A short story I wrote ten or so years ago
Jul. 17th, 2008 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbIN THE CHURCH OF ST.PAUL AURELIAN
A story by F.P.Barbieri
It was a small, nondescript, modern Catholic church, recent, but not recent enough not to look out of date; cheaply built, slightly dusty, and desperately unimpressive. It all contributed to Matt Heilewulf's feeling of embarrasment. Except for concerts and tourist visits, he was not sure he had been inside a place of worship in his life; least of all was he familiar with this sort of little local erection, stumbled upon in a suburban road like a pub or a launderette. He had a distaste for them: they went in some way against his artistic sense that a temple ought to look like a temple - grand, standing alone on top of a hill, or at least in the middle of a square or a garden, towering over every other building. This, he thought, is not like a church; this is a cheap counterfeit.
Worse still, the ritual embarrassed him. He had not wanted to be conspicuous, and had come in early and sat somewhere at the back; but, having made the mistake not to study a missal, he grew paralyzingly aware that he was going to be out of step. All he knew of the Mass were the five great Latin hymns composers set to music. Those he knew well, and he noticed with distaste that they had been translated into a markedly inferior brand of English; but the rest of the sacred performance was a complete fog to him, and he simply could not help getting up and sitting down at the wrong times. And each time it happened, he felt as though every eye in the place were on him.
The friend who had persuaded him into this anomaly, Charles Shapiro, kept whispering suggestions; which didn't help. Quite apart from making his inexperience yet clearer, the whispers were apt to be inaccurate, for Charles himself, though baptized by a Roman priest, had rarely entered a church since his teens, and his memories of the Mass were hazy and Latinate. As he told Heilewulf when they first spoke of the place, he had even been surprised to hear a Catholic congregation singing English - Protestant - hymns.
But it was the hymns - and the voluntary at the end of the service - that they had come to listen; and both Heilewulf and Shapiro were glad when the first one came. The Mass had only gone on for a few minutes, but to both of them it had seemed an hour. If not for Shapiro's extraordinary news, Heilewulf would have ran from the place; or, if not ran - which was not in keeping with the dignity he expected of himself - at least elegantly and swiftly evaporated, to find a pub and compose himself.
But the news was indeed extraordinary; strange enough to make one of the most prominent musicologists in the world leave his chair and his students in central London and come to this neglected little parish in a suburban by-road and endure tedium and embarrassment to listen. A week earlier, Shapiro had stumbled into the morning service, tired and half-lost on a separate errand; and had heard organ playing like he never had before - and Shapiro was a very knowledgeable amateur. He had waited till the end of the Mass to see who was producing this stunning, stupefying performance. And his astonishment had redoubled at seeing the small yet world-famous face that had peeped timidly from behind an organ itself much too large for such a small parish.
So the first hymn came. It did not start immediately; the congregation, as though from habit, fell silent, and the organ opened with a few notes in the highest registers, as if of little birds tentatively tuning up; which suddenly, and yet with a strange inevitability, flared up into a massive march, the great chords flaring like bright, icy shafts of light, a piece of rock-like music that somehow made the frame of the little church seem as massive and majestic as a Cathedral. The congregation burst out:
At the name of Jesus
Every knee shall bow,
Every tongue confess Him
King of glory now...
...as the organ played over, under and around the exultant voices. By some miracle of sound-manipulation, whose inward detail Heilewulf was narrowly able to decipher and Shapiro not at all, the sound managed to reinforce and encourage the bellow of a fairly average and not over-musical congregation into a fountain of gold. And it was varied. Each verse had a new and interesting piece of whimsy or interpretative detail woven into the repetitive chorale, including something Heilewulf had genuinely never heard before - a sort of drum-roll involving several of the lower registers, lending to the tune something genuinely military that was the last thing anyone would expect from a church organ. Later Heilewulf came to realize that this was a peculiar innovation of the organist, which she delighted in using in all sorts of contexts.
The hymn came to an end, and the two men fell back from musical paradise to tedium. The service dragged on, with both trying to look as though they had not parachuted in from somewhere where Catholic services and habits were quite unknown, and failing in the attempt. At last another hymn struck up:
O God of Earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die...
