Requiem Mass (Though Not For Me, As You May Have Thought)

     Well, it is interesting to see how summer work and a boatload of schoolwork can affect my opportunity to post even a small entry! But I finally have something worthwhile to write about!

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra warming up before the concert.
The choir still had yet to come out!
(The picture isn't very clear; it was taken with my phone)

     This past October, I had the exciting and amazing opportunity to see the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra give an outstanding performance of the Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626). This was the first time I had ever heard a real, professional symphony orchestra perform any classical masterpiece live. Of all pieces, they performed one of my all time favorites, the Requiem Mass!
     This was only part of the excitement, however. The advertisement I had read for the performance stated that actor John Lithgow would be reading excerpts of poetry and letters written by Mozart. Naturally, I was very excited to see a famous actor live. Then, while waiting for the concert to begin, I discovered in the program that Mr. Lithgow would not be there that night...instead, it was F. Murray Abraham (winner of the Oscar for his performance as Antonio Salieri in the film Amadeus) whom they were featuring! I just about jumped out of my seat. The star of my favorite movie of all time was there that night, reading letters from Mozart during the Requiem Mass! Needless to say, Mr. Abraham did not disappoint.

F. Murray Abraham as Salieri (L) and as himself (R)

     Before the Requiem Mass, the PSO treated us to a stellar performance of Beethoven's violin concerto, featuring Noah Bendix-Balgley. It was so amazing! What more can I say? How can I really describe with words a night filled with Beethoven and Mozart? (Of course, there are no words!)
     One of the most amazing parts of the evening was the end of the Requiem--after the last movement ended, the concert hall faded to complete darkness and a bell tolled in remembrance of one of the greatest composers of all time. Slowly, the lights faded back on, and at that moment, the entire hall erupted into a chorus of emphatic cheers.
     There is nothing quite like being surrounded by Mozart's emotional, deeply moving sacred music. This day will forever be one of my most cherished memories. A special thanks to Dave for this wonderful, unforgettable day!

Merry Christmas!

May the Child Jesus bless you abundantly

this Christmas season and throughout the new year.

Ave, Ave, Verum Corpus...

I went to Mass this afternoon, and during Communion I heard the organ begin to play a familiar introduction. Sure enough, the cantor began to sing Ave Verum Corpus. Instantly, I felt like I was on a cloud floating to heaven. The quality of the music may not have been the greatest, but I still wanted to cry as I meditated along with it. God certainly speaks through Mozart's compositions. I wish more music ministers would use this kind of sacred music!

Mozart vs. Beethoven

MOZART'S MUSIC HAS A NEW YOUTUBE ACCOUNT!

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www.youtube.com/herrmozartsmusic

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The following video is on the new channel. Please enjoy...and comment!

Mozart's Wedding Day

Wolfgang and Constanze were married on

August 4, 1782 in Vienna, at Saint Stephen's Cathedral.

Wolfgang and Constanze's marriage certificate.



Saint Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.




The inside of Saint Stephen's Cathedral. 



They had a very happy marriage together. Wolfgang's letters to Constanze -- written either while he was out pursuing work, or while she was at the spa in Baden -- remain tender, loving, and even a bit silly up until the last one.

For instance, on April 13, 1789 while he was in Dresden, Wolfgang wrote a letter to Constanze and told her of all the silly things he would do with her little portrait while he was away from her:

If I were to tell you all the things that I do with your portrait, you would laugh heartily. For instance when I take it out of its prison house I say "God bless you, Stanzerl! God bless you, you little rascal, -- Krallerballer -- Sharpnose -- little Bagatelle!" And when I put it back I let it slip down slowly and gradually and say "Nu, -- Nu, -- Nu, -- Nu;" but with the emphasis which this highly significant word demands, and at the last, quickly: "Good-night, little Mouse, sleep well!" Now, I suppose, I have written down a lot of nonsense (at least so the world would think); but for us, who love each other so tenderly, it isn't altogether silly.

Then, on July 7, 1791, just five months before his death, Wolfgang wrote to his wife who was at the spa in Baden:

You can not imagine how slowly time goes when you are not with me! I can't describe the feeling; there is a sort of sense of emptiness, which hurts -- a certain longing which can not be satisfied, and hence never ends, but grows day by day. When I remember how childishly merry we were in Baden, and what mournful, tedious hours I pass here, my work gives me no pleasure, because it is not possible as was my wont, to chat a few words with you when stopping for a moment. If I go to the Clavier and sing something from the opera [Die Zauberflöte] I must stop at once because of my emotions. -- Basta!

No doubt, August 4, 1782 remained one of the happiest memories in Wolfgang and Constanze's lives.

Pope Benedict XVI, Mozart and the Quest of Beauty

I was very excited to find this article on www.CatholicEducation.org. Enjoy!

