Sacred & Sunny
It was rare for an outsider to compose for the San Marco cathedral in Venice, but Claudio Monteverdi, whose Messa da Cappella was featured Sunday at St. Bartholomew's Church, wasn't just another wandering minstrel from the provinces. Born in Cremona, he served as music master for the Duke of Mantua, although not the one from Rigoletto. For Venice having survived the plague, Monteverdi offered his mass of thanksgiving in 1641.
The program began with at least a tenuous nod to Venice, as director of music William Trafka opened this celebratory day — it was a Sunday wherein St. Bart's welcomed new members — not with the usual short organ prelude, but rather with a full-scale Concerto for Organ in B minor composed by Bach's great rival and exact contemporary Johann Gottfried Walther. The Venetian connection is that the piece is "after Vivaldi," a polite way of saying that it is largely pilfered from the red priest. In typical sunny fashion, its fast-slow-fast sense of comfort and joy was ably communicated by Mr. Trafka, and seemed not only appropriate to introduce the music written after deliverance from pestilence, but also made for a stimulating introduction to a positive service, whose sermon explored the need to keep anxiety in perspective.
There was a bit more music than normal for one of the installments of this Summer Festival of Sacred Music, and the performance of the mass itself was notable for its remarkable sense of discipline. The Gloria is notably of this world, a natural type of tone painting for a composer who excelled in the secular arena. Monteverdi is arguably the greatest of the madrigalists and the first major composer of opera, a brand new art form in his day. He saves his otherworldly harmonies for the phrase cum Sancto Spiritu — a powerful doctrinal object lesson for a congregation that was mostly illiterate in his day. In this performance, the passage seemed to sound from several different directions within the church, an acoustical trick accomplished by assiduous assigning of voices.
The meat of this magnificent work is the Credo, and it was rendered quite expertly this day. In a thanatological setting, the section that begins "Et resurrexit tertia die" ("He rose again on the third day") was truly thrilling: A febrile energy seemed to take over the singers. The culmination of the movement, a statement that caused another great church composer, Olivier Messiaen, to write one of his most powerful sacred pieces, "Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum" ("We anticipate the resurrection of the dead"), was especially memorable.
What is musicologically so striking about this series is that it allows the listener to compare the thoughts of a 16th-century composer with that of a 20th-century one. Monteverdi is especially relevant here. I have always thought of him as very similar to the Jewish fin de siècle composers of Vienna who strained to "color within the lines" but consistently created music that strained to break free to the other side. Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony, or Schoenberg's "De Profundis" or "Friede auf Erden" exhibit the same cosmological longing and ultimate sense of belief. Monteverdi would have loved them, and, I daresay, would have found Sunday's performance quite satisfying as well.
