Since recording the ACF podcast on La Grande Bellezza with my friend Sebastian, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to the music Sorrentino uses, since Sebastian ascribed such importance to it. We’re all in love with the cinematography of Luca Bigazzi & especially the use of art & architecture in the movie, which tends to obscure the use of music; further, the music is simply much less famous, because it’s modern, which Rome is not; but perhaps if you’d watch the movie as often as Sebastian has, at some point, you’d begin to hear the music again, in a way become aware of it apart from the scenes, simply as choices Sorrentino makes, or as evidence of his taste. So I’ve given this some thought, put together a playlist of the most ambitious pieces used in the movie, & will offer you an introduction into the matter. Just hit play & you’ll be done reading before the song is over!
First, two pieces by David Lang:
Lang is a Jewish American composer with a Pulitzer prize to his name & something of a career in this kind of arpeggiated choral music. This first song, I Lie, is in Yiddish, adapting a text written by Joseph Rolnick, a Jewish poet born in Tsarist Russia, who emigrated to America at the turn of the 19th c., & who specialized in this kind of modern lyrical poetry. It seems to be a love song, despite the choral arrangement; describing an intimate scene—a lover, alone in his room, waiting for his beloved. Of course, once you listen to the music, you can ask yourself what he’s really waiting for & what kind of love this is, if it’s of interest to the audience.
Lang has adapted various holy Jewish texts to modern European music, sometimes the kind of singing we associate with the modern Catholic church. This seems, in a way, a work of nostalgia, for the 19th c., when music was often enough a replacement for religion. The power of music was felt more deeply at that time than since, above all in Germany: Think of Wagner & German nationalism; or of the philosopher Schopenhauer; or of Nietzsche’s Birth of tragedy.
American interest in this kind of art music, however, lacks popularity as well as the prestige of philosophy, it speaks instead to an apolitical or post-political longing for spiritual education or consolation. Since this is, politically speaking, primarily the concern of liberals & often involves the institutions of classical music & artistic grant-making, you may call it the stirrings of some human longing among casual, even unthinking atheists. One wonders whether the artists, however, are trying to return to faith or to rework that art into something post-religious.
World to Come IV is part of a modernist cello piece Lang wrote for a prestigious artist, Maya Beiser (also scored for sighs). You will recognize the musical similarities, but you might think that this smacks of the baroque rather than the modern attempt to return to medieval plainchant & hymnody.
Lang also wrote the music for Sorrentino’s strange follow-up to La Grande Bellezza, called Giovinezza (Youth), which earned him an Oscar nomination for an original song.
Arvo Pärt is probably the most famous living composer of classical music. He is Estonian, born in 1935 & raised mostly under the Communist tyranny. Unlike his countrymen, at some point in early adulthood, he experienced a spiritual crisis & converted to Christianity, eventually to the Eastern Orthodox confession, & has accordingly written quite a lot of religious music over the last 50 years. His religious work got him in trouble with the atheistic Communists & led to his censorship, more or less official, & eventually his leaving Estonia, where he returned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s important to notice that Christians & atheist liberals in the West both love his music, he has been praised as much by the previous pope, Benedict XVI, as by any atheist democratic state or university in Europe & abroad, even in America.
My Heart's in the Highlands is an adaptation of a Robert Burns poem. The song was written, like the Lang pieces, around the turn of the 20th c. & is plausibly connected with the attempt to deepen & perhaps even spiritualize the experience of modern man through the articulation of longing. But this music is itself part of the experience of modern man, since it associates sentiment with a kind of ritual of the concert hall, apart from most of life’s concerns. It is hard to judge correctly of the matter, because it is hard to say what is classical music. In this case, there is no plausible connection between the audience of the song & Burns’s Scotland. We may say that one connection is Romanticism, which is some kind of longing for Rome, according to the name, but usually refers to a longing for the Middle Ages, which was more pronounced in Scotland than England, but felt strongest of all in Germany. Romanticism in music is opposed to classicism, ultimately as Wagner & Haydn are opposed. It’s very difficult to say which is the better taste, but it is impossible to argue seriously that they are the same or that they are coherent, despite the popular mistake that calls all music from the Renaissance to Part classical, understanding the word to mean artful, the work of unusually talented artists, whose skill shows in the large scale & complexity of the compositions—which puts the works beyond the judgment of ordinary people.
