A small compilation of Eleison Comments commenting on art - music, painting, etc. - and on the revolution of the Enemies of God by use of the art.
God Bless Bishop Williamson! Viva Cristo Rey!

Eleison Comments 009: Wagner
Eleison Comments 041: Docuмenting Distress
Eleison Comments 084: Heroic Harmonies
Eleison Comments 088: Coriolanus Ouverture
Eleison Comments 114: Hammerklavier Sonata
Eleison Comments 119: "Tristan" – Production
Eleison Comments 120: "Tristan" – Chord
Eleison Comments 122: Frankfurt School




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Saturday, September 1, 2007

Eleison Comments IX: Wagner

Teaching some humanism to pre-seminarians, I have again chosen to introduce them to Richard Wagner, German composer of famous music-dramas, and one of the most interesting characters of modern times. Straddling most of the 19th century (1813-1883), he was certainly not the greatest man of his time, but he was surely its most comprehensive artist. For breadth and depth of his world-vision, he must rank alongside Dante and Shakespeare, but not for truth, because he reflected an age falling away from God. Here was his greatness, and his misery.

Here was his greatness, because there is no question that he had a real sense of the height and depth of man, crying out for religion. His misery lay in the fact that he came up with a non-religious solution to that religious need. However his substitute solution has been enormously popular to this day, precisely because he seems to satisfy that religious need while leaving the real God, as modern man wishes, out of the picture. Hence the veritable cult of Wagner by "Wagnerians", for whom his music-dramas can act as a substitute religion.

What is that solution of his? Basically, the redemption of a fallen world by love between man and woman. In each of the four great works of his maturity, "The Ring", "Tristan and Isolde", "The Mastersingers" and (with a slight variation) "Pansifal", the basic plot is the same. Up against, primarily, a social structure and authority unable to adapt and therefore stranded in unreality, and up against, secondarily, a kind of underworld also resisting, there arises a hero to love and win a heroine, united with whom in redemptive love he brings about a revolution which, through their love, rescues society and restores reality.

In other words, the authority figure or figures are ineffective and, if not themselves villains, at least seconded by villains, whereas if only the boy can find his girl, he and she will make everything happy ever after. Does anyone recognize the formula of numberless Hollywood films? Of course a good wife is a tower of strength to her husband and children (see Proverbs Chapter 31), but to rest the salvation of the world upon her shoulders is asking altogether too much – how long are households patterned primarily on Hollywood apt to last ? Often not long.

Of course Wagner is not the sole source of Hollywood plots, but he is the main origin of a mass of its sub-Wagnerian music, and there is no denying the huge influence of that music and of Wagner’s mythology on modern times. Boys and girls, take heed. Wagner is a great musician, but there is no substitute for the true God; people in authority are not automatically antiquated, or villains; and neither of you is the complete solution to the other’s problems. You both need Our Lord Jesus Christ and the fullness of his Catholic Truth, and his sacraments.

Kyrie Eleison.

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Saturday, 12th April 2008

Eleison Comments XLI: Docuмenting Distress

Commenting on last week's „Eleison Comments" which were highly critical of the modern Revolutionary art movement known as Dadaism, a Catholic friend wrote to me, „I love Dadaism". I am not sure of his reasons, but there is one lovable aspect to many a modern Revolutionary movement, even for Catholics, in fact primarily for Catholics!

This is because they are best able to grasp how the key to the last 500 (or 700) years of the history of mankind has been its apostasy, its slow but steady turning away from God, in particular from his divine Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. This eliminating of the true Messiah has left in men's lives an enormous gap to be filled, a gap unknown before the Incarnation. Hence a variety of false messianisms in modern times.

Communism is an outstanding example. It is the messianism of materialism. For it may be just as materialistic as the bourgeois society it seeks to destroy, even more so; and it certainly has nothing better with which to replace the residual human values of that society. Yet Communists are driven by a quasi-messianic urge to create their horrible new world. It is as though they are saying, „Better no god than your false hypocritical »God«!" And to the extent that the God of the bourgeoisie is a false god, the Communist messianism rejecting it is not false. In this respect Communists may at least be credited with a messianic dimension. Similarly in the scream of protest of Rock musicians there is something just, however negative their protest proves finally to be.

