If you can’t make it to the Royal Opera House to see The Nutcracker this Christmas, you need not miss out. Opus Arte, the ROH’s multi-platform arts production and distribution company, is bringing The Nutcracker to cinema screens across the country, filmed in a high-definition recording from the Royal Opera House itself.

To promote the screenings Opus Arte has made a wonderful digital advent calendar for The Nutcracker. Enter your details (it just takes a few seconds) and you get daily clips of the opera throughout December. A neat idea and a delightful way to count down to Christmas.

For our discussions on The Beatles’ Revolver album I dug out the clip below from Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated lecture series The Unanswered Question, Six Talks at Harvard. This short extract is from Lecture 5: The 20th Century Crisis, in which he focuses on Mahler’s 9th Symphony. He sees this great symphony as a prophetic vision of the 20th Century that lay before Mahler, a century that was to become shadowed by the spectre of death like no other before it.

Bernstein’s list of the great works of the century is interesting, and he was one of the first of the giants of classical music to champion The Beatles and other significant ‘popular music’ of his time. This lecture was recorded in 1973, and I often wonder what other art works he would add to that list that have emerged since then, and what he would have made of the 21st Century.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CDz62GNx1A

It’s interesting that Bernstein should reflect on the Beatles’ Revolver during a talk on Mahler, as I’ve always thought that there is a strong connection between these two very different artists, namely that focus on the universal. Recall that statement Mahler made about his work to Sibelius: “The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing.” Like The Beatles’ work on Revolver he sees the task of art as encompassing the universal spirit.

In his essay on Mahler’s symphonic work in A Guide to the Symphony Stephen Johnson has this to say about the famous Mahlerian irony:

This brings us neatly to one of the most celebrated Mahlerian devices: the use of naïve, or even downright banal material in a way which, far from bringing a sense of bathos, can convey intense feeling. It is one facet (but only one) of the so-called Mahlerian irony. Again context is everything: the clarinet’s Ländler tune in the Scherzo of the Second Symphony is innocuous in itself but after the haunted opening one can read all manner of sinister possibilities into it; the childlike oboe tune of the Sixth Symphony’s second movement Trio has an intrinsic oddity in its alteration of 3/8 and 4/8 bars, but coming as it does at the heart of what is perhaps the classic Mahler ‘horror’ Scherzo, it can be deeply unsettling.

There is a similar effect that we find in the appearance of a children’s song (Yellow Submarine) on Revolver. In itself it’s a glorious sing-along, a beautiful pastiche of the kind of nonsense verse that Edward Lear wrote for children, with the improbable craft updated from a sieve to a submarine. But in the context of an album marked with so much ‘bitter sweet cynicism’ it sets off different resonances.

This was reinforced when the Beatles came to release a single from the album, and chose Eleanor Rigby, a song of hopeless love, loneliness, old age and death (‘no one was saved…’), backed with Yellow Submarine, a song of youth, togetherness and hope (‘we all live…’). Here are the two polarities between which life is lived.

Revolver by The Beatles was released in 1966 and marked the beginning of a new phase for the band and a revolution in popular music.

In his book The Sixties, an exhaustive history of the 1960′s, Arthur Marwick introduces his subject as follows:

If asked to explain the fuss, both survivors of the decade and observers of the repeated attempts subsequently to conjure it up again could probably manage to put together a list of its most striking features, which might look something like this: black civil rights; youth culture and trend-setting by young people; idealism, protest, and rebellion; the triumph of popular music based on Afro-American models and the emergence of this music as a universal language, with the Beatles as the heroes of the age; the search for inspiration in the religions of the orient; massive changes in personal relationships and sexual behaviour; a general audacity and frankness in books and in the media, and in ordinary behaviour; relaxation in censorship; the new feminism; gay liberation; the emergence of the ‘underground’ and the ‘counter-culture’; optimism and genuine faith in the dawning of a better world.

