Bright Cecilia

Today is the patronal feast for musicians and poets, the feast of St Cecilia.  If you want to read her legend, you can find the life of St Cecilia in the Golden Legend.

I remember the first time I heard G.F. Handel's setting of John Dryden's Ode on St Cecilia's Day.  It was electrifying, and set me off in search of both more Handel, and a good dose of Dryden.  As things turned out, Handel stuck, but Dryden didn't really -- I ended up being more of a fan of Alexander Pope, especially after meeting the bilious Epistle to Arbuthnot.  It still makes me laugh out loud, and I do enjoy the frisson from the sheer cattiness of it.

But back to Handel's Ode.  This is one of two such pieces composed for the celebration of St Cecilia's day in London, this one in 1739; Alexander's Feast is the other (setting another poem by Dryden), composed in 1736.

In the 1739 Ode, Dryden and Handel work their way through the orchestra, with meditations on the properties of harmony and music to bring the world into order.  You can find a copy of the poem by scrolling down the page here.

The opening sequence is the predictable formula of overture, recitative and chorus.  By the time the tenor arrives to summon us out of our elemental rest, you can almost feel the universe vibrating away in perfect tune.  It's important to distinguish between the use of terms here -- the universe is made by harmony, the musica universalis so perfect it is inaudible to mere human hearing.  That which we can hear is musica mundana, somewhat lower down the scale of value in the Platonic order, but no less affecting for that.

The soprano follows on with an aria posing the question "what passion cannot music raise, and quell?"  I love the description of the origins of music here -- Jubal struck the chorded shell, and his brothers stood amazed.  How rare for anyone to gape at music!

Of the instruments, we get the organ (obviously!), the lyre, the violin, and the flute.  However, the instruments that really get the show off the ground are the trumpet and drums.  Hark!

This is probably the aria and chorus tenors and choristers love to hate -- try saying "the double double double beat of THE thund'ring drum" as quickly as possible on your own, then getting a dozen or so people to match up perfectly, and then add a healthy number of string players and a timpanist to the mix.  But look very closely at this video: you will see natural trumpets, and what stunning players they are.  There is so much that just makes your jaw drop in this performance.

Skipping over the soft complaining flute and sharp violins, one reaches the part of the piece where the existential rubber hits the road, as it were. No organist can ignore it, given that it is this instrument which sets things spinning on their eternal coil in the climax of the poem.  Given that St Cecilia's attribute in iconography is the organ, this is where all the classical music theory meets with mid-eighteenth century ideas about music and theology.  (If you look closely at the picture at the top of this entry, you'll see a small portative organ between the violin-toting angels.  Curiously, it looks as if one could only play this particular organ while kneeling, for which purpose a nice cushion has been placed before it.)

The cadenza at the end of the aria in this performance is real fun.  It's worth recalling that Handel was known for his virtuosity as an organist.  The organ theme carries on in the following aria, where we get Orpheus quelling the savage brute followed by angels dropping by because they mistook earth for heaven when Cecilia was at her practice.  (Oh that this would happen to me!)