Now Art, Literature, History, Culture, Music, each of them with a capital letter, are all worshipped as substitute religions by modern devotees who, because they have no present religion, pump up these by-products of true religion in the past to take its place. Hence the Dadaists' refusal of „Art", and their „re-definition" of art. „What is your Art?" they ask. „It is our godless god", say the Art-worshippers. „Your godless god is a urinal!" snorts Dada.

Alas! How many Dadaists or Art-worshippers, or Rockers, or Communists, show any signs of looking for the real solution to that problem which they all share?

Kyrie eleison.

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Saturday, February 7, 2009

Eleison Comments LXXXIV: Heroic Harmonies

Just before the media uproar of the last two weeks a dear friend asked me to write about any piece of music that I especially liked. It would have to be a piece by Beethoven (1770 – 1827). Then I might single out the first movement of his Third Symphony, known as the "Eroica", or Heroic Symphony.

Really the whole symphony is heroic. It is the musical portrait of a hero, originally Napoleon, until Beethoven learned that from First Consul of the French Republic he had made himself into an old-style Emperor of the French Empire, whereupon Beethoven ripped out the dedication page to Napoleon and dedicated the symphony instead to a hero. But the music remained unchanged: the revolutionary expression of Beethoven’s ardent hopes for a heroic new age of mankind to emerge from a tired old order of kings and cardinals.

It was however that old order, as expressed by Haydn (1732 – 1809) and Mozart (1756 – 1791) in particular, that gave to Beethoven the musical structures within which to shape and contain his dramatic new emotions. The first movement of the "Eroica" was unprecedentedly long in Beethoven’s own day – over 600 bars, lasting in performance anywhere around a quarter of an hour. Yet from first bar to last, the varied wealth and dynamic force of the musical ideas owe their tight unity and overarching control to the classical sonata form which Beethoven had inherited from the 18th century: Exposition, Development and Recapitulation (ABA), with a Coda mighty enough (innovation of Beethoven) to balance the Development (ABAC).

Leaping into action with two E flat major chords, the hero strides forth with his main theme, the first subject, built solidly out of that chord. The theme goes to war. A valiant re-statement precedes several new ideas of varying rhythms, keys and moods until moments of calm come with the classically more quiet second subject. But war soon returns, with off-beat rhythms and violent struggle, culminating in six hammering chords in two-time cutting right across the movement’s three-time. A few vigorous bars close the Exposition.

Upheavals and calm alternate for the rest of the movement. Notable in the Development is the most tremendous upheaval of all, culminating in a threefold shattering discord of F major with E natural in the brass, out of which mouth of the lion comes the honey of a brand-new lyrical melody, but still striding! Notable in the Coda is the fourfold repetition of the hero’s triumphant main theme, climaxing with inexorable logic in a blaze of glory. Lord, grant us heroes of the Faith, heroes both tender and valiant, heroes of the Church!

Kyrie eleison.

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Saturday, March 14, 2009

Eleison Comments LXXXVIII: Coriolanus Ouverture

Several of Beethoven's most popular masterpieces give musical expression to a tremendous struggle within the human soul. Some, like the Third and Fifth Symphonies, finish in a blaze of heroic glory. The famous "Appassionata" Piano Sonata finishes in a storm of heroic destruction. The "Coriolanus Ouverture", dating from the same peak of Beethoven's creativity, ends in the hero's undoing.

Beethoven loved reading Plutarch, whose parallel lives of great men of Greece and Rome has been called "a school for heroes". Coriolanus was a conquering but proud General of the early Roman Republic who, considering himself at one point insufficiently appreciated by his fellow-Romans, offered his services to their enemy, the Volsci, and with a Volscian army advanced on Rome to tear it to pieces. Roman leaders, senators, friends and family begged him in turn to spare his own country. In vain. Only the pleading of his own mother at last broke down his anger. Sparing Rome, he doomed himself to exile and death amongst the Volsci.