The first part of that statement regarding The Beatles’ contribution to 1960′s culture – ‘the triumph of popular music’ – finds its source in the band’s extraordinary success during the early phase of its career, from 1963 – 1965. The second part – ‘the emergence of this music as a universal language’ – emerges entirely from the album Revolver.

In the June 2000 issue of Q Magazine, Revolver topped its assessment of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In that issue, David Quantick pointed out that this was ‘the most shocking Beatles record, the one that makes a quantum leap even from the brilliantly developed super pop of Rubber Soul’. He also asserts that ’1966 was the only year that The Beatles’ album Revolver could have been recorded.’

The timing is significant. It marks the start of the second phase of the 1960′s, when the exuberance of youth, permissiveness and sexual scandal gave way to a darker and more cynical outlook. It was the year that the 1960′s grew up.

The Beatles more than any other artists were totally in tune with these times. The album Revolver didn’t just capture this new outlook, it pointed the way forward. And the way forward from the point of view of the latter part of the 1960′s was that ‘universal language’ referenced by Marwick above. In fact, every one of those definitions of the 1960′s referred to in the Marwick quote above finds expression and reflection on Revolver.

The wide variety of musical styles, the range of human concerns covered in the lyrics, the bewildering kaleidoscope of innovative sounds and the interrelated musical themes on Revolver are unprecedented in any musical field, let alone pop music. Consider the musical genres covered:

• Rock (And Your Bird Can Sing, She Said She Said)
• Soul (Gotta Get You Into My Life)
• Electric blues (Doctor Robert, Taxman)
• Ballad (Here, There and Everywhere, For No One)
• Children’s song (Yellow Submarine)
• Classical chamber music (Eleonar Rigby)
• Indian raga (Love You To)
• Avant garde ‘musique concrete’ (Tomorrow Never Knows)

And within these songs themselves we glimpse snippets of a myriad of other styles, from military brass bands, sea shanties, tape loops, sound effects, sacred vocal music, bar-room piano, and more.

While not quite a ‘concept album’, Revolver does, as Quantick states, ‘combine an astonishing mix of styles with a weirdly consitent sense of purpose’.

The subjects of the songs cover much ground, from the worldly (Taxman) to the deeply personal (For No One), from adolescent sexual joy (Love You To) to a more spiritual kind of love (Here There and Everywhere), and from a child-like wish for togetherness (Yellow Submarine) to the desperate loneliness of old age (Eleonar Rigby).

The all-encompassing variety is itself a theme, as the album creates a powerful sense of the ‘unviersal’ from its disparate materials, the many combining to make one.

Cyclical motifs in Revolver

The other major theme is that of ‘cycles’, referred to in the title, as Jonathan Gould elaborates in his excellent book on The Beatles, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America:

After considering titles like Abracadabra and Magic Circles, the group had settled on Revolver as a kind of McLuhanesque pun – revolve is what records do – that also described the way the focus of attention on the album turned evenly from one Beatle to the next. Woven with motifs of circularity, reversal and inversion, Revolver was the first record on which the Beatles made the interplay of their individual personalities a theme of the music itself.

Those motifs of circularity that Gould alludes to can be found throughout the album. To take some random examples: the overlapping a capella fade-out on ‘Good Day Sunshine’, the cyclic harmonised guitar instrumental in ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ and the circular descending/ascending chord progression of ‘For No One’. The album culminates in a tour de force of cyclical representation, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, with its incessant circular drum pattern, backward-and-forward guitar playing and musique concrete taped loops. As Gould explains in his chapter on Revolver in Can’t Buy Me Love:

As the singing fades up and away, the bass hums, the drums stutter, and the banshees wail. “Or play the game Existence to the end – of the beginning… of the beginning… of the beginning,” John repeats, over and over, like a proverbial broken record, or a skip in the Wheel of Rebirth, ending Revolver with a conceptual joke as elaborate as the one with which it began. “The end of the beginning” completes the album’s motif of circularity and declares the Beatles’ intent to initiate a new phase of their career.

