“There’s absolutely nothing to write about,” I tell Lady,
“though that tended not to stop me in the past. Unless, of course, you have
never heard Montserrat Figueras, in which case you should cancel your day and
get down to YouTube at once….”
“And who will paint all these houses?” asked Lady. “Besides,
there’ll be plenty of time to hear whoever-she-is later.”
I ponder that. I might have agreed with her a few months
ago, but breaking your back teaches you: you have to seize the moment. And
speaking of moments…well, I go on to ask her.
“Listen, do I seem normal to you?”
Lady is wise: why answer when no answer will pass?
“It’s just that I seem confused, lately. For months I was
busy listening to Bach, and waiting eagerly for the liturgical year to begin. Though,
come to think of it, I must be the only atheist in the world who knows about,
much less can’t wait for, the liturgical year.”
“That may perhaps account for that smallest bit of
abnormality I detect in you,” said Lady. “Anyway, we’re well into the
liturgical year, so all should be well.”
“Yes,” I tell her, “but before I fell, I was fiddling around
with things like ‘the 19th Sunday after Pentecost,’ which you have
to admit is nothing so glamorous Quasimodigeniti. Or even
Misericordias Domini. So I’d been waiting and waiting for Advent, and then
I completely missed it! That’s what spending three months pre-hospitalized,
hospitalized, and then post-hospitalized will do to you. And now we’re in Lent,
and Holy Week is a week or so away, and I’m confused, if not discombobulated.
How did we get here?”
“Well, would it help if you went back to the beginning, back
to Advent? You could sort of crash-course your way through to the present, and
by the time Good Friday rolled around, you’d be ready for it.”
“I’m never ready for Good Friday,” I told her. “Who is, or
who could be? The suspense always kills me: will Christ this year agree to be
resurrected? Because from a mystic point of view, it’s by no means certain that
he will. It’s a lot to ask, you know, for a guy a couple of millennia old to
get up and do it all over again, Easter morning.”
“Of course he’s going to resurrect,” said Lady. “He’s got
to. It’s all over the place in the Bible….”
“Of which Jesus knew nothing,” I told her, “since the damn
thing was written decades after his death. No, it’s clear: each year it’s a
gamble, a risk. Jesus may very well decide not to be resurrected this year, and
who could blame him? I mean, imagine going through all the trouble of being
resurrected, and then getting Donald Trump as president? No, I’d hang out in
the afterlife as long as possible, given that scenario….”
Of course he’ll be resurrected,” said Lady. “He’s got to be.
Can you imagine what would happen if everybody all across the world got to
church, and were faced with little signs on the church door: ‘Services
cancelled due to lack of savior of mankind?’”
“Off-putting, to say the least,” I told her. “But you may
have something, there. It may be that we all have a part to play in it, and
that if Jesus is gonna have to drag his sorry-ass back here, as he may have
done for 2000 years, then we all have to make it happen. Right—so I’ll do my
part. I’ll go back to the first Sunday of Advent, which is approximately when
the world fell apart for me….”
“So when was that?” asked Lady.
“In fact, it was the day after my birthday, or November 29.
I had fallen a couple weeks before, you remember, and I don’t even remember my
birthday. But anyway, it’ll be a stretch packing in all of the Christmas music
into one week. Bach alone would be bad enough, but what about all the rest?
Messiah, all of the French Baroque music like Couperin’s Messe de Minuit, to say nothing of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio
itself. No, I’d really have to plow through a lot—musically speaking—to get
this savior born before killing him off and resurrecting him again. And who’s
to say it’s worth it? Why not let him take a year off, now and again?”
“No wonder you’re an atheist,” said Lady, “since it seems
you hardly have half the energy to sustain faith. Nonsense, get down to work!
After all, if Bach could write over 200 cantatas—though it was probably
substantially more than that—the least thing you can do is listen to them.”
So I resolve to take on BWV 61, which is one of the two
cantatas for the first Sunday of Advent. But I determined to hear Nikolaus
Harnoncourt, since he had recently died, and since he had been known as
“the pope of early music,” by somebody or other. But what happened when I tried
to open it on YouTube? Absolutely none of my favorite conductors was available.
Or rather, they were, but I kept getting those annoying “error” messages when I
tried to click on them. No, it seemed as if YouTube had thrown down the
gauntlet: no HIP (historically informed performances) today. I was left with
Karl Richter, from the early 1970’s, and the effect was somewhat startling.
I would have been in my teens when I started listening
seriously to Bach, and who would I have heard? People very much like Richter,
who came to the score with intelligence and sound musical ideas, and who
conducted them with a breath-taking sincerity. Not only that, but he got the
best singers around to work with him: the great Fischer-Dieskau, Peter
Schreier, Edith Mathis. Yes, it sounds dated to our ears, so used are we to
modern HIP performances. And according to Wikipedia, Richter died an embittered
man, since he had been derided as “old fashioned,” and thrown onto the rubbish
heap of “inauthentic” performances.
The truth?
I no more know what Bach’s band of musicians sounded like
than I know how Sappho proclaimed her odes. I suspect that Bach would be amazed
at the quality of musicians today, but perhaps not. Because many of the
cantatas contain solo parts of surprising virtuosity. Would Bach have written
them if no one could have played them?
And so I enjoyed the Richter performance, taking me back as
it did to a time when I was hearing so much great music for the first time.
Yes, I was lying on the green sofa of my childhood living room, my mother was
cooking dinner in the kitchen, my father was chatting with her and leaning
against the refrigerator. The glorious music came to an end, and it occurred to
me….
…Richter’s Christ will resurrect again!