Beethoven wrote his "Coriolanus Ouverture" to introduce the theatrical presentation not of the last of Shakespeare's great tragedies, but of a play with the same title by a contemporary dramatist, H.J.v.Collin. The Ouverture is not programme music insofar as it stands on its own, purely as a drama of the soul in Sonata form, regardless of the story which inspired it. Nevertheless, it is easy to read the music in connection with that episode of Roman history...

The Exposition's first Subject in two parts would portray the General's anger (bars 1-14) and his agitation (15-27), developed angrily (29-50), but running straight into the smooth and lyrical second Subject (52-77), which it is easy to visualise as the tender pleading of a strong and sure Roman matron. Anger returns (84-95), to fade into a little falling motif (96-100), which will quietly monopolise the Development (101-152) - mother winning the argument by gently wearing her son down ? With the Recapitulation (152-229) the General's anger breaks out again, more violent than ever (167-176), only to run into the pleading, also more insistent than before (178-206) - with Beethoven, a Recapitulation is liable to sharpen rather than soften the conflict which enlivened the Exposition !

The Coda, or tail of the piece (230-314), begins with mother again winning the argument (230-240), stalled by the lyrical pleading (242-254). A final confrontation (255-269) and argument (270-275) conclude in a last outburst of the General's wrath (276-285), only this time it breaks down in a series of falling and quietening chords (286-294) for just the first phrase of the General's agitation to re-appear four times (297, 299, 300, 306), each time slower and more subdued than the last, until the Ouverture dies away in silence. The General and his wrath are undone. Rome is saved!

Catholics, if you do not wish to tear Rome to pieces, listen to your Mother! Non-Catholics, if you do not wish to help tear your own country to pieces, listen to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of us all, from the foot of the Cross!

Kyrie eleison.

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Eleison Comments CXIV: Hammerklavier Sonata

Music, history and theology are closely intertwined, because there is only one God and all men were created by Him to go to Him. History relates their actions amongst one another according as they go to Him or not, while music expresses the harmony or disharmony in their souls as they make their history towards Him or not. The music of Beethoven (1770-1827), taken as dividing into three Periods, is a clear illustration.

His First Period containing the relatively tranquil works of his masterly apprenticeship to Mozart (1756-1791) and Haydn (1732-1809), corresponds to the last years of pre-Revolutionary Europe. The Second Period containing most of the glorious and heroic works for which Beethoven is best known and loved, corresponds to the French Revolution's spreading of upheavals and wars throughout Europe and beyond. The Third Period containing profound but somehow puzzling masterpieces, corresponds to Europe's attempting after the Congress of Vienna (concluded in1815) to re-construct the old pre-Revolutionary order on post-Revolutionary foundations - a puzzle indeed.

As Beethoven's Third Symphony, the "Eroica" (1804), by first giving full expression to his heroic humanism of a new world, was the pivotal work between the First and Second Periods, so his 29th Piano Sonata, the "Hammerklavier" (1818), was the pivotal work between the Second and Third Periods. It is a huge piece, lofty, aloof, admirable, yet strangely inhuman...The first movement opens with a resounding fanfare to be followed by a wealth of ideas in the Exposition, a climactic struggle in the Development, a varied Recapitulation and an again heroic Coda, features all typical of the Second Period, yet we are in a different world: the harmonies are cool, not to say cold, while the melodic line is rarely warm or lyrical. The brief second movement is hardly more friendly: a stabbing quasi-Scherzo, a rumbling quasi-Trio. The third movement, Beethoven's longest slow movement of all, is a profound and almost unrelieved lament, in which moments of consolation merely highlight the prevailing mood of virtual hopelessness.

A pensive introduction is needed to make the transition to the Sonata's last movement, normally swift and uplifting, but in this case swift and grim: a jagged main theme is worked over, slowed down, turned back to front and upside down in successively ungainly episodes of a three-part fugue. To the slow movement's raw grief is responding raw energy in a musical struggle more brutal than musical, with the exception again of one brief melodic interlude. As in the "Grosse Fuge" string quartet movement, Beethoven is here foreshadowing modern music. "It is magnificent", the French General might have said, "but it is not music".