This time Heilewulf was surprised at the delicacy of the organist's work. There was almost no introduction - only a slight hint of the tune - and her playing suggested a solo violin, with an almost inaudible bass background. The lamentation of a single good man was powerfully conveyed, and when the second verse came, the great critic could almost hear the artist's anger and disgust at a corrupt, venal and oppressive world. The words pleased him, which surprised him until he saw the author's name; and the tune was one of those lovely English folk-like affairs that can never really pall. And when, again by surprise, the organist, with daring bareness of means, span out the poet's third verse into an intense, powerful pleading phrase, ending in five great chords like so many amens, Heilewulf felt that it had really been worth his while to brave the gates of a suburban church.
It surprised him, though he should have been used to the power of music, how much the sound affected his perception of this undistinguished, barn-like structure, with the remnants of a degenerate Baroque art stuck here and there on the walls with no overall design. The previous hymn's grandiose marching rhythms had suddenly made it into a vast, ribbed, structured cathedral, a thing of daring and beautifully conceived spaces and volumes; now the naked pleading of the organ turned it into a hermit's cell, bare, stripped of all inessentials, dedicated to the single pursuit of a burning and beautiful vision. Heilewulf's successes in his field were due in no little part to his acute and cultivated sensitivity; his gift of turning a phrase, of explaining the sense and feel of a piece so that a layman could understand it and a musician feel that the last word had been spoken, was, though worked upon all his life, innate; and now that keen sensitivity was at work again. He knew Laura Lockridge's work as a conductor quite well. He had been among the first to make the trek from central London to suburban Slough - harder to conceive, in some ways, than to Birmingham or Manchester or Edinburgh - in the early seventies, and come back with news of a new and very gifted artist, the first in his experience to negate the usual gibes about women conductors, with a quite exceptional sense of rhythm and a sound whose bright, severe clarity reminded him somewhat of Toscanini; he had followed her career with growing pleasure; and when she recently had married the rich and handsome Lord Camelot, a man with all the glamour of a superhero to boot, he had been invited to the wedding. He would not deny that he was a little in love, as many musicians he knew, with the brave little figure wrestling with the public, sixty musicians and the minds of dead geniuses: as romantic a picture as ever he had seen in forty years in the concert hall.
Yet he had never had any idea that she had any religious faith; let alone that she would creep into a little church half a mile from her husband's hall every Sunday morning, like a thief in the night, to play the organ at ten o'clock with no recognition and no pay. There were many cathedrals who would pay good money for a performance like today's, he knew; even Lord Camelot's chapel at Silchester Hall, where the wedding had been held, seemed a more suitable setting for these sonorous wonders than this Surrey/Hampshire piece of nothing-much.
And yet there was something curiously consistent about it. As long as he had known her, she had never really given away a lot about herself. He felt that she must have had a lonely childhood and learned early to shut herself off. She had a trick of sounding friendly and communicative and yet say very little, and at any rate she seemed to prefer to listen, which she did with wide-eyed earnestness. (He flattered himself that he had influenced her performance of a couple of pieces of the repertoire; as when, meeting her backstage after a performance of Liszt's second concerto, which they had recently discussed, she had smiled and said "you see, I'm playing it your way now".) She did not like social life, and he knew that she and her husband occasionally took part in small chamber performances with local Silchester people. Lord Camelot, that giant of a man, played the violin, which he wished he could see; he looked as if he could smash one with his little finger.
Small and big, big and small; the contrast of the gigantic husband and the diminutive wife had haunted him. There was a foot and a half difference between them, and subtler differences: just as his hands were big even for his size, spade-like, almost frightening (and he was aware of this, and tended to keep them behind his back), so her hands and feet were small, dainty and scarcely looked strong enough to wrestle a piano keyboard, or an organ -
- Heilewulf's attention snapped back to the present. Yes, as he looked back, he noticed dozens of things that said that the hands that were performing such wonders on the organ could barely reach the tenth. He was struck by the ingeniousness with which this difficulty - which would have been fatal to a pianist - was overcome, by the use of combined and constantly varied registers, agile - indeed dazzling - pedal work (she must have the feet of a dancer), and great swiftness and precision in the fingers. Laura had once told him that she was not only too small but too clumsy to play the piano well, every piece a shower of mistakes that no amount of practice could eradicate. Well, there may have been such problems here, but he certainly had trouble hearing them.
