A Scots Song: A Life of Music by James MacMillan

Author:James MacMillan [MacMillan, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, music, Individual Composer & Musician, Religious, General
ISBN: 9781788852258
Google: DpC6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2019-09-18T23:28:03.093358+00:00

Chapter 4

The Search for

the Sacred

One of the big surprises in my creative life has been the wider recognition that the spiritual inspirations behind the great composers, past and present, springing from Judeo-Christian civilisation, should be seriously reassessed. By this, I don’t mean in some reductive, anthropological detachment from the sources, which amounts to a de facto denial of the theological and cultural claims of that tradition, or an implied, haughty downgrading of its authenticity. Rather, the reassessment is a recognition of the potency of a culture with Christ very much at its origin and centre, and a joyous sense of wonder at everything that has flowed from it in centuries of music-making. What brings this recognition and reassessment some urgency is the wider, sometimes reluctant concession that religion has played a huge part in musical modernity from Wagner to the present day. Some of the world’s most important composers were profoundly religious people. Not all were necessarily conventional believers, and many were not Christian, but the search for the sacred has been constant and widespread in musical modernity.

When I speak about this phenomenon, some are surprised that Wagner figures so centrally at the beginning of the process. His religious faith was shaky at best, sometimes all over the place between Lutheranism and a late discovery of Buddhism (with a strange Eucharistic detour in Parsifal), and he was sometimes decidedly anti-clerical. But Wagner was deeply significant in the twentieth century’s search for the sacred in its art music, as Roger Scruton argues in his controversial and provocative book Death-devoted Heart – Sex and the Sacred in Tristan and Isolde. ‘Even if Wagner the man made no place for religion, however, Wagner the artist was entirely given over to it,’ he writes. ‘What we see on the stage and hear in the music are human beings steeped in a religious form of life, surrounded by supernatural powers, and living, as it were, on the threshold of the transcendental.’ And Michael Tanner, in his 1996 book on the composer, describes Tristan and Isolde – and not Parsifal, with its big Holy Communion scenes – as one of ‘the two greatest religious works of art of our culture’ (the other being Bach’s St Matthew Passion). It turns out there is a ‘eucharistic’ scene in Act One of Tristan and Isolde too, when, through drinking potion from a chalice, the two protagonists are lost to love; they fall in love with each other, but, more importantly, also allow themselves to be given over to the power of an all-consuming numinous force. The love is erotic and pagan in its original storytelling, but the wider implications in Wagner’s music drama are hugely cosmic. The original mythology is channelled through Schopenhauer and Freud, and the Christian essence is shrouded and seemingly out of sight. But for Scruton the implications and symbolism are massive. Pessimism, fate and the search for the existential oblivion of the self into the eternal embrace of divine love – all imply contradictions of Judeo-Christianity as well as metaphors and signals towards it too.

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