Beethoven himself climbed down from this Mount Everest of piano sonatas to compose in his last ten years some more glorious masterpieces, notably the Ninth Symphony, but they are all somehow overcast. The hero's uninhibited exultation of the Second Period is a thing mostly of the past. It is as though Beethoven had firstly basked in the godly old order, secondly stridden forth to conquer his human independence, but thirdly been driven to ask: What has it all meant ? What does it mean to make oneself independent of God ? The horrors of modern "music"are the answer, foreshadowed in the "Hammerklavier". Without God, both history and music die.

Kyrie eleison.

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Saturday, October 17, 2009

Eleison Comments CXIX: "Tristan" – Production

After an absence from London's Royal Opera House of some 40 years, it was delightful to be offered by friends last week a ticket to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde". It did make a delightful evening, but oh dear ! -- the modern production ! The classics of yesteryear are one thing. Their production on stage today can be quite another !

A classic like "Tristan and Isolde", which was staged for the first time in 1865, becomes a classic because it succeeds in expressing human problems and solutions that belong to all the ages. Never for instance have the passions of romantic love between man and woman been so skilfully and powerfully expressed as in the music-drama of "Tristan". But every time a classic drama is put on stage, its production can obviously belong only to the time of its staging. So the classic depends in itself on the author, but in its production on the producer, and on how he understands the classic he is producing.

Now Wagner can be called the father of modern music, especially through the revolution wrought by the chromatic harmonies of "Tristan", constantly shifting. Nobody can say Wagner is not modern. Yet what the current production of "Tristan" at Covent Garden shows is the huge distance even between Wagner's time and our own. This producer had either no understanding or no regard for Wagner's text, as two little examples may show. In Act III when Kurwenal is meant to be looking out to sea for Isolde's ship, he is shown watching Tristan all the time. On the contrary when Isolde finally rushes in to find Tristan dying, Wagner's text has her of course scanning him for the least sign of life, but this producer has her on the floor with her back turned to him ! This flagrant violation of the original text, and of common sense, ran through the production from beginning to end.

What did the producer think he was doing ? I would like to know. Either he had no common sense, or if he had any, he set out deliberately to defy it. Worse, the Royal Opera House probably paid him a royal sum to do so, because it will have judged that today's audiences would enjoy the defiance. One is reminded of Picasso saying that he knew his art was nonsense, but he also knew that it was what people wanted. Indeed last week's audience, which should have been hooting such nonsense off the stage, instead watched docilely and applauded warmly. In Wagner’s own country today, unless I am mistaken, classic productions of his operas are rare.

One is bound to ask, what is happening to common sense ? Where are today's audiences going ? How can a people long survive which takes pleasure, for example, in lovers turning their backs on one another at the moment of death? Objection: it is only theatre. Reply: theatre holds up the mirror to society. Conclusion: society today either has no common sense, or what little it still has, it is trampling on. Since common sense is the sense of reality, such a society cannot survive.

Kyrie eleison.

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Saturday, 24th Oktober 2009
 
Eleison Comments CXX: "Tristan" – Chord

To an objective structure of the human soul corresponds an objective structure of music. Both can be disrupted by men's discordant choices, but subjective free-will cannot change these structures, nor their correspondence to one another. Is it not common sense that as soft music is piped into supermarkets to incline women to buy, so rousing music is played in the army to incline men to march? Marketing and fighting are activities too real for the fantasies of liberalism to be allowed to interfere.

Yet liberals do fantasise. Hence surely the current production of "Tristan and Isolde" at Covent Garden, striving to "de-construct" Wagner's masterpiece, as described in "Eleison Comments" last week. However, a two-page article in the programme notes for the same production brilliantly illustrates the objective correspondence between kinds of music and kinds of human reaction. I wish I could quote it all, but do not be scared of the technical details, readers, because these are exactly what prove the point.

The article is taken from the book "Vorhang Auf!" (Curtain Up), by a living German conductor, Ingo Metzmacher. It centers around the famous "Tristan Chord", which first appears in the third bar of the Prelude. The chord consists of a tritone (or augmented 4th), F and B below Middle C, and above it a 4th, D sharp and G sharp above Middle C. In this chord, he says, is a tremendous internal tension striving for resolution, but each of the four times that the chord appears in the first 14 bars of the Prelude, it only resolves into the dominant 7th, itself a chord unresolved and calling for resolution. And when at last a stable F Major chord is reached in bar 18, it is immediately destabilized by the bass-note rising a semi-tone half a bar later, and so on.