Two more hymns, and the rest of the service, wenty by. At consecration, Matt's embarrassment reached its peak - he didn't know whether or not to kneel to a God he didn't believe in, and compromised by all but ducking behind a pillar. Not long after, he understood that the Mass was over, hearing the shuffling feet of the first few yong mothers with unruly children and other people in a hurry to leave; he relaxed, waiting for the voluntary.
It came, and was another surprise; for a second, the great scholar, who knew music like the back of his own hand, simply could not recognize the piece - not because it was unknown to him, but because he would never have dreamed of associating it with a church. Laura Lockridge was playing Non piu' andrai farfallone amorosoÀ, the wonderful mock-military aria in which the vigorous wit of Figaro teases the moonstruck page Cherubino about being drafted. And she was playing it with a full appreciation of its humorous quality, delighting in the beautiful muscular drollery, indulging one or two tricks of organ sound that seemed to him positively irreverent. She was not keeping strictly to the score, of course; and soon he realized that she was launching into a deceptively simple variation, which was soon wheeling itself into a fugue, still clinging to the original's robust pace, but - he groped wildly for a word. Firmer? More profound? No; not quite. There was something about it of a stout working man striding cheerfully off, and something else - something invigorated, grateful, satisfied; something of going out into the world with a strength and happiness you did not expect to have, a feeling that surprises you and for which you feel you ought to give thanks. There was no heavy seriousness about it; one felt the organist might at any minute cut a caper; and yet it was, on the deepest level, one of the most religious things he had ever heard, a hymn of praise. Beethoven - he thought - might have composed music like that.
A week later, M.Heilewulf wrote a review of a concert of popular French pieces including Saint-Saens' Third Symphony.
"...Saint-Saens was hardly the most talented musician of his time. Too often, his imagination is defective, his development limited, his structure stolid. Even this thunderous symphony does not exactly sparkle with glittering brilliance. Almost as soon as it is started, one has the sense of hearing the same theme over and over again.
"But it is memorable. The verdict of generations of concert-goers is unanimous: we want to hear it again. And again. It does not have the greatness of a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Verdi; but it has greatness. And one wonders whether its very lack of imagination is not a part of its greatness. There is nothing in it but one thing, the common chord, and only the common chord. If the symphony feels, at some point, repetitious, it is because it sticks to the point.
"And it does so with absolute belief. Stolidity is not a word one associates with the Third Symphony; passion, even anger, are more to the point. It comes home like a battle-cry. Every listener, even should he know nothing about music, becomes aware that the symphony mobilizes every resource of the orchestra, from organ to triangle, in the service of a cause. It is not Beethoven; it does not have his breadth, his flexibility, even his gentleness; but one can hardly think of another composer breathing such a heroic spirit.
"Saint-Saens has an enemy to fight. In an age of increasingly clever harmonic manipulations, of sonic relativism, of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian assaults on the very notion of tonal solidity, he raises the three tones of the common chord like the colours of his country's flag; he grounds half an hour of music on them and them alone; and he summons the organ, the sacred instrument of Christian temples, to battle, calling it to witness how perfect and satisfactory, how fully true to nature are the three tones. Around the organ, the piano shimmers like a golden cloud, and the violins move with the perfect ease of nature, and the brass answers with the strength of perfect comvinction.
"In the hands of another composer, this would be indescribably hollow and dreary; the lack of natural cleverness could not be made up by fluency and convinction; but Saint-Saens is enough of a musician, if not to shimmer, certainly to convince. The symphony is narrow, ungentle, short on variation and delicacy; the only variance in is that between a softer and a harder grip, between increases and decreases in tension. But its very severity arises from convinction; and its tonal world does not have to be brilliant, because we recognize its truth."