For now, we can leave it at saying that the classical taste seems decisively defeated. In regard to Sorrentino, the important question is whether the strange connection between Christianity & Romanticism has the character of nostalgia or anticipation, & whether it is tied up with faith or a mournful atheism.
John Tavener would be the other famous 20th c. classical composer to have converted to Orthodox Christianity. He was born in 1944; at some point in his career, his attempt to write religious music, connected to Russia & Greece, ran against the taste of educated people, perhaps especially in his native England; in the 21st c., he started also writing music somehow inspired by other religions—Islam, for example, or Hinduism.
The Lamb is a 1984 choral setting of a poem by William Blake from Songs of Innocence, which is unusually full of Christian symbolism, seems full of childish simplicity, another connection between faith & Romanticism. It became quite successful, since the English love singing hymns & carols & hymn-like choral pieces; Tavener also set to music the corresponding poem from Blake’s Songs of Experience, The Tyger. Perhaps the 20th c. alliance between religious music & those who like sophisticated music comes from their understanding that they have lost any access to democracy; what does the future hold for them? But it seems to put the inspiration of sophisticated music & its audience at odds with each other, without achieving much of a coming together or an artistic breakthrough or a musical school.
Henryk Górecki is nowhere near as famous a composer, but he is sometimes categorized with the others as a composer of “holy minimalism,” a rejection of the modernism associated with the nonsense of serialism. That’s where Górecki, Polish, growing up under the Communist tyranny, started, but after attaining even some international renown in Europe in the ‘60s, he gradually turned back to the European musical tradition, which cost him his reputation. His third symphony, op. 36, whose third & last movement Sorrentino used, was written in 1976, but only became famous in the early ‘90s, when it suddenly became a hit, after being rerecorded, eventually selling more than a million copies. Partly, this is due to rising interest in Poland & Polish music in the ‘80s, leading up to the collapse of Communism. It did little for Górecki’s reputation or music, which has not become famous, but it brought him to the attention of other artists, including directors.
Since talking about the music would take me far from any claim of competence, let me quote instead the late Terry Teachout writing in Commentary:
The best-known example of holy minimalism is Górecki’s Third Symphony, Op. 36, composed in 1976 & subtitled “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” It consists of three movements for soprano & string orchestra based on Polish texts. The first of these is a 15th-c. Catholic prayer; the second is a prayer scrawled on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell by its anonymous occupant [a child]; the third is a Polish folk song about the death of a child [in the Silesian Polish uprising against Germany after WWI]. The austere yet ecstatic music to which Górecki has set these emotion-laden texts is permeated with the gently swaying melodic shapes of plainchant—a defining feature of holy minimalism. It is also unabashedly tonal.
Terry pointed out that Europeans have an advantage over Americans—a very old tradition of music; it’s not obvious, however, why Americans could not benefit from it again, as they have in the past, & make their own version of that tradition. Perhaps the only major problem is that elites are against it & there is no other source of founding or institutional way to reach an audience…
Back to Europe: Górecki was Catholic, but he was also Polish, & nationalism speaks up in the last movement as surely as faith in the first, which is also a Polish folk song. As for the shocking theme of the second movement, it is the inscription of a Polish girl imprisoned by the Gestapo in Zakopane, also in Poland. Górecki, a professor of music, resigned his post in protest against the Communist refusal to allow the then-Pope, now St. John Paul II to visit Katovice, where he taught; he later wrote music in support of the Solidarity movement, a Miserere. Poland had unusually talented artists at the time—the directors Andrzej Wajda & Krzystof Kieślowski come to mind.
So much for the first half of the Sorrentino soundtrack; another five pieces remain, excluding the pop songs from the party scenes in the movie, & if the gentle readers are very interested, I will continue this weekend.
La grande bellezza--music as spirituality
Simply wonderful.