One evening, during my retreat at an old Jesuit novitiate, I read an unforgettable letter in L’Osservatore Romano, English, June 12, 1996. In it, Dom Bernardo Olivera, the Abbot-General of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, or Trappists, writes about the brutal, wholly arbitrary murder of seven Trappist monks in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria … Read more
The distinguished English critic and specialist in Scandinavian music, Robert Layton calls Franz Berwald “the most commanding composer Sweden has thus far produced, and the leading Scandinavian symphonist before Sibelius.” This is the bicentennial of his birth in 1796, but few know his name. When Franz Liszt met the sixty-one-year old Franz Berwald in 1857, … Read more
Suppose you were Bach, and no one noticed? Welcome to the early eighteenth-century world of Jan Dismas Zelenka, a Catholic composer at the court of Dresden, who lived in relative obscurity from 1679 until his death in 1745. Buried on Christmas Eve in the Old Catholic Cemetery in Dresden, he suffered the same fate as … Read more
Dignitatis Humanae—the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom—is frequently described as an expression of Christian personalism, because of its teaching that every human being has an inalienable right to immunity from state coercion in matters of religious conviction. As the declaration puts it, “the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very … Read more
St. Thomas often cites the famous phrase, “sapientis est ordinare“—the function of the wise man is to order. We human beings have the added burden, if I can call it that—for it is also a glory—of ordering ourselves. To order means that we properly place ourselves amidst the other things, including human things, that are … Read more
Picture fin de siecle Vienna in the 1890s, a cosmopolitan capital of empire that was about to shake the world with its new ideas. Sigmund Freud was already in practice. Walter Gropius would soon launch his revolutionary architecture. Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were splashing their canvases with images of angst. Gustav Mahler was directing … Read more
The asthma was back. The heavy coughing that convulses her body beneath the habit, the tightening of the chest, the drowning struggle to pull in another gasp of air—still Mother Mary Angelica was determined to make her show. With potentially forty-one million households counting on her, she couldn’t stay in bed. As host of the … Read more
Some critics think composers should be seismic devices. Music should not only reflect its time, but foretell things to come. In fact, it should even help usher in the new age. However, both politically and artistically, the cultural revolution is now over, and so too should be this view of music as a revolutionary muse. … Read more
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was the greatest Catholic composer at the turn of the nineteenth century and the greatest English composer since Purcell some two hundred years earlier. Elgar’s mother, Ann, was a convert to Catholicism and, despite her husband’s objections, raised her children in the faith. Among the things she used to read them as … Read more
Over the past four years, Pope John Paul II has developed what is arguably the most sophisticated moral, philosophical, and theological analysis of democracy on offer in the world today. In a triptych of encyclicals — Centesimus annus (1991), Veritatis splendor (1993), and Evangelium vitae (1995) — the Holy Father has both secured the teaching … Read more
Fleeing the congestion and mayhem of New York City in the early summer of 1893, Antonin Dvorák, along with his wife and six children, alighted from a train in the little Bohemian settlement of Spillville, Iowa. Perhaps by then his worldwide fame had spread even there, but this quiet town in the middle of nowhere … Read more
Requiems are for the living. They shape our attitude toward death. What should we expect? Peace and serenity, or terror and judgment? Heaven or hell? It depends on the composer. In their Requiems, Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi frighten us with rafter-shaking, apocalyptic visions of the Dies Irae. Just as composing symphonies became a problem … Read more
On April 28, a Friday morning, about ten-thirty, I boarded United Express at Islip, Long Island, for the flight back to Washington. The plane landed at about noon at Dulles. On the flight back, I thought I had better make arrangements for a ticket to the West Coast to see my family after classes ended … Read more
A week after Tad Szulc’s biography of Pope John Paul II appeared in the bookstores, David Shaw, the media critic of the Los Angeles Times, wrote a remarkable four-part series arguing that the American press — obsessed with issues of sexual morality and incapable of understanding the Church in terms other than those drawn from … Read more
The older I grow the more I listen to Haydn. There is something measured in his pace that goes with daily life. The sturm und drang of youth is over and I can no longer bear the emotional excesses of Romanticism. Of course, there is always Mozart. But listening to him involves the pain of … Read more
The word “breakfast” obviously means the moment when we break a fast, when we first eat in the day after our night of sleep. The word probably had something to do with the older and perhaps wiser rules about Holy Communion, fasting from midnight before one receives the Sacrament. To break the fast, with its … Read more
The attempted suicide of Western classical music has failed. The patient is recovering, no thanks to the efforts of music’s Dr. Kevorkian, Arnold Schoenberg, whose cure, the imposition of a totalitarian atonality, was worse than the disease — the supposed exhaustion of the tonal resources of music. Schoenberg’s vaunted mission to “emancipate dissonance” by denying … Read more
The Supreme Court is at it again. The Justices are looking this term at two church-state questions which have long perplexed them. One is the yuletide baby-Jesus-in-the-public-square problem. This time, in the case of Pinette v. Review Board, a private group set up a Latin cross near the Ohio state capitol. This public space has … Read more
Was Hildegard of Bingen a saint? One might think so from the way this 12th-century abbess wrote music. She compiled her Symphonia harmoniae caelestium revelationum (“The Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations”) over the course of a long life that creatively did not begin until she was in her forties (b. 1098). In 1141, … Read more
That something is wrong with human nature has been known since ancient times, in all cultures, by any individual who, like Augustine, reflects on himself, on his own life, in the unclouded honesty of his memory. But let me be more accurate: On the whole, human nature seems to be intact; human nature is good, … Read more
