Floating Melodies Treated With Greatness

Classical Music

By FRED KIRSHNIT
August 7, 2007

Heaven knows it would have been fascinating to hear a performance of the full mass that Joseph Rheinberger composed when he was only 7 years old, but for Sunday's installment of the Summer Festival of Sacred Music, the associate director of music at St. Bartholomew's Church, Paolo Bordignon, prudently programmed a more mature work, the Cantus Missae, Opus 109.

Rheinberger was a true prodigy, already holding down several church organist positions in Liechtenstein at the age of 5. Born into a well-connected family, he eventually worked for mad King Ludwig of Bavaria and was in a unique position to observe some significant musical history. Rheinberger was a vocal coach at the Munich Court Opera at the time when Richard Wagner was preparing the premiere of "Tristan und Isolde." However, he was not a fan of the "music of the future" and did not look favorably upon either Wagner or Liszt, although his close friendship with the cuckolded Hans von Bülow may have had something to do with his aesthetic position.

The mass performed Sunday is a great musical experience and the St. Bart's choir treated it as such. Rheinberger belonged to the doctrinally conservative Cecilian movement that wished to return church music to its roots in the Venetian school. The Cantus Missae is an antiphonal work, that is, there are two distinct choirs on the two separate sides of the room. Melodies float freely between the two groups and illuminate the space between. The zen koan that it is not the vessel that we craft but rather the emptiness inside seems particularly appropriate for a visitor first entering the San Marco Cathedral in Venice (or experiencing Rheinberger's mass). The space itself is overwhelming and the acoustics are otherworldly. At St. Mark's, Andrea Gabrieli certainly thought so and brought his nephew Giovanni in to play the second organ, which was positioned opposite to his in a separate loft. This fortuitous instance of nepotism altered the history of Western music forever and even shaped the platform positioning of the orchestra still used in the 21st century.

Mr. Bordignon began with Felix Mendelssohn, specifically the Organ Sonata No. 1. He decided to frame the entire proceedings with this magisterial piece, intoning the first two movements as a processional and the last as a recessional. Employing Mendelssohn seemed especially fitting for this week's ecumenical service wherein the program booklet featured on its cover the writings of the Jewish mystic Lawrence Kushner. Mendelssohn lived his entire life as a Protestant, but his family had only recently converted before his birth, and his grandfather was the renowned Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Many composers in the Germanic world of the 19th century moved from one of the three great faiths to another, although only Alexander Zemlinsky has the distinction of being Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic all in the same lifetime.

The singing of the Cantus Missae was quite special, a great deal of power emanating from the Gloria and its ending Sancto Spiritu fugue. Especially ear-catching was the beginning of the Sanctus, a celestial mingling of the highest of voices in the finest tradition of Monteverdi. Rheinberger gets a bad rap in virtually all music history textbooks, the academics repeating ad nauseam that his music is formally impressive but uninspired. This is simply balderdash. It is the very purity of the harmonic lines that expresses eloquently the nature of God and paradise. For sheer beauty of sound, Rheinberger is hard to beat and for his realization, St. Bart's is difficult to surpass.

Just one question though. In my personal value system, Carnegie Hall would also be considered a sacred place, but many might not agree. However, in church, shouldn't chatting on your cell phone be considered particularly bad form?

Floating Melodies Treated With Greatness

Classical Music

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