All this week I have been seeking out and listening to suitable music.
Last night, I did not have to seek, I already had a ticket for a well-timed Boston Symphony concert: a performance of The Dream of Gerontius, a big work for soloists, orchestra and chorus by Edward Elgar which depicts the passage of the soul from this life to the next.
Although the author of the text was Christian and I do not think of myself as that, Elgar's music gives the work an irresistible universality. I have known and loved this work for years from a recording conducted by the incomparable Sir John Barbirolli, but I have never been able to hear a live performance till last night.
Many parts of the poem are prayer and doctrine - the author was an English convert to Catholicism who later became a cardinal, John Henry Newman. But other parts explore the experience of dying and coming out on the other side in a purely imaginative way. Since I can't fit two hundred singers and instrumentalists in here, I'll just leave a few scraps of the poem here as an inadequate memento, a bit of dried flower between the pages.
However, it is music with its more direct route that always convinces us, Whatever the truth of the matter may be and whatever words say, the sounds you are hearing now are true.
At times all the musicians are singing and playing full-throat, at other times the huge tones go down to a tiny sustaining lifeline.
In the first part of the work, the Soul sings,
...I am near to death; I know it now
Not by the token of this faltering breath,
This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow--
'Tis this new feeling, never felt before
That I am going, that I am no more.
'Tis this strange innermost abandonment
This emptying out of each constituent
And natural force, by which I came to be.
Pray for me, O my friends, a visitant
Is knocking his dire summons at my door,
The like of whom, to scare me and to daunt,
Has never, never come to me before
...
I can no more: for now it comes again,
That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain,
That masterful negation and collapse
Of all that makes me man...
There is a break in the music, then in the second part of the work,
I went to sleep, and now I am refreshed.
A strange refreshment; for I feel in me
An inexpressive lightness, and a sense
Of freedom, as I were at length myself,
And never had been before. How still it is!
I hear no more the busy beat of time,
No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse;
Nor does one moment differ from the next.
This silence pours a solitariness
Into the very essence of my soul;
And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet,
Has something too of sternness and of pain.
The soul finds that he is being propelled forward by the same guardian angel who had been with him during his life.
Dear Angel, say,
Why have I now no fear...?
Along my earthly life, the thought of death
And judgment was to me most terrible.
Thou hast forestalled the agony, and so
For thee the bitterness of death is passed.
Now that the hour is come, my fear is fled;
And at this balance of my destiny,
Now close upon me, I can forward look
With a serenest joy.
...
...we are come into the veiled presence...
I hear the voices that I left on earth.
It is the voice of friends around thy bed.
The soul is at length given, for one moment, a glimpse of the ultimate.
Then,
Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone nightwatches keep,
Told out for me.
Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
Topic: Heath Ledger - the grieving thread (Read 754485 times)