The motif of circularity is not merely decorative. It refers to a deeper theme on the album, that of transformation. From childhood (Yellow Submarine) to old age (Eleanor Rigby), from sleeping (I’m Only Sleeping) to waking (Good Day Sunshine), from the birth of love (Love You To) to its tragic demise (For No One). Above all it speaks of the ultimate transformation, from life to death.

Death casts a shadow over Revolver, from the ghoulish image of Taxman, in which we are advised to ‘declare the pennies on your eyes’, to the ‘surrender to the void’ of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (see my post on Leonard Bernstein’s comments on death in the 20th Century). The journey that Revolver takes us on is in effect an acceptance and transcendence of death. The lost opportunity for love that leaves us suspended over a spiritual precipice at the demise of Eleanor Rigby (‘No one was saved’) is finally transformed into something positive with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. By surrendering to that same void, accepting that ‘love is all and love is everyone’, we reach a state that ‘is not living’ and ‘is not dying’ – ‘it is believing’.

Buy Revolver by The Beatles (Amazon affiliate link).

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is celebrating 120 years in business.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, one of the finest in the world, is offering free downloads of 10 great symphonies to celebrate its 120th anniversary. Registration is required, and the symphonies will remain online until the 24th November.

The recordings feature world-class conductors such as Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Chailly and Mariss Janson, so this is quality free music! The symphonies available for download are:

• Franz Schubert – Symphony no. 8 ‘Unfinished’
• Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony no. 2
• Felix Mendelssohn – Symphony no. 4 ‘Italian’
• César Franck – Symphony in D minor
• Gustav Mahler – Symphony no. 1
• Antonin Dvorák – Symphony no. 8
• Camille Saint-Saëns – Symphony no. 3 ‘Organ’
• Jean Sibelius – Symphony no. 2
• Anton Bruckner – Symphony no. 8
• Johannes Brahms – Symphony no. 2

This story via MetaFilter via Open Culture.

Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic perform the entire Eroica Symphony by Beethoven. This was part of the Berlin Philharmonic’s 100th year celebrations.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a non-religious person, I’ve always struggled with the concept of ‘faith’. It’s not that I disagree with it or oppose it, it’s just that I’ve never been able to fully understand it. Whenever religious people talk of their ‘belief’ and their ‘faith’, they seem to mean it in a different sense to the way that I usually understand these words.

Recently, however, I had a breakthrough. It was while listening to the Beatles’ classic song Yesterday, from which the line ‘I believe in yesterday’ stands out.

What does it mean to ‘believe in yesterday’?

The song Yesterday basically describes the contrast between a previous time, when the singer’s ‘troubles seemed so far away’, and his current state, in which his troubles are back, possibly here to stay, and he needs ‘a place to hide away’. This in itself is an unremarkable sentiment, and one that’s been described in many songs about heartbreak and the loss of a loved one. What lifts the song to a higher level is the singer’s statement that he still ‘believes’ in yesterday. If we reflect on the context of this belief, there can be no basis for it. There’s nothing in the song that suggests he will get his lover back, or that he has the prospect of new love in sight. The belief declared is an affirmation – a statement to the effect that ‘I will continue to put my faith in love, even though this love has ended and I’m not half the man I used to be.’

It seems to me that here the word ‘believe’ is being used in the same way as the religious mean it with regards to their faith. In fact the song Yesterday has a spiritual tone. The loss of the loved one is not mentioned until the bridge, almost in passing, as if to imply that this may not even be the source of the troubles, and that something darker is responsible for the ‘shadow falling over me’. The lyrics predominantly talk of disintegration, fragmentation, disruption:

Suddenly,
I’m not half the man I used to be,
There’s a shadow hanging over me,
Oh, yesterday came suddenly.