Pope Benedict XVI, Mozart and the Quest of Beauty
By Mark Freer
Used with permission.

. . .

Everyone, it seems, loves Mozart. As a small boy I would march round and round the room to an old recording of the Haffner Symphony that my father used to play, and in my professional vocation as a musician that love has remained and grown. And I find myself in excellent company. The Pope's brother Msgr. Georg Ratzinger — for thirty years choirmaster of Regensburg Cathedral — recently gave an interview to the Swiss Catholic press agency KIPA, in which he divulged that Benedict XVI's favourite musical pieces are the Clarinet Quintet and the Clarinet Concerto. Inside the Vatican reported that Benedict was playing Mozart on his piano on the Sunday afternoon following his installation as Pope, when he returned to his old apartment to see his brother. And papal biographer George Weigel said in Newsweek after Benedict's election that "here is another surprise for cartoonists of the dour Ratzinger: he's a Mozart man, which I take to be an infallible sign of someone who is, at heart, a joyful person." Georg Ratzinger supplies further anecdotes:

Does he still find time to tickle the ivories?
Very seldom. But the last time I was in Rome with the Cathedral Choir the piano lid was open, and Mozart sonatas were lying there, open. He knows himself that his playing is hardly of an elevated standard, but he enjoys it. And his desire to make music still finds its most beautiful outlet in Mozart.
What sort of piano does he have then?
It's of no particular brand. We bought it when he was lecturing in Freising. The action is not so great, but it looks very nice, and the tone is fine. For the papal palace in Castelgandolfo the Steinway firm has donated a small grand piano, one which I also used to enjoy playing very much. There's talk of getting one for the Vatican too, but my brother says it's not worth it. For one thing he doesn't have much time, and also he gauges his own abilities realistically. For his own playing, his old piano is good enough.

Msgr Ratzinger also gives a musical portrait of their family home:

Reverend Kapellmeister, how did you and your brother come in contact with Mozart for the first time?
At home we played the harmonium. Our parents were of the view that it would prepare us for the organ. In one practice book was a piece of two lines reputed to be by Mozart. I could never identify it later. The "Mozart year" 1941 saw an intensification. During the 150th year after the composer's death there was a Mozart broadcast every Sunday, at lunch time. As I was the one in the family who was the most musically engaged, I was allowed to take my father's place at the table, which was directly next to the radio. Then in July I went with my brother to a Mozart concert put on by the Regensburg Cathedral choir. They sang excerpts from The Impresario in costume, and it was quite wonderful. I couldn't sleep the whole night.

Cardinal Ratzinger enjoying Mozart

But let's hear Pope Benedict himself on the subject. In the extended interview that was published ten years ago as Salt of the Earth we read:

You are a great lover of Mozart.
Yes! Although we moved around a very great deal in my childhood, the family basically always remained in the area between the Inn and the Salzach. And the largest and most important and best parts of my youth I spent in Traunstein, which very much reflects the influence of Salzburg. You might say that there Mozart thoroughly penetrated our souls, and his music still touches me very deeply, because it is so luminous and yet at the same time so deep. His music is by no means just entertainment; it contains the whole tragedy of human existence.

Penetrated our souls...so luminous...so deep...contains the whole tragedy of human existence, says the man who is now Pope. Many, including myself, would agree. The deeper one enters into Mozart's music — the more one seeks to find there, in between those little quavers and crotchets; — in short, the more one allows it to 'penetrate the soul', then the more it is felt as transcendent, sublime, consummately beautiful. 

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a close friend of Cardinal Ratzinger (together with Cardinal de Lubac and others they founded the Communio International Catholic Review, published today in fifteen countries). Balthasar dared to express himself in directly theological fashion, speaking of the "...miraculous Mozart, who... had the 'power of the heart' to sense infallibly the true and the genuine". Referring to The Magic Flute, he writes:

What must appear everywhere else as a vain image of fantasy or even of blasphemy — the definitive revelation of eternal beauty in a genuine earthly body — may well have become blessed reality just once, here, in the realm of the Catholic Incarnation.

And this astonishing passage from his Tribute to Mozart:

Do we not come from God and return to him, passing through the waters and fires of time, suffering and death? And why should we not permit ourselves to be led through the dissonances of our existence by the Zauberflöte, a tremendous adumbration of love, light and glory, eternal truth and harmony? Is there a better, indeed another manner to bear witness to the nobility of our divine filiation than to make present whence we came and where we are going? All those whom we take for our models tried to have it that way, and above all he who knew himself to be the Son of the Father, who had the face of the Father before his eyes always, and whose will he accomplished. Mozart serves by making audible the triumphal hymn of a prelapsarian and resurrected creation, in which suffering and guilt are not presented as faint memory, as past, but as conquered, absolved, fixed present.

