Dear Friends of Sacred Music,
Today is a beautiful Solemnity, the day that celebrates when the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity took on flesh thanks to the great FIAT of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In thanksgiving for that moment, I present to you Beethoven's wonderful Et Incarnatus Est (and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man) from his great Missa Solemnis. If you've never listened to the entire thing, conductor Leonard Bernstein does a fabulous job of interpreting the music here; I would heartily recommend setting the family down and listening to great swathes of it at a time. The entire Mass (not for liturgical setting) is a fantastic musical interpretation of the text; the Benedictus is also strikingly and hauntingly beautiful.
Note how Beethoven uses the flute to convey the flutter of the Holy Spirit in the form of the dove's wings, a style other composers have used.
The practice of veiling images alerts us that something is different, it can be startling at first, but the last two weeks of Lent are a time of immediate preparation for the celebration of the Sacred Triduum. The veils are hard to miss and they serve as a reminder to get ready!
The veiled images build within us a longing for Easter Sunday. The veils seem out of place, and even counterintuitive. It can seem strange that the crucifix is covered up during Passiontide. Through this absence of images, our senses are heightened and we become more aware of what is missing. Similarly, the suppression of the Alleluia during Lent effectively demonstrates that we are in exile from our true Home, where the angels sing Alleluia without ceasing.
When images are unveiled before the Easter Vigil, we are reminded that we, in a sense, live in a veiled world. It is through our own death that we are able to see our true home, and the veil is lifted. Christ lifts the veil through His Resurrection.
The actual covering of images came later, perhaps continuing that theme of “fasting of the eyes.” According to Adolf Adam’s The Liturgical Year,
At the end of the thirteenth century Bishop William Durandus of Mende (Southern France) explains this custom by the fact that Christ veiled his divinity during his passion. Durandus saw this explanation as implied in this Sunday’s Gospel (from the 1962 Traditional Latin Mass ordo), the concluding sentence of which read: “But Jesus hid himself and left the temple” (John 8:59). Prior to Vatican II the editors of the Schott Missal saw the veiling of crosses and so on as intended “to remind us of the Redeemer’s humiliation and thus to imprint the image of the crucified Christ more deeply on our hearts.”We now celebrate this Sunday as the Fifth Sunday of Lent and next Sunday as Palm Sunday of our Lord's Passion, but these examples above provide a little context for this Catholic custom.It is with the Lord's upcoming Passion in mind that we look at this Sunday's motets:O Vos Omnes - Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548 - 1611)Fr. Victoria was the most well-known Spanish composer of the Renaissance and, along with Byrd and Palestrina, the arguably most prolific and respected composers of the entire era anywhere in the world. This piece, in my opinion, is amongst the most beautiful motets ever-composed. It contains an emotive power able to convey the text in an extremely clear way. Taken from Lamentations 1:12, the translation reads: O all ye that pass by the way, attend and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow.
The performance below by the famous Robert Shaw is striking. Admittedly he is employing a larger ensemble than Victoria perhaps ever envisioned, and so the sound is more luxurious, rich, and full, but it is a beautiful example of using the forces one has and applying them to something else and drawing out an unexpected-kind of beauty. It seems that if Victoria had these forces to use when he composed the piece, he would have happily utilized them. Here is a picture of Robert Shaw:
And here is the recording of note: Tomás Luis de Victoria - O Vos Omnes {Robert Shaw} - YouTube Out of the Depths - Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643 - 1704) Our second motet of the day is a lovely Out of the Depths by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, lesser-known than another piece he wrote by the same title. It behaves quite like harmonized chant, beginning in the key of a minor and ending in A Major. There is a feeling of sadness intermingled with hope, a sense that is also found in today's Gospel reading, where our Lord both mourned His friend Lazarus' death and then raised Him up. This same sense permeates the text of today's Responsorial Psalm - on one hand we, through the psalmist, acknowledge how low we have fallen, but on another we see hope in the Lord "hearing my voice". The other De Profundis of Charpentier's is quite lovely and a good deal longer, scored for string ensemble, and much more polyphonic as opposed to today's homophonic style. It is well-worth a listen and quite moving. Charpentier: De Profundis (1) - YouTube O Domine, Jesu Christe - Francesco Guerrero (1528 - 1599)
Our final motet of the day is by another Spanish composer (and priest), Francesco Guerrero, one of the top three composers from Spain of his time. Guerrero wrote some beautiful works, notably his Requiem, which can be heard here:
Missa pro Defunctis (Requiem, 1582)- FRANCISCO GUERRERO~Spanish Polyphony in LatinAmerica -COMPLETE - YouTubeHere is another of his gorgeous pieces, entitled Si Tus Penas No Pruevo. SI TUS PENAS NO PRUEVO - Francisco Guerrero (1528 - 1599) - YouTube
Guerrero received his training from his brother, and he became proficient at many instruments and began composing during his early years. Jaen Cathedral in Andalusia, Spain, made him the chapel master when he was 18 years old. He moved onto the Seville Cathedral in 1546, becoming its musical director five years later and chapel master in 1574. His compositions include two Requiems, 19 Masses, and instrumental music for the vihuela, a fifteenth-century fretted, plucked string instrument. Today's piece can be found in this recording here: Francisco Guerrero: O Domine Iesu Christe (David Hill, The Choir of Westminster Cathedral) - YouTube May God bless you and help you prepare to enter into this holiest of seasons!
In Christ,
Jacob Flaherty -Director of Sacred Music