Each year for the last three years, I have organized an all-music service based on the works of Mozart. For the last two years, all of the music in the service has been performed live. I had hoped to make this an annual event of the church calendar, and still hope to, but this year I have not had the time and energy necessary to put together such a service.
In place of it, I am doing a service today that is mostly musical. Since the end of July, I've spent virtually all of my drive-time immersed in the music of Beethoven: the cycle of sixteen string quartets, the thirty-something piano sonatas, and of course all nine of the symphonies-both in the orchestral versions that everyone knows, and in the complete set of piano transcriptions made by Franz Liszt. Liszt was a composer in his own right, of course, but for me, these piano transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies are his most significant contribution to the classical music repertoire. (I didn't even realize that they existed until I stumbled over a set of recordings of them a couple of years ago, and that set of CD's is now one of the very favorites in my collection.)
The two overriding ideas running through all of this music, for me, are joy and passion. And as I have been reflecting over the last several months also about the "soul project" that Henry and I started back in May, it occurred to me that the notion of passion might be a pivotal one in thinking about the soul, and that there was no better musical "illustrator" of passion than Beethoven. As I listened over the last three months, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer energy and joy of the symphonies-particularly listening to them one after the other. They seem to me to be the supreme "joyful noise" of western culture.
In the earlier Mozart services, I have said that the music of Bach sounds to me like the expression of an extended prayer from Man to God, and that Mozart's music sounds to me like the medium through which God expresses his response to that prayer. Having now spent several months listening intently to the music of Beethoven, I would extend the metaphor, and say that the music of Beethoven sounds to me like the music of Man, no longer praying, but rather taking matters into his own hands-the music of struggle and triumph over adversity--without divine assistance!
In the main part of the service today, I'll share a couple of brief thoughts about the nature of passion, and then we'll devote the rest of the "sermon time" to a movement from one of the last quartets-and one of his very last works.
Everything we listen to this morning is music that, when performed live, could be performed in a room of this size. In other words, it's all chamber music, or solo piano music-which is of course also chamber music. The first "reading," as it were, is Liszt's transcription of the opening movement of the Fifth Symphony, perhaps the most famous and listened to of all classical symphonies. But listen to it now, as played on the piano. This recording is played by Glenn Gould.
This isn't a story at all, really. It just comes at that point in the service where we usually tell a story. What I'd like to do is think for a minute about the kinds of feelings that music makes us have. Since Beethoven is the "star" of today's service, I've picked out a little tune of his that I'm going to play for you in a second. It's pretty simple, and not very famous. I couldn't find out anything about it, so he probably wrote it when he was still a very young composer. I'm going to play it two different ways for you. I want you to see if the two different ways of playing it make you feel any different when you listen to them. OK? Ready? Here's the first way:
What kinds of feelings did you have while I was playing that? (There isn't any right or wrong-it will probably be different for each person who is listening.) OK, now put that feeling aside, and listen to it again.
Did this time give you any different feeling? Maybe not much different, but a little? And that was just by changing the tempo, or speed of the music.
Now, which of these two ways do you think Beethoven meant for it to be played? (Ask each child, then the congregation.) Yes, the second way. And since there are many ways to play these notes-many others besides just the two ways I played them-he marked it "allegro" for the musicians who would be playing it, to make sure they came as close as possible to the way he wanted it to be played. "Allegro" is Italian, which means to play it "quickly." "Allegro" is very close to another Italian word, "allegre," which means "happy." So, you can see that feeling is extremely important to how music is played. But you already knew that, right?
Passion is not the same as emotion (Bring Robert Solomon book to hold up). Emotions are anger, sadness, grief, rage, joy, contentment, etc. Passion draws on the emotions, but is somehow a combination of emotion, feeling and energy at the point of our maximum engagement with the world. We have a passion for this or a passion for that...
Passion is what we experience when our emotional energies are released at the point of our maximum engagement with the world. It has a quality of "for its own sake."
A window onto the soul-we can see whether it is "true" or distorted.
Endures over time, and transcends immediate self-interests-not the same as an obsession or a pre-occupation. A passion for quilting, a passion for jazz, a passion for woodworking, for girls softball. Our emotions often are conditioned by our passion. If we have a passion for justice, then cruelty and deception will anger us, and peace and cooperation will bring joy and pleasure.
The music we are about to listen to is the longest single movement in all of Beethoven's sixteen string quartets. He wrote it shortly after recovering from a severe illness, and named it, "a convalescent's divine hymn of thanksgiving." This is a little experimental, in that we have never, in my memory, used such a long piece of recorded music as part of a worship service. It runs for just a hair under twenty minutes. I find it a very powerful piece of music, and yet one that also lends itself to meditation and reflection. My intention is that we use this twenty minutes of music to reflect on the role of passion in our lives. What are your own particular passions? In what ways do they define you as a person? How do they determine your relationships with other people? How do they affect your orientation in the world?
May passion become the music in your life, and may the music you hear feed your passions.