A reader writes:
Your latest essay back to Sam Harris coincided with the arrival here at home of a CD of Anton Bruckner‘s 2nd symphony, conducted by the late Carlo Maria Giulini, performed by the musicians of the Weiner Symphoniker. Among classical music fans, the Guilini/Weiner version of the 2nd is something of a gem. Bruckner (1824-1896) is often noted for being a devout Catholic from a small town in Austria, and both items show through in his music. He dedicated his last, unfinished, still magnificent symphony No. 9, "to my beloved God."
I write about this because your dialogue with Sam and several of the more astute and moving reader responses have made it clearer to me than ever that my deep love for a good deal of classical music, and of Bruckner’s music in particular, shows where much of my Catholicism "went": it sort of sublimated from its solid, early forms of devotion and practice as a child and adolescent (in a large, extended Irish-French Catholic family) — to a transcendental, aurally carried experience and communion; religious practice sublimated into musical meditational forms. Listening, playing, brings the same awe that you’ve written about and hinted at visually in the several pictures that have accompanied your essays on faith and the unfathomable.
Richard Osborne believes that Giulini and Bruckner’s shared Catholicism is a big part of their unusually strong concert:
"Giulini is a believer, a committed Catholic. Those who have worked with him have rarely been in doubt that here is a man, in tenor Robert Tear’s memorable phrase, under ‘the clout of God.’ Walter Legge … talked of Giulini being surrounded by "a radiant nimbus." He also referred to him as Saint Sebastian, the suffering one. Tear saw this quality at first hand: ‘Sometimes you felt music-making was something of a hair-shirt to him. The music was too beautiful to endure because what was coming through was getting closer to this vision of "the cymbol clash" with God as Elgar once put it. And the closer Giulini got to this the more painful the experience became.’"
Music is not a hair shirt for me: I’m too much the Irishman for whom it is a sentimentalist’s airy feast. Between Bruckner and Giulini we have the prophet of the divine aural spark, and a great priest of a conductor to lead the enactment of the sacrament.
I do like it that most of this music is wordless; it keeps the theologians at bay.
My own taste in music is also, I realize, skewed toward believers. Tallis, Byrd, Messiaen and Tavener all speak to me as musical vessels of the divine. But unlike my reader, I don’t see music as an alternative to faith – but as one sublime expression of it. If only the hierarchy of the church were able to channel these immense cultural resources toward a reinvigorated and thoroughly modern Catholicism. But they seem more concerned with enforcing sexual strictures.
(Photo: the interior of Washington’s national cathedral by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty.)
The Dish 