Here the symbol ‘yesterday’ is transformed. In the previous verse it had stood for the state of stability, radiance, love and carefree times (‘yesterday, love was such an easy game to play’). It now appears that it stands for the disruption itself, which ‘came suddenly’. This ambiguity and transformation is crucial to the spiritual rupturing that the song describes, and suggests that the ‘belief in yesterday’ is more complex than a naive faith in sunnier times.

Disruptions of melody, harmony and form in the Beatles’ Yesterday

The form, melody and harmonies also demonstrate profound ambiguities and disruptions. The melodic movement on the word ‘yes-terday’ that starts the song is an appoggiatura on the 9th degree of the scale, which then leads down to the tonic (G to F over an F chord). This is an uncomfortably dissonant start to a melody, and is a melodic movement one would normally expect to end a phrase, not begin it. Conversely, the melodic cadence on the word ‘yesterday’ that closes the verse rises by an optimistic major 3rd (F to A over an F chord), just as the lyric asserts its faith in ‘yesterday’.

There is further complexity expressed through the song’s persistent chromaticism; #5ths, 13ths over minor 7th chords, added 9ths, all shade and darken the melodic and harmonic movement. The melody note A over the Em7 chord on the word ‘why’ in the phrase ‘why she had to go’ is particularly discomforting (the Beatles used this unusual harmonisation in two other songs: Help! and I’ll Be Back, and both times at a point of personal crisis in the lyric).

The verse also takes an unusual 7-bar form, rather than the more common 8-bar song form, which disorientates us further. It’s as if the song constantly refuses to stabilise or rationalise: ‘why she had to go, I don’t know she wouldn’t say’. The singer is alienated; he did ‘something wrong’, but exactly what is unclear, even to himself.

The overall impression is that the love break-up is a metaphor for something more fundamental, a breakdown in the protagonist’s psyche, a darkness encroaching on a previously sunny or stable disposition.

Belief and Faith

It seems to me that there are two meanings of the word ‘believe’ that can get confused.

1. To regard as true – eg ‘I believe the earth goes round the sun’.
2. To have confidence or faith in someone or something.

It’s clear that in the song Yesterday, and in religious thinking (whether consciously or not), the word is being used in the second sense. The concept of faith here is not one that can be rationally explained. It’s not as if we could disprove Paul McCartney’s belief in ‘yesterday’, or demonstrate that ‘today’ is more worthy of his belief. Trying to persuade the singer of the song Yesterday to give up his faith in love would be pointless and entirely negative. Opponents of religious faith fail to grasp this; ‘belief’ in a spiritual sense isn’t meant in the same way that they understand it. This is why a rationalist approach can never dissuade believers. Here’s C.G. Jung in his essay ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ (October 1939):

If our critical reason tells us that in certain respects we are irrational and infantile, or that all religious beliefs are illusions, what are we to do about our irrationality, what are we to put in place of our exploded illusions? Our naive childishness has in it the seeds of creativity, and illusion is a natural component of life, and neither of them can ever be suppressed or replaced by the rationalities and practicalities of convention.

These insights haven’t changed my fundamental outlook – I’m not persuaded into a religious belief or attitude because of them. But it does lead me to a greater understanding of the religious ‘position’. After all, there are times when we all need to put our faith in something or someone.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Guardian Media reports that Tasmin Little will be offering her next recording as a free download: Top violinist’s free digital download targets classical elitism.

From the article:

Little also hopes her recording, The Naked Violin, will be educative as well as enjoyable, and has recorded spoken introductions to the pieces to give technical and musical insights. It will consist of three very different unaccompanied works: Bach’s mesmerising Partita No 3 in E Major; a Polish folk music-inspired piece from 1984 by the British composer Paul Patterson, Luslawice Variations; and Sonata No 3 “Ballade” written in 1924 by the Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe.

