judge their inner nature, their truth, or their spuriousness.”

So says Martin Mosebach early in this gentle and appreciative meditation on the traditional Roman Rite — what is today, following Pope Benedict XVI, called the “extraordinary form” of the liturgy for Latin-rite Catholics. It is one thing to listen to what theologians or liturgists say about the public worship of the Church, and another to see what they do. One sometimes belies the other, or at least the connection between the two is not always obvious.

“Liturgy wars” have waxed and waned for the last fifty years in the Church, since the radical changes introduced in the wake of the Second Vatican Council: the Latin abandoned, the altar turned around, the altar rails removed, the music changed, and so forth. For a long time the pre-Council rite was broadly forbidden — or was thought to be so. Benedict XVI liberalized its celebration in 2007, but today it is nonetheless the case that the vast majority of parishes worldwide celebrate the Mass in the new, “ordinary” form, and most Catholics have never attended, and most priests have never celebrated, a Mass in the older, “extraordinary” form.

Mosebach’s love is for the older form, and his book is a thoughtful account of why. It’s not a polemical book. Apart from a few paragraphs here and there, the new Mass hardly gets a mention.

His instinct to judge on appearances is, he believes, the natural attitude of “people of aesthetic sensibility”; those sensitive to artistic unity, to beauty, and to form are, in his experience, less inclined to admit, or at least to tolerate with equanimity, a putative division of form and content, which he calls “the German vice”. A loss of form, he argues, almost always entails a loss of content. To be sure, the Mass is not merely a work of art, but surely it is at least that.

The argument, which I have heard myself, that the form of the Mass, its aesthetic face, is irrelevant to the underlying reality and meaning of the Mass, he finds unconvincing. It has a certain validity, of course, for the gracious Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not dependant on the celebration of the Mass being beautiful or alluring. But surely the Mass, if by it Christ truly becomes present to us, ought to be surrounded with as much beauty, honour, and glory that we can muster. Our liturgy should, insofar as is possible, make that reality tangible to our senses. That would be fitting. That should be our aspiration. We are human creatures, after all, who know what we know through our senses. And so, when, decade after decade, this does not happen, when the liturgy is tawdry or banal, something is awry. The defect of form may possibly begin to affect our understanding, and even our apprehension, of the truths the Mass celebrates and enacts. The true reality of the Mass is not determined by its form, but neither is the latter irrelevant to the former.

Among the most fruitful observations Mosebach makes in the course of his reflections is that liturgy is a kind of revelation: it makes God known to us. We therefore ought to treat it with the reverence we own to other sources of revelation, like Scripture:

“Even in the earliest Christian times Basil the Great, one of the eastern Church Fathers, taught that the liturgy was revelation, like Holy Scripture itself, and should never be interfered with. And so it was, until the pontificate of Paul VI [that is, Vatican II]. Naturally this attitude did not prevent essential modifications, but such changes as occurred took place organically, unconsciously, unintentionally, and without a theological plan. They grew out of the practice of liturgy, just as a landscape is altered over centuries by wind and water.”

The reforms of the liturgy that occurred to create the new Mass were not of this organic kind; this was a consistent theme of Pope Benedict XVI’s extensive theological reflections on the liturgy. The Mass has been subjected to all manner of experiment in the meantime, pushed here, and pulled there, and sometimes treated as something that we make for ourselves according to our own perceived needs. (Mosebach cannily draws a connection between liturgical reformers and historico-critical exegetes of Scripture, both of whom he sees as tempted to make themselves masters of revelation rather than allowing revelation to master them.)

But this is quite at odds with the understanding that Mosebach (and Benedict) think proper. Liturgy, as with any revelation, is to be received as a gift, and it is a great advantage of the old rite that it comes to us in this way: not authored by anyone, not flexible enough to suit all tastes, not requiring the priest to be spiritually gifted in order to render it reverent. It is “begotten, not made”, to echo Mosebach’s wittiest appropriation.

This “impersonal” nature of the liturgy, its given-ness, its just-being-there, he connects to the sacramental nature of Catholicism. But the intelligibility of the whole sacramental system is contingent on its being of divine, not human, origin. “For this reason these sacraments and rites must be most strictly kept aloof from all subjectivism and all private and personal inspiration.” So with the liturgy, and for the same reasons.

**

I have said that the book is not polemical, and that is true. It nonetheless has a certain melancholy air, for Mosebach knows that the liturgy which he loves, that gift which he has received from God, has been nearly destroyed. He is conscious of living in the long, sad aftermath of something beautiful befouled and ruined. The respect which he instinctively feels is owed to sacred rites long inhabited has gone unheeded:

We must admit, with no beating about the bush, that the Roman liturgy’s fifteen-hundred-year tradition has been breached, and breached irretrievably. Dismayed and speechless, we had to watch as the supreme Catholic authority bent its whole might — a might that has grown over the centuries — to the task of eradicating the very shape of the Church, the liturgy, and replacing it with something else.