All this will inevitably scandalise those who regard Mozart primarily as a Freemason, and The Magic Flute principally as a piece of Freemasonic symbology, both true enough in themselves. (Balthasar too — the "theologian of beauty" — is viewed in certain circles with suspicion. Yet the Holy Father, as Cardinal Ratzinger, said at von Balthasar's funeral, "the Church itself, in its official responsibility, tells us that he is right in what he teaches of the Faith".) The subject of Mozart's Freemasonry was raised with Georg Ratzinger:

Does it disturb you that Mozart was a Freemason?
It isn't for me to pass judgement on Mozart. He was a man with many difficulties arising from the period he lived in, and from the circumstances of his life. The issue of his Freemasonry disturbs me insofar as he was not only an ordinary member, but attained the rank of Master, and wanted to found his own lodge. Freemasonry was obviously fashionable at that time in Vienna. Certainly he hoped for material gain from his membership. Whether he reflected on the theological implications I don't know.

No thoughtful Catholic will have difficulty distinguishing Mozart's music from his Freemasonry, any more, for example, than separating Bach's work from his Lutheranism. If we were to dismiss every human work that had been created by a sinner, there might not be much left standing. I was once taken to task for leading a congregation in a "Protestant tune", to which I replied, "which note was Protestant, the E-flat or the B-flat?" 


Let us move on.

All beauty comes from God. There is no beauty that does not come from the Father through Christ, Himself the embodiment of all beauty. St Augustine, in a famous passage from the Confessions, addresses God as Beauty personified:

Late have I loved You, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved You!

Contrary to popular opinion, true beauty (the only kind there is, despite Satan's posturings) is objective. Truth and goodness are beautiful, just as the beautiful is true and good. A wonderful passage from Balthasar's The Glory of the Lordsays,

Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. [my italics] Beauty is the ... one without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which ... has bid farewell to our new world, leaving it to its avarice and sadness.

In former times the liturgy, too, "refused to understand itself" apart from beauty: beauty was taken for granted. The fact that the holy liturgy has — in broad terms — been a casualty of the modern exaltation of ugliness is for Benedict XVI a matter of grave concern. He speaks scathingly of:

...mass culture geared to quantity, production and success. Pop music joins up with this culture... It is a reflection of what this society is, the musical embodiment of kitsch... Hindemith used the term brainwashing for this kind of noise, which can hardly be called music any more ... Is it a pastoral success when we are capable of following the trend of mass culture and thus share the blame for its making people immature or irresponsible? (A New Song for the Lord, p.108)

For him, "faith becoming music is part of the process of the Word becoming flesh" ( p.122 ). But there is no chance here of doing justice to the breadth and profundity of our theologian-Pope's writings. Here is one small taste:

It is not the case that you think something up then sing it; instead, the song comes to you from the angels, and you have to lift up your heart so that it may be in tune with the music coming to it. But above all this is important: the liturgy is not a thing the monks create. It is already there before them. It is entering into the liturgy of the heavens that has always been taking place. Earthly liturgy is liturgy because and only because it joins what is already in process, the greater reality. ( p.129 )

And a last word from Msgr. Georg Ratzinger:

Many describe your brother as the "Mozart of theology". What do you think of this title?
Joachim Cardinal Meisner of Cologne coined this phrase. It has a certain justification. My brother's theology is not as problematic and difficult as that of Karl Rahner... Directness, clarity and form: his work does seem to have these elements in common with Mozart's music.

 . . .

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Mark Freer. “Pope Benedict XVI, Mozart and the Quest of Beauty.” AD2000 (April, 2006).
AD2000 is published in Australia. Visit their web site here.
Printed with permission of the author, Mark Freer.
THE AUTHOR
Mark Freer is an Adelaide church musician and concert pianist. He is organist and choirmaster for the ecclesially approved Latin Mass at Holy Name Church, St Peters, and has performed and broadcast in Australia, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. At the 2005 international symposium in Lugano, Switzerland commemorating Hans Urs von Balthasar's 100th anniversary he presented a lecture and a Mozart concert accompanied by the leader of the Queensland Orchestra, Warwick Adeney; his seminar paper appeared in the Spring 2005 Communio journal entitled "The Triune Conversation in Mozart: Towards a Theology of Music". He may be contacted at mark.freer@mac.com.

Copyright © 2006 Mark Freer

Hallelujah!

Happy Easter, everyone!
I don't think anyone can say this better, however, than Georg Friedrich Händel in his Hallelujah Chorus from his oratorio, Messiah...

The Seven Last Words of Christ

Today this show was being played on television in remembrance of Christ's Passion and death. I didn't catch the opening credits and therefore didn't know exactly who the composer was. As I listened, I thought, "This is either Händel or Haydn (a very good friend of Mozart's, who inspired him in many ways). Händel, because it is a religious theme, or Haydn, because it sounds like Mozart, but it isn't quite him." Soon I decided that it wasn't Händel because it didn't sound Baroque in the least. So, it must be Haydn...and it was!