A story by F.P.Barbieri
It was a small, nondescript, modern Catholic church, recent, but not recent enough not to look out of date; cheaply built, slightly dusty, and desperately unimpressive. It all contributed to Matt Heilewulf's feeling of embarrasment. Except for concerts and tourist visits, he was not sure he had been inside a place of worship in his life; least of all was he familiar with this sort of little local erection, stumbled upon in a suburban road like a pub or a launderette. He had a distaste for them: they went in some way against his artistic sense that a temple ought to look like a temple - grand, standing alone on top of a hill, or at least in the middle of a square or a garden, towering over every other building. This, he thought, is not like a church; this is a cheap counterfeit.
Worse still, the ritual embarrassed him. He had not wanted to be conspicuous, and had come in early and sat somewhere at the back; but, having made the mistake not to study a missal, he grew paralyzingly aware that he was going to be out of step. All he knew of the Mass were the five great Latin hymns composers set to music. Those he knew well, and he noticed with distaste that they had been translated into a markedly inferior brand of English; but the rest of the sacred performance was a complete fog to him, and he simply could not help getting up and sitting down at the wrong times. And each time it happened, he felt as though every eye in the place were on him.
The friend who had persuaded him into this anomaly, Charles Shapiro, kept whispering suggestions; which didn't help. Quite apart from making his inexperience yet clearer, the whispers were apt to be inaccurate, for Charles himself, though baptized by a Roman priest, had rarely entered a church since his teens, and his memories of the Mass were hazy and Latinate. As he told Heilewulf when they first spoke of the place, he had even been surprised to hear a Catholic congregation singing English - Protestant - hymns.
But it was the hymns - and the voluntary at the end of the service - that they had come to listen; and both Heilewulf and Shapiro were glad when the first one came. The Mass had only gone on for a few minutes, but to both of them it had seemed an hour. If not for Shapiro's extraordinary news, Heilewulf would have ran from the place; or, if not ran - which was not in keeping with the dignity he expected of himself - at least elegantly and swiftly evaporated, to find a pub and compose himself.
But the news was indeed extraordinary; strange enough to make one of the most prominent musicologists in the world leave his chair and his students in central London and come to this neglected little parish in a suburban by-road and endure tedium and embarrassment to listen. A week earlier, Shapiro had stumbled into the morning service, tired and half-lost on a separate errand; and had heard organ playing like he never had before - and Shapiro was a very knowledgeable amateur. He had waited till the end of the Mass to see who was producing this stunning, stupefying performance. And his astonishment had redoubled at seeing the small yet world-famous face that had peeped timidly from behind an organ itself much too large for such a small parish.
So the first hymn came. It did not start immediately; the congregation, as though from habit, fell silent, and the organ opened with a few notes in the highest registers, as if of little birds tentatively tuning up; which suddenly, and yet with a strange inevitability, flared up into a massive march, the great chords flaring like bright, icy shafts of light, a piece of rock-like music that somehow made the frame of the little church seem as massive and majestic as a Cathedral. The congregation burst out:
At the name of Jesus
Every knee shall bow,
Every tongue confess Him
King of glory now...
...as the organ played over, under and around the exultant voices. By some miracle of sound-manipulation, whose inward detail Heilewulf was narrowly able to decipher and Shapiro not at all, the sound managed to reinforce and encourage the bellow of a fairly average and not over-musical congregation into a fountain of gold. And it was varied. Each verse had a new and interesting piece of whimsy or interpretative detail woven into the repetitive chorale, including something Heilewulf had genuinely never heard before - a sort of drum-roll involving several of the lower registers, lending to the tune something genuinely military that was the last thing anyone would expect from a church organ. Later Heilewulf came to realize that this was a peculiar innovation of the organist, which she delighted in using in all sorts of contexts.
The hymn came to an end, and the two men fell back from musical paradise to tedium. The service dragged on, with both trying to look as though they had not parachuted in from somewhere where Catholic services and habits were quite unknown, and failing in the attempt. At last another hymn struck up:
O God of Earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die...
