A visitor at choir practice

During choir rehearsal, an elderly fellow came by for some help and encouragement. He has been out of prison for about six weeks or so, and has been sleeping on a friend's floor. He has a minimum wage job at a fast-food restaurant, and has been trying to put his life back together. We have helped him a couple of times in small ways – mostly, giving him quarters to do his laundry, because he has to show up in a clean uniform to keep his job.

Tonight, he was in a fix. The landlord found out about him staying with his friend, and threw him out; his friend almost got evicted too for breaking the lease. He stayed last night in one of the Occupy movement tents – but it happens that they, too, are being evicted tomorrow. He cannot stay in the homeless shelter because he was in a fight there some years ago and has been banned for life. We gave him a little bit of money, not enough, and suggested that he can take a shower at the recreation center before going to work tomorrow evening. I think it meant more to him that we cared about his dilemma.

As soon as he left, we turned to the next item in our rehearsal, the Psalm for Sunday. Almost immediately, we encountered this:

For he does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty;
neither does he hide his face from them;
but when they cry to him he hears them. (Psalm 22:23)

I don't know what is going to become of this fellow. He probably has a tent over his head tonight, but not tomorrow. It is still winter. The United States has become a hard and unfriendly country where the arrogant rich who run the place care nothing for the poor. And there are a lot of them, more all the time.

But God cares: When they cry to him, he hears them.

[Edit, in April: He now has a roof over his head -- he was arrested recently for breaking and entering, and charged additionally with failure to register as a sex offender. He is in jail, awaiting trial.]

Addendum: Liszt and Bach

When Liszt sought a way to express his spiritual yearnings after the death of his son Daniel in 1859 and his daughter Blandina in 1862, yearnings that found their artistic form in the “Weinen, Klagen” Variations, he turned to J. S. Bach for a model.

Liszt worked in Weimar through the 1850's, and there came under the influence of Bach, who had likewise worked there in his day. Bach's music was still not widely known, though Mendelssohn had done much in Leipzig to remedy that.

It is impossible to consider Bach's music apart from its spiritual context. And it is impossible to contemplate Bach without recognizing his steadfast faith in God. “The Fifth Evangelist,” some have called him. I would add that if St. Paul can be seen as the “Apostle to the Gentiles,” Bach could be viewed (or heard) as an “Apostle to Musicians.” He proclaimed the Gospel of Jesus Christ his Lord in a form peculiarly appropriate to musicians and lovers of music, of whom there have been none more devoted than Liszt.

He was one of the many people who heard that proclamation, more than a century after Bach's time. It is an example of how our works in the Lord's service may lie dormant, eventually springing forth and bearing fruit in ways we could never have imagined.

Preparing for Liszt

Over the last three weeks, I have been practicing for the Liszt “Weinen, Klagen...” which is to be played at the Congregational Church on March 14. Most of the work has been at the piano, and a large share of it on one twenty-measure passage (measures 163-183). My lessons from Distler at Christmas have been helpful here: I have been working this up with the metronome as I did with parts of the Distler piece, four measures at a time, and there is a fair chance that it might be ready in time.

My first rehearsal across town at the church is scheduled for Friday, and I will only have perhaps one additional session before the recital – the minister over there has decided (sensibly) that we organists make too much noise for him to hold counselling sessions in his office, so Fridays are no longer available. This one is, because he is out of town. The other practice days which are available, Wednesdays and Thursdays, do not work very well for my schedule.

So, I need to use this Friday efficiently.

I became familiar with the instrument last year, and have the stoplist that I carefully noted down, with the locations of all the stops and the combination pistons. More importantly, I have a good sense of how the individual stops and combinations sound. So, an experiment: I spent about three hours today working out a fairly detailed registration scheme in my office. It will doubtless need tweaking when I hear it in the church, but that will take less time than creating the scheme from scratch.

