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Testaments of Tranquil Beauty

John Knight | January 2014


    Socrates once said, “the unexamined life is not worth living” and “the care of the soul is more important than the care of the body.” I find these remarks on self-examination and care of the soul apply to our appreciation of music and the arts. Through an examination of our inner selves we discover the importance of the creative arts, which give enrichment and nourishment to our souls.
    The search for truth and beauty may be the greatest hope for civilization. This search preserves our belief in the extraordinary goodness of mankind, even in dark moments of despair. It also teaches us that the human spirit is unconquerable and inextinguishable.
    The great works of our poets, writers, artists, and musicians are pillars of wisdom that remind us of the importance of truth and beauty. In our busy lives we sometimes forget that the conflicts of the human heart can be uplifted and resolved through the arts because beauty is immortal. It is what keeps us alive and points us to a more enlightened future. I agree with what poet John Keats once observed, that “beauty is truth, truth is beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
    Our search for beauty and truth begins in the innocent purity of youth and continues to the maturity of our autumnal years. Over time we become more philosophical and more spiritual, gradually letting go of the things of our youth and welcoming a return to tranquil simplicity.
    Nowhere is this search more evident or rewarding than in our musical growth throughout our lives. As we study the musical masterpieces, we go beneath hidden layers, open doors of our emotions, turn keys and unlock gates, and journey to inner recesses of the human soul.
    As a young man I was deeply impressed with the powerful and heroic movements in the symphonies of Beethoven, Mahler, and Tchaikovsky. My spirits also soared when listening to the tone poems of Richard Strauss and the passionate music of Puccini, Verdi, and Wagner.
    Though my spirits are still lifted by these musical giants, now I find myself deeply moved when I listen to soft, serene, and introspective music. These pieces of music are testaments of tranquil beauty. This is music that communicates by whispering, not shouting and is reflective, not obvious. This music has the elegiac glow and the warm eloquence of a sunset over a landscape of indescribable beauty. These testaments of beauty in music are like an x-ray of the human soul.
    William Wordsworth once defined poetry as “emotions recollected in tranquility.” I find the same definition applies to music because it is in the soft and tranquil moments that a composer will reveal his innermost spiritual depths.
    Several examples of tranquil music have appealed to me most over the years. These indelible masterpieces I have found to be heart-wrenching, heartbreaking, and heartwarming because of their poignancy, humility, and spirituality.
    At the top of my list is Samuel Barber’s immortal Adagio for Strings.

No composer was more concerned with expressing his inner-most feelings with such poignancy and simplicity. My favorite recording of the composition is with Maestro Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony for the premiere in 1938. I find this recording to be emotionally riveting and profoundly moving.
    Listening to Barber’s Adagio always releases a cascade of emotions in me that I seemed to have long forgotten. I see this piece as a sort of emancipation proclamation, stating it is permissible to feel music deeply and unashamedly. The long, elegiac, melancholy, nostalgic, and hauntingly beautiful phrases of the piece have an emotional impact that takes us into some ethereal and unknown region of thought and feeling. The music and its phrases are like a living organism from another world, growing in intensity and becoming more beautiful as it grows. The music ultimately starts to fade away into nothingness, like a curtain coming down at the end of a play, leaving you emotionally spent.
    Beethoven is another composer who left the world many testaments of tranquil beauty. Among these works is the third movement of his Ninth Symphony, an adagio molto e cantabile. This movement searches the secret places of the soul and evokes utterances of poignant eloquence that can melt any heart.
    Each time I listen to this movement I cannot help but reflect on how incredibly beautiful and subtle is the genius of Beethoven. His music will always remain one of the most moving revelations in the realm of the spirit. In this movement he captures nobility, sublimity, and spiritual development.
    Because of his deafness at the time, Beethoven seemed to turn inward and reach a transcendental calmness, a timeless region where absolute beauty and truth exist, an atmosphere of inner peace with reverence for all humanity. In this place Beethoven gives us a devout meditation of soul-searching music resembling a prayer of noble compassion.

    Ralph Vaughn Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, with its mystic serenity, brooding tranquility, and haunting melodies, evokes feelings of loss and loneliness. In this music the composer reflects on memories of friends who died in World War I.
    Vaughn Williams was 41 when World War I was declared, and he enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served on the battlefields of France. Vaughn Williams began composing the Pastoral Symphony when he returned to civilian life after the war. The symphony is a deeply personal reflection on his war years, serving as an emotional catharsis for the loss of his friends who died on the fields of France. In a letter to Gustav Holst, Vaughn Williams wrote, “I sometimes dread coming back to normal life with so many gaps.”
    The name Pastoral Symphony might seem misleading if compared it to Beethoven’s symphony of the same name, which describes “happy feelings on arriving in the countryside.” Vaughn Williams’s symphony is more elegiac, contemplating the horrors of war. It reminds me of a line from Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which observes that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
    The symphony’s second movement (Lento moderato) evokes a contemplative mood of calmness and serenity. The movement opens with a beautiful horn solo over muted strings. After this the strings and flute play a poignant melody marked tranquillo, rubato, and cantabile.

    The most emotional movement of the symphony is its finale, which is a sort of lament for the dead. The movement begins and ends with a vocalise without words for solo soprano over a soft drum roll, conveying wartime emotions recollected in tranquility.

    Gustav Mahler painted his works on a wide musical canvas, spanning the emotional gamut of cosmic longing and contemplative meditation with peaks of eloquence, nobility, and serenity juxtaposed with valleys of melancholy, darkness, and tragedy. Nowhere are these contrasting moods expressed so deeply as in the final measures of his Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”). This symphonic song cycle for mezzo-soprano, tenor, and orchestra, consists of six movements, based on six Chinese poems translated into German.
    Mahler wrote Das Lied von der Erde near the end of his life. Mahler never heard the final work performed. Its premiere was not given until six months after he died, when Mahler’s protege Bruno Walter conducted the first performance on November 20, 1911 in Munich.
    The sixth poem of the song cycle, “Der Abschied” (the farewell), is the one I find most poignant. It is a meditation on the finality of parting, as the poet awaits a friend he will see for the last time and contemplates the beauty of a spring landscape at sunset.

My heart is still and awaits its hour,
This beloved earth everywhere blossoms,
And greens in springtime anew
Everywhere and forever the distance
Brighten blue
Forever…forever…forever

    The paradoxical contemplation of the affirmation of Spring’s new life and the resignation and blessing of death in the last section receives a definitive interpretation under the direction of Bruno Walter and the beautiful and poignant performance of the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1953).
    Sadly, this music marked Kathleen Ferrier’s own farewell when she gave her legendary performance with Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic, recorded in 1952. Ferrier was stricken with cancer, and everyone at the performance knew she had only a few months to live. When she whispers the final farewell (ewig) on the last pages of the score, which is marked ganzlich esterbend (completely dying away), we can almost feel her life disappearing into the music. I can only describe her interpretation as a seraphic and transcendental resignation of haunting beauty and ethereal spiritual serenity.
    Socrates also observed that we reach the highest wisdom when we admit, “the only thing I know is that I do not know.” This may be true, for life is indeed a mystery. But I also believe we can discover a few answers to life’s enigmas through the study and performance of music that ennobles the spirit of mankind. Of all the creative arts, music is perhaps the most perfect expression of the affirmation and celebration of life, a divine mystery. Music is our guide to unveil what lies beyond.