This time Heilewulf was surprised at the delicacy of the organist's work. There was almost no introduction - only a slight hint of the tune - and her playing suggested a solo violin, with an almost inaudible bass background. The lamentation of a single good man was powerfully conveyed, and when the second verse came, the great critic could almost hear the artist's anger and disgust at a corrupt, venal and oppressive world. The words pleased him, which surprised him until he saw the author's name; and the tune was one of those lovely English folk-like affairs that can never really pall. And when, again by surprise, the organist, with daring bareness of means, span out the poet's third verse into an intense, powerful pleading phrase, ending in five great chords like so many amens, Heilewulf felt that it had really been worth his while to brave the gates of a suburban church.
It surprised him, though he should have been used to the power of music, how much the sound affected his perception of this undistinguished, barn-like structure, with the remnants of a degenerate Baroque art stuck here and there on the walls with no overall design. The previous hymn's grandiose marching rhythms had suddenly made it into a vast, ribbed, structured cathedral, a thing of daring and beautifully conceived spaces and volumes; now the naked pleading of the organ turned it into a hermit's cell, bare, stripped of all inessentials, dedicated to the single pursuit of a burning and beautiful vision. Heilewulf's successes in his field were due in no little part to his acute and cultivated sensitivity; his gift of turning a phrase, of explaining the sense and feel of a piece so that a layman could understand it and a musician feel that the last word had been spoken, was, though worked upon all his life, innate; and now that keen sensitivity was at work again. He knew Laura Lockridge's work as a conductor quite well. He had been among the first to make the trek from central London to suburban Slough - harder to conceive, in some ways, than to Birmingham or Manchester or Edinburgh - in the early seventies, and come back with news of a new and very gifted artist, the first in his experience to negate the usual gibes about women conductors, with a quite exceptional sense of rhythm and a sound whose bright, severe clarity reminded him somewhat of Toscanini; he had followed her career with growing pleasure; and when she recently had married the rich and handsome Lord Camelot, a man with all the glamour of a superhero to boot, he had been invited to the wedding. He would not deny that he was a little in love, as many musicians he knew, with the brave little figure wrestling with the public, sixty musicians and the minds of dead geniuses: as romantic a picture as ever he had seen in forty years in the concert hall.
Yet he had never had any idea that she had any religious faith; let alone that she would creep into a little church half a mile from her husband's hall every Sunday morning, like a thief in the night, to play the organ at ten o'clock with no recognition and no pay. There were many cathedrals who would pay good money for a performance like today's, he knew; even Lord Camelot's chapel at Silchester Hall, where the wedding had been held, seemed a more suitable setting for these sonorous wonders than this Surrey/Hampshire piece of nothing-much.
And yet there was something curiously consistent about it. As long as he had known her, she had never really given away a lot about herself. He felt that she must have had a lonely childhood and learned early to shut herself off. She had a trick of sounding friendly and communicative and yet say very little, and at any rate she seemed to prefer to listen, which she did with wide-eyed earnestness. (He flattered himself that he had influenced her performance of a couple of pieces of the repertoire; as when, meeting her backstage after a performance of Liszt's second concerto, which they had recently discussed, she had smiled and said "you see, I'm playing it your way now".) She did not like social life, and he knew that she and her husband occasionally took part in small chamber performances with local Silchester people. Lord Camelot, that giant of a man, played the violin, which he wished he could see; he looked as if he could smash one with his little finger.
Small and big, big and small; the contrast of the gigantic husband and the diminutive wife had haunted him. There was a foot and a half difference between them, and subtler differences: just as his hands were big even for his size, spade-like, almost frightening (and he was aware of this, and tended to keep them behind his back), so her hands and feet were small, dainty and scarcely looked strong enough to wrestle a piano keyboard, or an organ -
- Heilewulf's attention snapped back to the present. Yes, as he looked back, he noticed dozens of things that said that the hands that were performing such wonders on the organ could barely reach the tenth. He was struck by the ingeniousness with which this difficulty - which would have been fatal to a pianist - was overcome, by the use of combined and constantly varied registers, agile - indeed dazzling - pedal work (she must have the feet of a dancer), and great swiftness and precision in the fingers. Laura had once told him that she was not only too small but too clumsy to play the piano well, every piece a shower of mistakes that no amount of practice could eradicate. Well, there may have been such problems here, but he certainly had trouble hearing them.
