Before taking our places in the pews, we checked on the music to be played during the liturgy. Turned out it was Palestrina, Taverner and Bach – our church is laudably traditional.
True enough, the Palestrina and Taverner were indeed sung, but Bach was replaced with the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. That was like replacing paschal lamb with thin gruel.
One of many English eccentricities is an overblown affection for Handel, often in preference to Bach. Handel was doubtless a great composer, but he missed the chance of becoming even a greater one when he moved to England at age 27.
England had reached her musical peak in the previous century, and by the time Handel arrived, English tastes had begun to run towards the lighter, not to say frivolous, end. George Frideric was happy to oblige – I suppose that was a condition for naturalisation.
Bach, who was born in the same year as Handel, wisely stayed in Germany and continued to write sublime music without ever catering to popular tastes. Schopenhauer must have had Handel and Bach in mind when he explained the difference between talent and genius: “Talent hits targets no one else can hit; genius hits targets no one else can see.”
As it was, Handel wrote many fine pieces, although Messiah isn’t one of them. I suppose it would be just about passable had it not been played to death by millions of giftless hacks, including those wielding original instruments with a marked absence of originality. By now, the Hallelujah Chorus, especially, sounds downright trite.
That minor gripe aside, the Latin Mass was wonderful – only Latin can match (exceed?) the grandeur of the liturgical English language of the 16th and 17th centuries. And Fr Paschal Ryan’s homily was perfect, based as it was on John 20: 1-10.
On hearing from Mary Magdalene that Jesus’s tomb was empty, Simon Peter and another disciple, “the one Jesus loved”, rushed to the tomb to make sure for themselves. But didn’t Jesus love his other apostles too, not just John? Fr Paschal (an aptronym if I ever saw one) asked that question, which gave him an opening to talk about God’s love being shown in different ways to different people.
And so on in the same vein, the whole homily revolving around words like ‘resurrection’, ‘grace’, ‘love’, ‘life everlasting’. The oration was emotionally moving and intellectually satisfying: that’s what an Easter homily should be like.
However, the Most Rev Dame Sarah Mullally, the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to disagree. “Today, as we shout with joy that Christ is risen, let us pray and call with renewed urgency for an end to the violence and destruction in the Middle East and the Gulf,” she preached.
And the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, added his own anathema to the “literally pointless conflict consuming the Middle East”. Literally as opposed to figuratively, Your Grace?
Speaking from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, His Holiness Pope Leo also told us to “implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars and marked by a hatred and indifference that make us feel powerless in the face of evil”.
Mercifully, Pope Leo didn’t specify the region he had in mind, but the implication was clear. I must come out in defence of the US and Israel: accuse them of anything you like, but they are certainly not indifferent in the face of evil.
All God’s children want that “violence and destruction” to end, but the more discerning ones wouldn’t be happy with just any old end. Those who see that war as one fought against the spread of evil believe victory is the only acceptable outcome of the hostilities.
This in no way contradicts the traditional Christian teaching on just war: wars are evil, but they must be condoned if they prevent a greater evil. That issue has been settled in the church since the time of St Ambrose (d. 397) and St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430).
Attempts by modern churchmen to read pacifism into Scripture are rooted not in theological rigour but in ideological zeal. One could indeed cite any number of peace-loving passages from both Testaments, but there is no shortage of bellicose ones either. (I’ll spare you a thesaurus of appropriate quotations.)
That’s why church doctrine is so vital: the greatest minds in history have taken centuries to work such conundrums out, to show that, while Scripture is sometimes paradoxical, it’s never contradictory.
The Pope not only called for the end of all hostilities but also helpfully suggested how that end could be achieved: “Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace. Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue.”
Quite. A dialogue with the ayatollahs will stop their evil shenanigans promoting terrorism and genocide. A dialogue with Putin will stop Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. All it takes is a kind word and perhaps a hug.
I wonder if His Holiness is angling for a position on Trump’s negotiation team, perhaps to replace either Witkoff or Kushner. If so, he’ll quickly realise that Ambrose and Augustine were right: some evil can only be stopped by violence, regrettable though it might be.