• Download the Naked Violin here: www.tasminlittle.org.uk/free_cd/index.html
• Update: Read the review of the Naked Violin at Times Online
• Related Culture Club post: The Top Ten Violin Concertos of All Time

Mahler’s spirituality was defined by his personal inner demons and psychological struggles. He was a typical late Romantic in this respect. With Mahler’s music there is none of the objective contemplation of God that we see in the music of J.S. Bach, for example; everything Mahler wrote was highly subjective. His contemporary, one-time friend and the music critic of the Hamburger Nachrichten, Ferdinand Pfohl, wrote this of him:

Mahler was a mystic, a God-seeker. His imagination circled incessantly around these matters, around God and the world, around life and death, around spiritual matters and nature. Eternity and immortality were at the centre of his thoughts. Death and eternity are the great theme of his art. He wanted to believe, belief at any price.

But why the struggle, why the incessant questioning? A clue to Mahler’s spiritual intensity can be glimpsed in his remark to Richard Strauss; that it was through his art that he sought redemption. Strauss reported this to the conductor Otto Klemperer, adding his own baffled comment: ‘I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to be redeemed from’.

Mahler and Alienation

Strauss wasn’t the only one perplexed by Mahler’s deep spiritual angst. It’s this very issue that made his music so difficult to understand during his lifetime. It’s also what made him such a relevant composer to a later generation, and may explain the extraordinary growth of popularity in Mahler’s music from the 1950s to the present day, after being virtually ignored for over 40 years after his death.

At the heart of Mahler’s spiritual struggle is a deep-seated alienation from the world as he experienced it. Burnett James, in his book The Music of Gustav Mahler, puts this into a broader perspective:

Baudelaire’s remark that when we are moved by poetry or music, and tears come to the eyes, it is not a sign of profound joy but of ‘an irritated melancholy, a nervous postulation, a nature exiled in an imperfect world which would like to take possession at once on this very earth of a revealed paradise,’ is very near to Mahler’s intense longing and sense of alienation. It is of course true to a greater or lesser extent of all major art, in one form or another: it is also, perhaps primarily, true of Mozart (which is the major reason why the Romantics tended to regard Mozart as ‘the Christ of music’). In Mozart the very spiritualization of form, the inward ideality, all but breaks the heart that beholds it. It is simply that, with Mahler, as with all the Romantics, early or late, the nerves are nearer the surface, more exposed.

Mahler’s pain would appear to be a result of this intense alienation. As a Bohemian Jew he was an outsider racially and geographically until his death, and this was at the root of his ongoing spiritual crisis.

Leonard Bernstein was a great champion of Mahler’s music, and he played a major part in the re-evaluation of Mahler that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s (he was the first conductor to record the complete cycle of Mahler’s symphonies, in 1967). Bernstein was also Jewish, as well as a world-renowned conductor, composer and pianist in his own right, so he was uniquely placed to empathise with Mahler.

In his televised documentary, The Little Drummer Boy, Bernstein locates Mahler’s spiritual alienation within the struggle between his suppressed Jewish identity and a yearning for the salvation offered by Christianity:

It’s very difficult to be a Jew. Judaism is the hardest of all religions, because there are no ultimate rewards except on earth. No promises about the hereafter, no guaranteed kingdom of heaven, only the conviction that God will love you if you do his works. Judaism is not primarily a consolation, it is a system of ethics, with not ten but hundreds of commandments about how man should live with man. Therefore the great attraction of Christianity for Mahler was the great concept of resurrection of the soul, the promise of life hereafter.

Mahler himself claimed that his first and second symphonies were the spiritual autobiography of his early years. He called his first symphony a ‘flaming indictment of the Creator’. Ferdinand Pfohl, a friend and colleague, even suggests that this affected his physical appearance: ‘He looked like one who had questioned God and had accordingly been cast out of the Light and into the Darkness, one whose crime was knowledge and who now sought with desperate urgency the way back to the lost paradise… seeking to reach God and the angels on the sounding bridge of music which joins the present world with the hereafter.’ It was this aspect of his personality that was at the root of the hostility he attracted from the conservative musical elite, as Peter Franklin explains in his study of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3:

The revolutionary, critical aspect of Mahler’s music, which then, as now, could upset Brahmsian conservatives, consisted not least in the way in which it articulated Faustian questioning as much as it embodied the harmonious reconciliation that even Romantic classicism had tended to consider the primary function and purpose of the art.

