After a lifetime of listening to real music (aka CM), I think I am
passably versed in symphonic, chamber, piano, opera. Notwithstanding
the animadversions of the Sage of Santa Clara Valley [That's the wizard
of Windsor, if you please - Santa Clara is 100 miles away. -Dave], my
interest doesn't really start until Bach, historically. I no longer seek
to justify my tastes. I am so comfortable ossifying into a crotchety old
fool that I wouldn't wish to surrender the pleasure. Somehow rigidity
feels like strength.
I have neither been exposed to much choral music nor know I much about it.
I find Verdi's Requiem sublime, and like Faure's too. As much as I like
Bach, I find his cantatas tedious. For me Bach is a mathematical composer,
an inspired one, but one whose genius seems to lie in working out the
inevitabilities of harmony and counterpoint. His organ pieces are
especially gratifying in bringing themselves to a state of actum completum.
Even more than Haydn and Mozart, Bach is disinclined to mere necking. In
the cantatas, Bach's talent is disobliged by the tedium of all that
preposterous theology. Suddenly this pentametric composer is forced to
write Alexandrines, which like dying snakes drag their slow lengths along.
There is no room in real Bach for the human voice, only for the sublimity
of ratios. The mire and toil of flesh betray his geometries.
Every once in a while, in the few films I can watch past the first few
minutes, I encounter some wonderful, ethereal music, chorus and orchestra
floating in a vast acoustic suggestive of time, space, and completion
without end. Sometimes it turns out to be Verdi or Puccini, and I need
only think a bit or be reminded by the end credits.
I am open for suggestions. Does anyone know of choral compositions wherein
inspiration lasts the length of the piece, and beauty solaces even tragedy?
Doug Purl
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