P.S. Trump knows it, although I’m not sure about his heartfelt Easter message either: “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*****’ Strait, you crazy b*******, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
I think it was terribly wrong: F*****’ should have been a lower-case ‘f’. And just five asterisks and an apostrophe after the ‘F’ mean that the final ‘g’ was dropped. That’s a bit blue collar for a statesman, wouldn’t you say?
Easter is the one Mass of the year that we do not attend our normal TLM. As we are not at a diocesan church, we are at the mercy of our hosts, the local Polish community. On Easter Sunday they take our normal 7:15 spot and tell us that the church will be made available to use “sometime after 12:00”. As a consequence, we attend the Nobertine Rite of the Vigil of Easter at the local abbey. It is a wonderful experience, starting outside for the blessing of the new fire and proceeding indoors in candlelight for the reading of the seven lessons (modern man obviously cannot be bothered to listen to all of the original twelve). At the praying of the Gloria, the lights are turned on, the bells rung, and the organ played. While sermons at the abbey are strong – never woke and rarely touch on current events – they tend to be a bit bland and rambling. (The abbey provides the priest for our weekly TLM. The first priest we met there, Father Benedict, was wonderfully succinct in his preaching. He always left me wanting more and often had me researching the topic when I got home.) This year, the prior’s sermon focused on the first chapter of Genesis, the story of creation, as that is the first of the lessons. There is little music, but plenty of Gregorian chant. I, for one, felt no loss at not having a lesbian presiding.
For your language files, though not on par with football commentators: I heard this morning on KABC radio that the astronauts aboard Artemis II “will be the farthest humans ever to have left Earth.” The BBC did no better, informing us, “No-one will have been further from home than the Artemis astronauts.” Perhaps with a cross-Atlantic collaboration the two can construct a coherent sentence.
“available to us”, not “use”. Bah! I know my comments usually contain plenty of errors, but that one I found particularly annoying and felt the need to correct it.
Don’t worry about it: If I had to apologise for every typo, I’d be writing nothing but mea culpas. They usually come in droves — as Trump would say, when it reigns it pours.
Your Easter was much more festive than ours. I’ve only once witnessed something similar, at an Orthodox convent in France. And not far from us there, there is a Benedictine abbey housing the relics of St Benedict. The monks there do Gregorian chant at every mass, which is wonderful even thought they don’t do it especially well.
The topper was that Nicholas stayed awake for the entire Mass for the first time, and offered some commentary on the seven lessons. The Mass itself is three-and-a-half hours and the church quickly fills up, so one must arrive nearly an hour early to find a seat in a pew. My old back rebels if I have to kneel on the marble floor. We were there for nearly five-and-a-half hours. That’s a major task for a 12-year-old. Makes me proud.
As you have every right to be, if only to make me envious. Unfortunately, after my recent hip replacement I can’t kneel at all. Genuflection takes flexion, alas.
We should have already, but we’ll add your full recovery to our prayers. As encouragement, I will add that my mother had a replacement at age 82 and recovered nearly full mobility. Interestingly, the restrictions imposed for sleeping – she had to place a cushion between her knees to prevent twisting – resulted in her sleeping exclusively on her back for the remainder of her life
In Latin we have flexio and genuflexio; in French we have flexion and genuflexion. The modern English use, both British and American, of “-ct-” in such words is inexcusably barbarous.
I’m alarmed to learn that your hip replacement, which I regarded as too routine to require comment, isn’t satisfactory. If you could kneel even painfully before your upgrade you ought to get your money back. Or you could convert to Orthodoxy or Presbyterianism, neither of which requires much in the way of kneeling.
Handel’s oratorios are less frivolous than his operas, so it could be argued that moving to England improved his music – and I’m sure that meeting Geminiani in England made Handel’s instrumental music much less frivolous: the Opus 6 Concerti Grossi are magnificent. Nevertheless, to hear Handel (or anybody else) instead of Bach is like asking for bread and receiving a stone. Two further (not farther!) objections to the “Hallelujah Chorus” at your Mass are that it isn’t liturgical and its words aren’t Latin.
