Magnificat

My days and nights right now are accompanied by Ricardo Reis.* Everything tinged with melancholy, solitude, the loneliness of men needing women to stave off their thoughts of death, and feeling myself quite different but knowing the truth of it for some men, the way they feel death like a chill in their bodies and so it is in the body that they seek comfort.

Yesterday I spent a rare day by myself, and it was as beautiful a day as we ever have here. I began in the garden, as the sun had just come over the fence to open the morning glories, talking to a friend whose husband is in a nursing home. He has Parkinson's, she brought him home the previous night for the evening, she is very strong but her eyes were full of tears as she told me about his decline, his anger, their sadness, and touched just briefly on her own isolation. Who is taking care of you, besides les fleurs, I asked her. Myself, she said, with that kind of smile that shows the warmth behind the stoicism. I have friends. But it is a hard thing to share.

And then I cycled up to the studio, where I am now, past another centre de readaptation where the staff, in white, sat smoking and talking in the sun before their shifts began; past an old woman talking to a squirrel that was eating nuts at the base of a tree. I'm glad I don't have to face all this quite yet. Surrounded by paints and colors, with fresh coffee, and the piano, I was content

Today, our choir season began. It was good to see everyone,and even better to be making music together again. No melancholy at all. The 4:00 Evensong was devoted to music by the English Romantic composer Charles Villiers Stanford (he was actually Irish by birth), and I'll leave you with this recording of the Magnificat from his Service in C (accompanied by a bizarre and mostly-dreadful collection of paintings of Mary and the annunciation: shut your eyes and listen.)  It is, as you'll hear, what we call "a big sing." As one of only four sopranos in our choir of 25 or so today, I can vouch for that - by the end of the service I felt like I had a had an aerobic workout as well as a vocal one. I'm glad there were two pros on either side of me, better able to belt out one high G after another than I am! But it was fun.

*The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, by Jose Saramago

Comments

[Dick]

I hope that belting out those high Gs diverted your attention from things melancholy, Beth! I had the Stanford 'Magnificat' on cassette. Long gone now, so good to hear this morsel.

[Beth]

Oh, yes, I wasn't really too melancholy anyway, and singing knocks it right out of me. Isn't that Stanford a quintessentially English gem, for that period? An all-Charles Villiers afternoon was quite a trip.

[Lucy]

Just by sitting with your friend and listening, even by touching the old woman talking to the squirrel with your thoughts, you are helping to take care. Keep drawing strength from singing, and tyake it back out into the world.

It does sound very English, sadly the sound on this laptop is terribly shrill and tinny, but it gives an impression - I've scrolled it out of sight and am just listening while I type this, I'm on a bit of an anti-papist jag at the moment I'm afraid!

[Natalie]

Beth, I didn't know this composer's work at all,thanks for the clip. I can see this piece must have been marvellous to sing. One of my top favourites in all of music is Bach's Magnificat in D - have you ever sung it?

As you say, the Mary paintings are pretty awful,ie: pretty and awful. All these images subscribing to the saccharine cliché of a simpering, generally blonde Western woman in blue robes. The artists could have done some research to see how a teen-age Middle Eastern girl of that period would have looked but of course that wouldn't have gone down too well with their patrons or public.

[john]

I was listening to this as i get ready to go to bed after a long and hard work day.I feel better.Thanks for this

[Vivien]

Lovely piece of music, and choir. I do wish I could sing in a choir! - I used to, but now have a range of about 4 husky notes...

Yes, many of the pictures of Mary have an awful sugary sentimentality, but I think that fault is more tolerated in the Catholic church than in the Protestant (I speak as an ex-Catholic, who in some ways is not anti the church). It's a less polite church than, say, the Anglican - there are bleeding hearts, incense, more decorations, "bells and smells"; and infringements against the rules of North European middle class taste are not so frowned on.

About the way Mary is depicted: she's an archetype (a mother), not a real person, so naturally she's shown as similar in looks to the people who surround the painter or sculptor. And in the first half of the 20th c. and before she couldn't have been shown as a young Jewish woman - there was too much prejudice against Jews.

In the late 20th and early 21st c., now that there's so much more contact between different peoples, it wouldn't seem so odd in Europe or America if she were depicted as a Middle Eastern woman.

In Ethiopian art Mary is often shown as having rather Ethiopian features (google "Ethiopian art Madonna"). Does anyone object to this? In Byzantine and Russian art Mary is painted in a very stylised, unrealistic way. Given the sentimentality which seeped into Western popular art in the 19th and 20th c. it's not surprising that this is reflected in depictions of an archetypal young mother - subjects are seen through the eyes of the country and era.

Oh well, it's a vast subject and I can only vaguely tinker at the edges! Your blogs are always really interesting.