The Quest for Salvation in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’

In his Second Symphony, known as the ‘Resurrection’, Mahler presents his passionate and urgent quest for salvation and the afterlife, in which, as Burnett James says, ‘Faith had, for Mahler, to be created out of tragic awareness.’ The first movement is a funeral march, depicting the ‘death of the hero of my first symphony’, and from there on in it’s a struggle for faith that doesn’t come easy. As he said in a letter to a friend about the thoughts behind this work: ‘Why did you live, why suffer? Is it all nothing but a terrible joke?’

The ‘terrible joke’ aspect of life reveals itself in the Scherzo, Mahler’s first example of what has been called his ‘spectral scherzos’. Scherzo literally means ‘a joke’, and it was largely used to describe playful music, but in Mahler’s hands the joke becomes black humour (and in later symphonies at times grotesque). Bernstein argues that in this Second Symphony Scherzo Mahler portrays most conspicuously the conflicts between his Jewish and Christian identities; between, for example, ‘oriental’ melodies and Bachian contrapuntal exercises.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Much of the struggle and pain is expressed through one of the aspects of his style that was uniquely Mahlerian and at the time revolutionary; a style where the tragic and the commonplace sit side by side, where elevated classical themes are followed by popular street music, where a heavenly adagio might be suddenly interrupted by a hurdy-gurdy tune. Stephen Johnson provides an example of the effect in his essay on Mahler in A Guide To The Symphony: ‘The clarinet’s Ländler tune 13 bars before fig. 30 in the Scherzo of the Second Symphony is innocuous in itself, but after the haunted opening one can read all manner of sinister possibilities into it.’

This ‘inclusive’ style is very evident in the finale of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the final struggle towards salvation. Here he displays what David R. Murray called ‘a whole web of thematic cross-references, with anticipations of things to come as well as reminders of what has gone by’ (from the sleeve notes to the recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 by Simon Rattle and the CBSO, 1987). There are horn calls, marches, brass band tunes, plaintive melodies, vehement outbursts, birdsong, and much else, all brought together in one extensive movement, as if the whole world itself were being paraded by us. In the end, however, salvation does come, in a triumphant affirmation, ‘a final plateau of spiritual exultation’ (David R. Murray). This is one of Mahler’s most transcendental musical moments.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Identity, Faith and the Song of the Earth

It is easy, in retrospect, to see why Mahler was a man out of time, and why his music was resurrected and championed so passionately long after his death. The alienation that it depicts is something that many more people, certainly in the West, have come to experience in the modern and post-modern world, creating a powerfully receptive audience for Mahler’s message. As Burnett James puts it:

Mahler’s own sense of isolation and alienation – his sense of being ‘thrice homeless’ and his situation as a Jew in a hostile world – was reflected in the general sense of the individual’s loss of identity and the consequent loss of security in a world from which the firm centre had dropped under the pressures of the new knowledge and its concomitant faithlessness.

The Second Symphony is one of Mahler’s earliest solutions to the struggles with his inner demons, but he continued to search for answers throughout his life. At the last, however, he reached a calmer spiritual understanding, best conveyed in one of his last works, Das Lied von der Erde, the Song of the Earth. Bernstein discovers in this work an ‘almost zen-like contemplation of death’:

This stunning quietude and sparsness… is the musical equivalent of what Zarathustra, Buddha, Wagner and Nietzsche called variously the all, the nothing, the élan vital, the cosmic ‘om’. What has happened is that Mahler’s music, at its greatest and most mature, has become a synthesis of his lifelong conflict between Judaism on the one hand and Christianity on the other. Which makes it clear to us why Mahler chose for his final song texts ancient Chinese poetry which concerns itself with youth, beauty, wine, the brevity of life and the mystical embrace of death.