Semi-tones are in fact the key, says Metzmacher, to the new harmonic system which Wagner invented in "Tristan" to portray the boundless yearning of romantic love. The semi-tones "work like a virus - no sound is safe from them, and no note can be certain that it will not be shifted up or down". The chords being thus continually breached, repaired and immediately breached again, constitute an unrelenting procession of states of unresolved tension, which corresponds perfectly in music to the lovers' longing for each other, "growing immeasurably as a result of the impossibility of their ever finding fulfilment".

But Metzmacher points out the price to be paid: music based on the system of keys, a structured mixture of semi-tones with full tones, "draws its vital strength from an ability to give us the sense of being at home in a particular key". On the contrary with the Tristan system, "we can never be certain that any secure feeling is not really a deception". Thus the Tristan chord "marks a turning-point in the history not only of music but of all humankind". Metzmacher would well understand the old Chinese proverb : "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake".

Maybe as "Tristan" subverted tonal music, so this Covent Garden producer tried to subvert "Tristan". Where then does the de-construction of life and music stop? Non-Wagnerian reply: In true celebrations of the Mass! With the Masonic New Mass true Catholics will never feel at home.

Kyrie eleison.

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Saturday, November 7, 2009

Eleison Comments CXXII: Frankfurt School

Valuable lessons for all friends or lovers of "Western civilisation" are to be culled from an analysis of the USA's leftwards lurch in the 1960's by a Californian Professor of Psychology, accessible at www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-WheatlandII.html . Professor Kevin MacDonald is there reviewing the critique of mass culture in a book on "The Frankfurt School in Exile".

The Frankfurt School needs to be much better known. It was a small but highly influential group of non-Christian intellectuals who, when Hitler came to power, fled from Germany to the USA, where in conjunction with a like-minded group of New York Trotskyists they continued to exert an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. Feeling a profound alienation from the "traditional Anglo-American culture", says MacDonald, they made war on it by promoting the individual against the family, multi-culture against White leadership, and modernism against tradition in all domains, especially the arts. "Theodor Adorno's desire for a socialist revolution led him to favour Modernist music that left the listener feeling unsatisfied and dislocated - music that consciously avoided harmony and predictability". The Frankfurt School wanted "the end of the order that bore the sonata".

The Frankfurt School scorned the American people's lack of desire for Revolution, and they blamed it on the people's "passivity, escapism and conformism", says the Professor, and on "late capitalist" control of the mass culture by, for instance, conservative organisations imposing moral standards on Hollywood. Yet when in the 1960's they themselves gained control of the media, universities and politics, they exploited to the full the mass culture and Hollywood and the people's on-going sleep-like condition to swing them to the left. The Professor laments the resulting vicious attack upon "White interests", "White identity" and the "traditional people and culture of the West".

The Professor is right on several counts. For instance, the war is not mainly between capitalism and communism, as the leftists originally thought, and as many Americans still think. Material comfort has lulled the American people to sleep, after the 1960's as before them. Also, on or off the leash, Hollywood and culture play a huge part in moulding minds and masses (which is why "Eleison Comments" often treat of cultural topics). Also, there does exist a small group, conscious and resolute, of highly influential enemies of "traditional Western culture".

However, to defend "White interests" the Professor needs to go well beyond White interests as such. The real problem is religious. Why did White Europeans ever have so much to give Because for centuries and centuries they co-operated with God's grace to profit best by the Catholic Faith. Why does this small group of leftists so hate "Western culture"? Because it is the lingering remains of that Faith. And why did the small group become so powerful from the 1960's onwards? Because at Vatican II the same "Whites" were mainly responsible for the Catholic officials' betrayal of the Faith which took place at that Council. Today's triumph of the leftists is no more nor less than a just punishment from God.

Professor, you are not asleep. Now pick up a Rosary!

Kyrie eleison.