There are between thirty and thirty-seven registration changes in this twenty-minute piece. Some of them can be made by hand; most of the rest can be made with manual pistons and adjustments to the couplers. I think I can get by with one general piston, which is used at the beginning and at two subsequent locations in the score. But I will be making heavy use of all of the manual pistons, setting them up from softest to loudest for each division. There are several places in the piece where Liszt intends a gradual crescendo from a fairly soft dynamic to pretty much full organ: the manual pistons will make this possible, along with judicious use of the Swell pedal.

Lessons from Liszt? The construction of a registration scheme such as this is one. Another is the pianistic nature of the piece, which has been good for my technical development. Perhaps most of all, there is the need for an all-out Romantic engagement with the music, full of rubato and expressiveness in a manner that makes Franck or Brahms or Mendelssohn (composers of the period with whom I am more comfortable) seem positively reserved. Liszt poured his soul into his music, and the performer must do the same.

Many moments in the piece feel Wagnerian, which would please Liszt. He was a staunch supporter of Wagner from the earliest days to the end, and arranged for the first productions of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin at a time when it was not at all a given that Wagner could get these operas performed. Liszt's daughter Cosima ended up as Mrs. Richard Wagner, though in a manner with which her father was not at all pleased: she jilted her husband (and Liszt's close friend) Hans von Bülow to run off with Wagner, doing this while von Bülow was preoccupied with trying as music director and conductor to bring Wagner's Tristan und Isolde to production, a monumental undertaking even now, and more so then when such music was beyond anything that had been experienced. Liszt refused to attend their wedding, though in the end he died at Bayreuth, Cosima (rather unwillingly) at his side.

I share Franck's suspicion of Wagner – Franck procured a copy of the score to Tristan, and after studying it scrawled across the first page “This is poison.” But Wagner did have a religious streak of sorts, as can be heard in Parsifal. Liszt had even more of one, and this piece, the “Weinen, Klagen...”, is one of the strongest expressions of it. As I work on this, I sense that Liszt was like many of us – full of conflicts and doubts, very far from perfection in morals or manner of life, but casting himself upon the mercy of the Lord, much like the publican: “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

In the Via Crucis, an organ solo version of which I will be playing at our parish as part of the March 6 Stations of the Cross, the vocal score ends with repeated cries of Ave, crux... and Crux fidelis, spes unica. In this, I join Liszt: there is no other hope for any of us. I will try to pour my soul into the “Weinen, Klagen” as he did, trusting in its final affirmation: Was Gott tut, daß ist wohlgetan.

The Promotion of Christian Knowledge

In the U.S. church, today is the feast of St. Thomas Bray, priest (d. 1730). He was appointed in 1696 by the Bishop of London as Bishop's Commissary for the Maryland colony, made one visitation to the colony in 1699, and worked for the benefit of the American colonies after his return to England, raising money for mission work and encouraging young priests to go to the colonies.

As part of his work, Bray founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the SPCK, which still exists. Appropriately for his feast day, I had an opportunity to Promote Christian Knowledge this morning: a visitor at Matins.

She was new to the Daily Office, so we did an "instructed Matins." I was so flustered by having a visitor that I forgot that today was Wednesday and thought that it was Friday, so we read the wrong Lessons. I showed her the Lectionary and how it worked and took the pericopes from there, rather than going to my bookmarks in the Bible, which would have put me in the right place. I thought at the time "aren't we skipping something?" but did not stop to ask what day of the week it was, or check my pocket calendar. The visitor corrected me when I got to the Collects and was about to read the Collect for Fridays. "Isn't this Wednesday?" she asked. It may have been providential, because Friday's lesson from Genesis is considerably more edifying than today's, and let us sing the fine Wesley hymn "Come, O thou Traveller unknown," which we did with enthusiasm.

Still, she got an introduction to the Daily Office. The equivalent moment years ago changed my life. I hope it might be equally valuable for her. And I hope she comes back.

It was, also, my first experience of saying the Office with someone who was following the texts from her telephone. I believe that Father Bray would be pleased; any way to get the texts of Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer in front of people is good.