He understands the reasons given for undertaking a reform, and is doubtful of them, but emphasizes the disconnect between what the Council fathers intended and what was actually perpetrated after the Council:

Disastrously, the implementation of the conciliar decrees was caught up in the cultural revolution of 1968, which had broken out all over the world. That was certainly the work of a spirit — if only of a very impure one. The political subversion of every kind of authority, the aesthetic vulgarity, the philosophical demolition of tradition not only laid waste universities and schools and poisoned the public atmosphere but at the same time took possession of broad circles within the Church.

This is an old story, hardly original observations, but stated with a certain panache.

*

The book is not like Jesus’ tunic, without seam, woven from the top throughout, but instead consists of essays and occasional pieces gathered together on account of their shared interest in things liturgical. This leads to a certain amount of repetition, and also promotes the introduction of themes and ideas that are slightly digressive relative to the main argument, eddies in the stream, but intriguing ones.

He takes up the question, for instance, whether there is something anti-ritualist in the bones of Christianity, a religion that has, after all, been periodically wracked by iconoclasm. His own father was a Protestant who worshipped alone with a small black prayer book and nothing else. But he thinks ritualism is proper to Christianity, on the grounds that Christianity is founded on the person of Jesus, a physical presence then and now, not an abstraction, and he argues that ritual is a natural way of honouring his presence and making it tangible to the senses.

Likewise he touches on the role of music in the liturgy (a much travelled theme!), the value of our Eastern liturgies as a foil for seeing what is right and wrong with our Western liturgies, and the meaning of the much-disputed Vatican II phrase “active participation” vis-a-vis liturgy. There is a wonderful essay about his visit to Fontgombault, where the monks continue to celebrate the liturgy in its old form.

*

The writing in the book is graceful and often striking in its formulations. Mosebach is a well-regarded novelist in his native Germany, and it shows. (Indeed, the last selection in this book is actually an excerpt from one of his novels.) Writing this articulate and pleasant to read is rare in any context, much less in the realm of meta-liturgical literature, where polemics have long ago calcified along partisan lines.

*

My own experience of the liturgy answers in some respects to Mosebach’s, but not in all. I am, in general, a Novus Ordo Mass-goer, like the vast majority of Catholics today. This is partly because opportunities to attend the older rite are rarer, partly because I often feel like I’m making an especially big disruption when I attend the traditional rite with my children, and partly because I myself prefer certain aspects of the new rite, such as the vernacular readings.

I’ve been lucky, though, in my experience with the Novus Ordo Mass. The number of really awful experiments I’ve seen and heard have been few in number, and haven’t been as bad as the train wrecks Mosebach describes witnessing in Germany. Of course I’ve been to many Masses that were aesthetic horrors, but generally we’ve attended parishes where the Mass is celebrated in a way that is beautiful and even glorious. Sacred music sounds. Incense billows. The vestments are beautiful. The Mass is often celebrated ad orientem (in which the priest spends much of the Mass with his back turned to the antics of my children in the aisles). The atmosphere is reverent and prayerful.

That said, I do make an effort to attend the traditional Latin rite when I can. Perhaps I go once a month or so, usually not on a Sunday, but for an evening Mass or a special feast. I love this Mass. I especially love to go alone, when I can have the freedom to sink into the silence and remain there. (I have learned from this rite the value of simply being present, which has been a boon to my child-chasing adventures at the new Mass also.) At this form of the Mass I feel especially close to the heart of our tradition, and close to the saints (especially, for some reason, to the post-Reformation English saints), for this is the form of the Mass that they knew.

I have friends who have had strong negative reactions to the traditional Mass; I don’t share those feelings at all, but I sort of understand them. They support the troubling claim that the two forms of the rite are quite dissimilar. When Pope Benedict liberalized the old Mass he did so in part in the hopes that the two forms of the rite would mutually inform one another, drawing them closer together. And I have attended Novus Ordo Masses which were very close to what I experience at the traditional Mass, so I know the dissimilarity of form is not unbridgeable. To a first approximation, I see the older form as the standard to which the newer form should aspire, generally speaking. In the meantime, I am not interested in taking sides in any contest. My desire is that both forms be celebrated as beautifully and lovingly as possible, and that I know and love both.

In the end I appreciated Mosebach’s measured and personal approach to his theme. The book is a love letter, of sorts. Agree with him or not, I think a reader with an interest in these matters would appreciate the manner in which he makes his case.

Easter Sunday, 2020

I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.

– George Herbert (1633)

Happy Easter!

Tenebrae III

Jerusalem surge

Tenebrae II

Omnes amici mei

Tenebrae I

Tristis est anima mea

Ovid: Poems of Exile

The Poems of Exile
Tristia; Black Sea Letters
Ovid
Translated from the Latin by Peter Green
(University of California, 2005) [8-14 AD]
lxxxiv + 451 p.

Ovid had for years been at the heart of Rome’s literary culture when, in 8 AD, he was exiled by Augustus, sent to the city of Tomis, on the edge of the Black Sea, on the far fringe of the Empire. It was for him a death in life, and from the depths of his misfortune he wrote these poems, first the Tristia (in 5 books, composed roughly 8-11 AD) and then the Epistulae ex Ponto (in 4 books, written roughly 11-14 AD).