We’ll have to wait a while for an Easter message from the head of my Church, the Patriarch of Antioch, but I fear that he’ll come even closer to calling for death to the Jews than his equal in Rome has done.
But so what? Críst is arisen! Sóþliċe is he arisen!
It’s because of his Concerti Grossi that I did describe Handel as a great composer. His oratorios may not be frivolous, but I do find them tedious.
There are longeurs in all the oratorios, but also some moments of genius. Even the operas aren’t entirely bad: you won’t be disappointed if you listen to Kirsten Flagstad singing “Ombra mai fu”, and I have an old cassette tape of the mighty Gérard Souzay singing assorted baroque arias which suggests that Handel wasn’t enormously inferior to Lully, Charpentier and Rameau.
My recommendation for Handel’s Op. 6 is the Munich Bach Orchestra directed by Karl Richter, but the music is so good that even an inferior performance is unlikely to ruin it.
Oh Handel is definitely superior to the Frenchmen you mentioned. Penelope is playing Rameau this summer, so these days I write to the sound of her practising that stuff — alas, I have no influence on her programming.
Thank you for you recommendation.; I have a warm spot for Karl Richter. Back in the late 1970s I heard him play Bach for three hours at Notre Dame de Paris. That was one of the strongest musical experiences of my life; perhaps the hall and its marvellous organ had something to do with that. I also heard a couple of his harpsichord recitals back in Moscow, but that was in another life.
I have a higher opinion than yours of the French opera composers, and a very much higher opinion than yours of “that stuff”. I admit that Rameau’s keyboard music isn’t as profound as Couperin’s or Bach’s, but whose is?
I envy your opportunities to hear music being practised. Long ago at music college, I could walk up and down the stairs hearing Schumann from one room, Shostakovich from another, and Bach from most of the rest. Nowadays the only extraneous music I hear is thumping pop noise from delivery vans, none of which sounds as if its perpetrators had taken much trouble to practise it.
I have been in Rome for the past few months, though at the moment and during Easter, in its northernmost region, Campagnano di Roma, where the Via Francigena (a 2000 year old pilgrimmage route starting from Canterbury and ending at St Peter’s Basilica) is just steps from me. A mountain region scenic during the day, a black and terrifying abyss at night with wild boars even grunting about, I was delightfully surprised to hear an Easter mass or part of it from a loudspeaker on that path Friday night, visible by only tiny points of white and blue light a hundred or so meters away through chinks of black forest. Though of course no Bach, no Handel, no Gregorian chants, but just what seemed to be a moving vehicule carrying a couple of priests, a loudspeaker, and a small escort of carabinieri. What made it remarkable, and here is where the beauty of Christianity comes in, was that even the very few residents hidden about in this wild black gorge, were worthy of a liturgy and not forgotten.
Correction: The Via Francigena pilgrimmage route is not 2000 years old, but 1300 to 1400 years old. My apologies.
Rome was the first place I lived in the West, for six months back in 1973. It has changed since then, not always for the better. Trastevere, for example, has lost much of the tone it had then — mass tourism is greatly to blame. The last time we were in Rome, we went to see the Milvian Bridge (Ponte Milvio), where Constantine saw the sign that changed the world. At both ends of the bridge there were text boards giving the detailed architectural history of the bridge, which was helpfully informative. Yet there wasn’t a single word there about ‘In hoc signo vinces’, nor even about the battle. That made us sad.
Next time you visit there will probably be a sign condemning St Constantine for owning slaves, or opposing women’s rights, or failing to ban chariot-racing, or something.
I live on the edge of my village, a fair distance from the church, but yesterday morning I enjoyed hearing the distant bells ringing the changes during a practice. The vicar may be a lesbian and the bell-ringers all atheists, but willy-nilly the bells’ message hasn’t yet been completely silenced: surrexit Dominus de sepulchro.