This is Haydn's "The Seven Last Words of Christ".
I didn't upload these videos, but I gathered them into a playlist on YouTube for you to enjoy and meditate on.

May God bless you this Good Friday!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

As I promised in the previous post, I'm writing a day early about Mozart's Irish friend and fellow musician, Michael Kelly, in honor of Saint Patrick's Day.

Kelly was born in Ireland on Christmas Day in the year 1762, six years after Mozart was born. His father, Thomas, was a Roman Catholic and felt that music was extremely important. So, when he was very young, Kelly was taught voice and piano. He proved to be a great singer.

For the Kellys, a great musician coming over as a guest was a regular occurance. In 1778, one particular guest, Venanzio Rauzzini, a great musician and friend of composer Joseph Haydn, recognized Kelly's talent and began to give him voice lessons. Kelly proved to have such great talent that Rauzzini suggested he be sent to a conservatory in Italy to study. Knowing how important music was (especially to his son), Thomas Kelly made plans immediately to send his son to Italy.

Before leaving, Kelly made his debut in Dublin, singing soprano as the Count in the opera, La buona figliuola.

In 1779, Kelly left for Italy and was enrolled at the 1537 Conservatorio Santa Maria di Loreto. In Italy, Kelly became known as both O'Kelly and Ochelli. Soon, he was performing for noblemen and women and even sang for the King and Queen of Naples.

In 1780, Kelly's voice matured and dropped to tenor, which gave him leading roles as tenor in operas. He travelled by boat to Livorno, where he met Nancy Storace, a 15-year-old soprano who would later play Susanna in the premier of Mozart's opera buffa, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).

In 1783, Kelly accepted an invitation to begin working with an Italian company who worked for the Emporer Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna.

In Vienna, Kelly met court composer Antonio Salieri and starred in his opera Le scuola dei gelosi. He then went to visit Haydn in Eisenstadt. During his stay in Eisenstadt, Kelly met Mozart and his wife Constanze at a dinner--a friendship that would last until Mozart died.

Kelly wrote in his Reminicenses about Mozart; in fact, it is from him we get an idea of what Mozart looked like. He wrote,

"[Mozart was] a remarkably small man, very thin and pale, with a profusion of fine, fair hair of which he was rather vain."

He went on to say that he often enjoyed playing billiards with Mozart (a favorite pastime of the Austrian composer) and never won.

In 1786, Kelly played Don Curzio in the premier of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).

In 1787, Kelly left for England to perform on Drury Lane (the street in the famous children's song, "Do You Know the Muffin Man?"). In 1788, he performed in Handel's Messiah.

In 1793, Kelly became acting manager of the Kings Theatre in London, after having already been principal English tenor at Drury Lane theatre from 1787 to 1789 (in 1789 the theatre had been closed and demolished).

Kelly later began composing, but as a career, it was not as successful for him as singing. He also opened up a music and wine shop, but the business unfortunately failed finacially. A friend once made him a humorous sign to hang above the shop that read, "Michael Kelly, Composer of Wines and Importer of Music".

Kelly died at the age of 64 in Margate. Most of what is known about him is found in his Reminicenses, which was published in 1826, although it is said that much of what Kelly wrote is in question. We do know, however, that he was friends with Mozart because of surviving letters from the composer to the singer.

Michael Kelly.

Great Quote

"In my dreams of Heaven, I always see the great Masters gathered in a huge hall in which they all reside. Only Mozart has his own suite."

-Victor Borge

Genius...A Blessing and a Curse

     I often wonder how the great composers were able to stand horrible music. Not just mediocre, but horrible. It must have brought them nearly to the point of insanity.
     As I sat in church this morning this thought came to mind. The music was missing something...no, everything. Mostly it was missing its sacredness. There is a large difference between, say, "Ave Verum Corpus" and "Lord I Lift Your Name on High" (Not one of the songs in church this morning, but close enough). One is completely sacred; focused on God and no one else. The Latin title translates to, "Hail, True Body". It is a hymn devoted to the Holy Eucharist, worshipping Christ with some of the most beautiful music ever written. The other is loud, upbeat, and devoted to "I". "Lord, I lift Your Name on high...Lord I love to sing Your praises..."
     Oh, if Mozart heard the songs that have taken the place of his and the other great composers' music. I hate to think what he would say.

Baptism!

On this day, 255 years ago, Mozart was baptized and received the name

Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.

This is Saint Rupert Cathedral's record of the day. It shows his full name, and other information that is written in German (and I can't speak German...).

Happy Baptism Day, Mozart!