This spine-tingling piece by the Venetian composer Antonio Lotti was one of the highlights of the Good Friday liturgy at the cathedral. The choir sang it beautifully, but they're not on YouTube, so here are the excellent Tenebrae...
I had not attended a Good Friday service for some years, and was perhaps unprepared for the sheer emotional power, the horror indeed, of the Crucifixion narrative. I mean, I know the story well enough and have read it many times, but in such surroundings and told to the music of Tomás Luis de Victoria, it hit me with such force that I came within an inch of making a spectacle of myself. As a story of human anguish, cruelty and degradation, culminating in desolation as God (apparently) abandons even His loving son, it surely stands as an emblem and embodiment of the most extreme of human suffering, an endless vista of which, a whole vast history, opens up around the terrible image of the man on the cross. What's worse, it occurred to me as I listened to John's account of the events, is that the telling of the story, in a manner determined to pin the blame on the Jews rather than the Romans (a historical nonsense), seems to provide scriptural justification for the centuries of Jew-hatred that culminated in the unspeakable horror of the Shoah. Tragic irony is too weak a phrase.
Still (he says with a graunching change of gears), I'm happy to report that Good Friday also gifted me my first butterflies of the year – at last! Brimstones galore, plus one Comma and one Tortoiseshell. The butterfly year has begun...
No comments:
Post a Comment