The reason for Ovid’s exile is not entirely understood. He says in the Tristia that “It was two offences undid me, a poem and an error”. About the “poem”, at least, there is no doubt, for he dwells on it constantly throughout these poems:

“Poetry made Caesar condemn me and my life-style
because of my Art, put out
years before: take away my pursuit, you remove my offences —
I credit my guilt to my verses. Here’s the reward
I’ve had for my care and all my sleepless labour:
a penalty set on talent. If I’d had sense
I’d have hated the Learned Sisters, and with good reason,
divinities fatal to their own
adherents.” (II, 1)

His “Art” is the Ars Amatoria, his poetic guidebook for the aspiring seducer. An important raft in Augustus’ political program was reform of marriage and family life in Rome; he passed laws requiring marriage of all Roman citizens of child-bearing years, and imposed severe penalties for adultery. Evidently Ovid’s casual indifference to this program and the moral ideals underlying it earned him Augustus’ anger, and this despite the fact that the love poetry had been written decades earlier.

As for the “error” to which Ovid alludes, we don’t know what it was. A personal affront to Augustus? Perhaps he just brought his old poems to his patron’s attention at an inopportune time? We will probably never know. It may have been something personally embarrassing to Ovid, for, unless I am mistaken, he mentions this “error” only once, a rarity made the more remarkable because of the obsessiveness with which the poems dwell on his fate.

And they are obsessive, exhaustingly so. In his notes to his translation, Peter Green sums up these poems: “Ovid is chronicling his own slow inner destruction”. The ambit of his themes is disconcertingly narrow: his misfortune, the fickleness of his friends who will not lobby on his behalf to the Imperial ear, the barbarity of his surroundings, the inadvertence of his offence, the faithfulness of his wife, praise of Augustus’ godlike power, and that’s about it. We read of how an exile’s condition is like that of a storm-tossed ship, of how his journey to exile was worse than Ulysses’ voyage from Troy, of his fair-weather friends, of his loneliness and isolation, of the rigours of life in Tormis, a “land seared by crimping frost”. As one reads through these poems, the monotony of his complaints, almost always in combination with self-justifying excuses, is wearying, and he knows it:

“Now I am out of words, I’ve asked the same thing so often;
now I feel shame for my endless, hopeless prayers.
You must all by now be bored stiff by these monotonous poems —
certainly you’ve learned by heart what I want,
and know the contents of each fresh letter already
before you break its seal.”
(BSL 3.7)

It would be reasonable to become exasperated with Ovid, but I found myself inclining more to pity. He was obviously at his wit’s end, overwhelmed by the punishment inflicted on him, and I felt that in these poems I heard the voice of Ovid the man, rather than Ovid the dazzling conjurer of tales or Ovid the irreverent huckster. Though the range of his mind in these poems is almost immeasurably narrower than in the Metamorphoses, the field of view is in clear focus: we see a tortured heart. “Who can see another’s woe, and not feel in sorrow too?”

Despite the monomaniacal intensity of these poems, there are some interesting variations here and there in which Ovid finds a new angle on his sorrow. He imagines his book of poems travelling to Rome and touring the city from which he is barred (Tr 3.1); he writes movingly of his memories of spring in Rome (Tr 3.12); he celebrates his birthday with a lament on his being separated from everyone he loves (Tr 3.13); he imagines himself and his wife aging apart (for she had stayed in Rome to argue his case before the Emperor) (BSL 1.4); he relates a vision of the god of Love, the deity who caused his exile (BSL 3.3).

The most famous of these exile poems is the tenth in Book IV of the Tristia, a long autobiographical poem in which Ovid tells us about his childhood, his family, his first efforts at poetry, the people in his poetic circle in Rome (Propertius, Horace, and, at a distance, Virgil), his fame, and finally his exile. It is a long, consistently interesting, and touching performance.

And “performance” might be the right word for many of these poems. Despite the directness with which they speak, there is reason to think that a certain amount of artifice is at work. He writes, after all, with a purpose which Peter Green says can be summed up in just five words: “Get Me Out Of Here”. He begs his friends to speak on his behalf to Augustus, and he begs Augustus to relent, to rescind his exile, or at least to allow him exile in a more hospitable place. To this end, we are subjected to a good deal of self-abasing praise of the munificence and wisdom of Augustus:

Spare me, my hero, whose virtues eclipse the boundless
cosmos, rein in your vengeance, just though it be!
Spare me, imperishable glory of our era, through your
own devoted care, lord of the world!
(BSL 2.8)

Such cringing gives no pleasure to the reader, and if it brought any pleasure to Augustus it was nonetheless not enough. When Augustus died in 14, Ovid was still in exile, and he died there a few years later, a great talent brought to a sad end.

It doesn’t seem quite apt to describe a collection of poems of this heft as a “pendant”, but that does roughly describe the place of these poems in Ovid’s oeuvre. If his whole body of work is like a symphony, with the love poetry being a scherzo and the Metamorphoses a long and elaborate fantasia, then these exile poems are a stately andante in a minor key, gradually winding down and fading away into silence. They are not going to bring anyone joy, but, for their disarming portrait of a man sundered from home and all he loved best, I am grateful to have read them.