Mahler’s composing hut in Steinbach. (Photograph courtesy of Alex Ross)

Gustav Mahler was working on his Symphony No. 2 in 1894 when he decided to build a composing hut in a lakeside meadow in Steinbach. The builder who constructed the hut was a man named Franz Lösch, and in an interview with a Viennese journal he recalled the time he worked on Mahler’s hut (quoted in Mahler Remembered by Norman Lebrecht):

[Mahler] would always say: the lake had its own language, the lake talked to him. From up at the inn he couldn’t hear it, so he needed to have a little house right by the shore. When he heard the lake, he composed more easily, and the compositions flowed fully formed from his head.

My father, who was still alive then, would say to me shaking his head, ‘Strange there’s a man who talks to the lake.’ He was a good man, my father, but he did not understand. I, however, who have spent my whole life by the Attersee, I understood very well.

Reading this, I was struck by the connection (I’d call it a ‘spiritual’ connection) to the following passage from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Siddharhta has finished his journey and joined the ferryman, who teaches him to listen to the river.

Siddharhta listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking everything in. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices – the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.

When Siddharhta listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or the laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om – perfection.

There is a great coincidence in these two passages and how I came to find them. We are looking at Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha in this month’s Culture Club, under the theme of ‘spirituality’. Both are examples of something deeper than symbolism, of something more like a total identification with nature as a unifying principle of spirituality.

It’s not first time that I’ve found surprising or revealing cross connections between the works that we’re looking at; for example, the central idea of an argument between law and love emerged for me in the works we looked at under the ‘supernatural’ theme; and while looking up a reflection on a theme of Chekhov’s, in a book about Frank Zappa, I came across a reference to JH Prynne, brought together under the question of authorial intention. All of this reminds me to be continually mindful of the unexpected connections within and around creative works of art.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor is not only a religious work, but a spiritual one. In other words, it transcends the theology of Christianity on which it is based and applies itself to a broader category of feeling that we call ‘spirituality’. This is what the eminent music scholar Yoshitake Kobayashi meant when he affirmed that Bach’s Mass in B Minor had great spiritual significance to him even as a Buddhist. But what do we mean by spirituality, and how is it distinct from religious belief?

Einstein and Spirituality

Spirituality is a concept that is difficult to pin down, so to avoid being ambiguous let’s look to science for some direction. The famous physicist Albert Einstein was very clear that he didn’t believe in a personal God or any accepted theology. He denied any belief in the immortality of the individual, and considered ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it. However, he did have a spiritual side, which he often expressed. To him it was characterised thus:

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.

The letter Einstein wrote late in his life to the Queen of Belgium, who was suffering a great grief, is full of this sense of spirituality.

And yet, as always the spring-time sun brings forth new life, and we may rejoice because of this new life and contribute to its unfolding, and Mozart remains as beautiful and tender as he always was and always will be. There is after all something eternal that lies beyond the hand of fate and all human delusions, and such eternals lie closer to an older person than to a younger one oscillating between fear and hope. For us there remains the privilege of experiencing beauty and truth in their purest forms.

Einstein’s spiritual side often expressed itself in his love of music. After hearing the 13-year-old Yehudi Menuhin with the Berlin Philharmonic he was heard to exclaim ‘Now I know that there is a God in heaven.’ He once said, ‘I often think about music, I live my daydreams in music, I see my life in the form of music’. He particularly worshiped WA Mozart and JS Bach: ‘I have this to say about Bach’s works: listen, play, love, revere – and keep your trap shut.’

Bach’s Mass in B minor

Bach was probably the greatest composer to be exclusively focused on his spirituality – it has been said that every composition Bach wrote was dedicated to God. The Mass in B Minor is seen by many as his greatest work, and although it is clearly a document of Christianity, related specifically to the Lutheran liturgy, a close analysis suggests that Bach’s intentions were broader. Indeed, the circumstances of its creation suggest this.