Two more hymns, and the rest of the service, wenty by. At consecration, Matt's embarrassment reached its peak - he didn't know whether or not to kneel to a God he didn't believe in, and compromised by all but ducking behind a pillar. Not long after, he understood that the Mass was over, hearing the shuffling feet of the first few yong mothers with unruly children and other people in a hurry to leave; he relaxed, waiting for the voluntary.
It came, and was another surprise; for a second, the great scholar, who knew music like the back of his own hand, simply could not recognize the piece - not because it was unknown to him, but because he would never have dreamed of associating it with a church. Laura Lockridge was playing Non piu' andrai farfallone amorosoÀ, the wonderful mock-military aria in which the vigorous wit of Figaro teases the moonstruck page Cherubino about being drafted. And she was playing it with a full appreciation of its humorous quality, delighting in the beautiful muscular drollery, indulging one or two tricks of organ sound that seemed to him positively irreverent. She was not keeping strictly to the score, of course; and soon he realized that she was launching into a deceptively simple variation, which was soon wheeling itself into a fugue, still clinging to the original's robust pace, but - he groped wildly for a word. Firmer? More profound? No; not quite. There was something about it of a stout working man striding cheerfully off, and something else - something invigorated, grateful, satisfied; something of going out into the world with a strength and happiness you did not expect to have, a feeling that surprises you and for which you feel you ought to give thanks. There was no heavy seriousness about it; one felt the organist might at any minute cut a caper; and yet it was, on the deepest level, one of the most religious things he had ever heard, a hymn of praise. Beethoven - he thought - might have composed music like that.
A week later, M.Heilewulf wrote a review of a concert of popular French pieces including Saint-Saens' Third Symphony.
"...Saint-Saens was hardly the most talented musician of his time. Too often, his imagination is defective, his development limited, his structure stolid. Even this thunderous symphony does not exactly sparkle with glittering brilliance. Almost as soon as it is started, one has the sense of hearing the same theme over and over again.
"But it is memorable. The verdict of generations of concert-goers is unanimous: we want to hear it again. And again. It does not have the greatness of a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Verdi; but it has greatness. And one wonders whether its very lack of imagination is not a part of its greatness. There is nothing in it but one thing, the common chord, and only the common chord. If the symphony feels, at some point, repetitious, it is because it sticks to the point.
"And it does so with absolute belief. Stolidity is not a word one associates with the Third Symphony; passion, even anger, are more to the point. It comes home like a battle-cry. Every listener, even should he know nothing about music, becomes aware that the symphony mobilizes every resource of the orchestra, from organ to triangle, in the service of a cause. It is not Beethoven; it does not have his breadth, his flexibility, even his gentleness; but one can hardly think of another composer breathing such a heroic spirit.
"Saint-Saens has an enemy to fight. In an age of increasingly clever harmonic manipulations, of sonic relativism, of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian assaults on the very notion of tonal solidity, he raises the three tones of the common chord like the colours of his country's flag; he grounds half an hour of music on them and them alone; and he summons the organ, the sacred instrument of Christian temples, to battle, calling it to witness how perfect and satisfactory, how fully true to nature are the three tones. Around the organ, the piano shimmers like a golden cloud, and the violins move with the perfect ease of nature, and the brass answers with the strength of perfect comvinction.
"In the hands of another composer, this would be indescribably hollow and dreary; the lack of natural cleverness could not be made up by fluency and convinction; but Saint-Saens is enough of a musician, if not to shimmer, certainly to convince. The symphony is narrow, ungentle, short on variation and delicacy; the only variance in is that between a softer and a harder grip, between increases and decreases in tension. But its very severity arises from convinction; and its tonal world does not have to be brilliant, because we recognize its truth."
