Laudate Dominum

Laudate Dominum, omnis gentes:
Laudate eum omnes populi:
Quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus:
Et veritas Domini manet in aeternum.

Tuesday is a busy day, and most Tuesdays I do not make it to the bench for practice. Today was an exception; staff meeting was short, allowing me to work out the fingering of the Mozart “Laudate Dominum” (from K. 339, the Vesperae solenne de confessore), for soprano solo and choir.

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Interacting with Mozart is one of the chief joys of being a classical musician. As soon as one plays so much as a measure of this little choral piece, one is lifted up into heaven. It is almost too beautiful for mortal ears. How could anyone write something like this?

When one works out fingerings and makes other preparations for rehearsal on a piece, it is what some musicians call “putting it under the microscope.” The musician is privileged to look very closely at the piece. With something as good as this, the closer one looks, the more beautiful it is. Subtle details come to the fore, details that would never be consciously heard in performance. But there they are, each of them contributing to the beauty of the whole.

Any good composition of music creates its own little universe, its “subcreation” in Tolkien's terms. A masterwork is fine-grained, as it were – it is, ideally, a perfect little world at every scale, from largest to smallest. It is in this manner, among others, that our creative work is in the image of the One who made a universe such as the one we inhabit, beautiful beyond imagining at every scale from galactic clusters to quarks and neutrinos. For those with eyes to see, the closer one looks, the more beautiful it is.

Mozart is better at this work of subcreation than most of us, one of the best that has ever lived. One sees this in the “microscopic” details. There is a ten-bar introduction. Much of this material recurs as the piece progresses – but never quite in the same form. A note might differ here, or there; now the soprano is singing it, now the choir. It is analogous, perhaps, to nature's dislike for exact repetition; a snowflake is a snowflake, but never exactly the same.

And there is what I call a “Mozart moment” at the end of measure 62, a moment that no one else could have conceived. He has completed the re-statement of the main musical material, the “A” section. The choir has sung the “Amen.” He could stop here, finishing with a cadence to the tonic chord, the choir holding the chord for a couple of measures of figuration in the accompaniment. The piece would be perfectly balanced, and a masterpiece we would still be singing and playing. But he does more: in the sixth and final beat of measure 62, the bass line (in the choral bass part and the accompaniment) goes C# - D instead of the expected C – F. It is a “deceptive cadence,” to use the term from music theory.

Mind you, this is not something abstruse; it is a simple device known to ten-year-old choristers and piano students, and frequently encountered in music of Mozart's time, including his own. But what a cadence! The soloist, who has been silent for twenty bars, comes in at precisely this moment on a sustained high F, the tonic note, as the choir drops out for a measure's rest. It is as if she is floating through the air like an angel. The harmonies circle around one last time through a ten-bar coda as she sings a gentle little cadenza, as if she does not wish to leave this place of beauty, the choir sings a simple V-I cadence as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and it is done.

No one but Mozart could have written these ten measures. It is one of his gifts to use the simplest of materials in obvious ways (well, obvious after he has done it) that are graceful, fitting, and perfect.

I love Bach. I spent much of December living with the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch, and it is every bit the equal of this Laudate Dominum as a masterpiece of artistic creation. Is Mozart better than Bach? Or what about Beethoven – there are transitions from recapitulation to coda in his works that are as magical as this one.

They are all miracles, all of these composers. We have not just one manner of subcreation, but many – as many, perhaps, as there are people, if everyone were granted opportunity to develop their creative potential. And all of them, and their subcreations, part of the larger Creation, this world full of beauty.

Soli Deo gloria.