Just before his death, Bach edited and compiled the Mass in B Minor from various pieces of music that he’d composed throughout his career. It was probably the last project that he ever undertook, and there seems to have been no intention, or even possibility, of having the whole piece performed. His intention was to summarise his entire life’s work with this one enormous missa tota.

Although each of the four sections that Bach used to structure the Mass in B Minor relate to occasions within the Lutheran liturgy, grouping them altogether also creates a complete mass in the Roman Catholic tradition. There has been much speculation about whether anything was meant by this coincidence. Some commentators have called the formation of the Roman mass out of Lutheran elements fortuitous, in order to avoid the idea that Bach had a late conversion to Catholicism. But many more agree with John Butt’s conclusion, in his book Bach: Mass in B Minor:

Perhaps the most useful means of summing up its meaning and content is to consider its ‘universality’, as the complete work unites Catholic and Lutheran confessions.

This sense of the universal is not limited to the theological implications. Stylistically, the Mass in B Minor pulls together an unprecedented range of musical styles and approaches. One of the most striking is his adoption of the so-called Stile Antico – the strict contrapuntal style associated with church music from the 16th Century – which is found particularly in the Credo in unum Deum and the Confiteor. This style is distinguished by a certain objectivity, as John Butt explains:

The surface of the music is coloured by a specific repertory of contrapuntal devices: those concerned with dissonance and passing notes, and those relating to the combining of the subjects (double counterpoint, stretto, augmentation etc.). Although this gives the music a particular flavour and generates onward movement, the music is – in terms of the eighteenth century – emotionless, lacking the standard affective devices that permeate most music in the tonal system. When such a style is viewed from the historical standpoint of Bach’s age it is not difficult to perceive how clearly these examples are suited to ‘ancient’ and established texts (such as those of the Creed), those associations with ‘timeless truths’ which are not subjected to the whims of each succeeding generation.

In the B Minor Mass the ‘studied neutrality’ of the Stile Antico is combined and contrasted with profoundly expressive music, such as the chromatic ostinato that symbolises the tragic in the Crucifixus, and the sighs and laments expressed through the pairing of notes in minor keys, such as in the Kyrie, the Qui tollis and the Agnus Dei.

Butt goes on to demonstrate that there are also many elements of secular dance music throughout, including the Gigue and Passepied (Gloria in excelsis Deo, Osanna and Et in Spiritum sanctum), Passacaglia/Chaconne (Crucifixus), Courante (Et resurrexit) and the Bourée (Et expecto). Perhaps most obviously the Qui sedes ‘…opening as it does with a four-bar phrase and repetitive rhythms, immediately evokes a dance style. Indeed it could well be compared with the opening of the Polonaise, in the same key, from the second Ouverture, BWV 1067.’ (John Butt). See the video below for a complete performance of the Qui sedes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In summary, the Mass in B Minor may be the greatest unifying work by any composer, and this appears to be a conscious attempt by Bach to depict the sense of universality behind his spirituality. Albert Schweitzer described the work as ‘one in which the sublime and intimate co-exist side by side, as do the Catholic and Protestant elements, all being as enigmatic and unfathomable as the religious consciousness of the work’s creator.’

The Unifying Principle of Spirituality

A final quote from Einstein might help to clarify this mysterious unifying principle. In 1930 Einstein published an essay on Religion and Science in the New York Times magazine, in which he described his own inclination towards a ‘cosmic’ religious sense, and discerned kindred glimpses of this feeling in such diverse figures as the prophets and psalmists of the Hebrew Bible, St Francis of Assisi and the Buddha. In this he said the following:

It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who does not experience it. The individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvellous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence strikes him as a sort of prison, and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling. In my view it is the most important function of art and science, to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

Bach’s Mass in B Minor certainly fulfils this function.