the Three Days

Maundy Thursday
Time to practice. I begin with two hours on the Vierne, a solid workout.
There is little more than that; an hour or so on tonight’s music. The “D” in the middle of the pedalboard is not working; this will be a problem for a large piece in D major, to say nothing of the hymns and other music. But there is no time for it today; I must play the organ as it is.

All too soon, the day is done. The choir arrives, we begin. As I had hoped, the Bruckner Pange lingua does have Connection – but it also has some shaky intonation. Connection and Accuracy – I have emphasized the one at the expense of the other. Good choral singing must have both. It is hard – one rarely hears both at the same time, even from the best of choirs. We did better with the Duruflé Tantum ergo, immediately following: here is the YouTube link.

This night is the most complex of the services for the choir: four anthems. We finish with a procession back to the darkened church for the Stripping of the Altar. The choir clusters tightly together in the entrance (where there is enough light to see our scores), and we chant Psalm 22.

Good Friday
The day begins with the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified at 7 am, led by my friend Fr. H. He is a retired priest, and the service is very much of the Old School. The Solemn Collects, Confession, Lord’s Prayer, and distribution of the reserved Sacrament. Following that, I am the officiant for Matins and Litany. A visitor joins us, a man in town on business who saw our service list on the website.

And then, to work. I must do something about that D in the pedals. As with much organ work (at least on mechanical action instruments), the diagnosis of a “dead” note is fairly straightforward – it almost has to be a failure somewhere in the linkage between key and pallet (in the windchest, under the pipes). And there it is – a locknut that has slipped off the pallet pulldown wire.

And as with much organ work, figuring out how to get to the thing and fix it is very much the harder part. I remove some things, lay on my belly, reach through the other trackers, and finally get the tiny screwdriver onto the locking screw with one hand while holding the nut in place with the other. This was after several failures (the nut dropping to the floor and again needing to be fished out with tweezers), when I learned a lesson: tighten the locking screw a little at a time until there is a friction fit on the wire, then push it up the wire into position. The friction helps keep it in place long enough to fully tighten it. All told (counting diagnosis, removing and replacing parts, doing the little repair): close to two hours. But I console myself that getting a repairman here on Good Friday or Holy Saturday would be pretty much impossible, not to mention expensive. And I learned a little something about organ repair.

While I am working, one of the two men I still support with alms shows up. He has spent the night in jail, and we talk about it for a while – “I couldn’t sleep, so I prayed all night,” he said. I think of Paul and Silas, and how much better of a Christian this fellow is, for all his faults, than I am.

I get the Pilcher buttoned up just in time to be out of the way for the midday Good Friday service. I am not involved in this, so I go downstairs. The other of my two friends comes by; he is hungry, and not looking well. I take him to the buffet a block from the church and buy him some soup with crackers and bread – he currently has no teeth so that is about all that he can eat without difficulty. He wants me to stay and eat with him. No, not now. Not during the Three Hours. We pray, and I go back to the church.

The issue that I must resolve this afternoon when the organ is not available to me for practice is what to play for next Sunday’s choral evensong. I have the perfect piece, and pencilled it into my planning notebook months ago – “The Two Walls of Water,” from the Messiaen Livre du Saint Sacrement. There could be no more perfect fit to the First Lesson, which is Exodus 14:5-22, which ends with that very thought:

And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.

I have much desired to learn this; it is almost the last of the larger movements in the Livre that I have not played. But it is twenty pages, much of it highly virtuosic. If I had found the time to work on it through the last year, I could do it. But not in one week, starting from scratch. I play a couple of pages and thoroughly convince myself of that.

Here is a fine performance by Olivier Latry.

I would say “Next Time,” but it would require the confluence of Second Sunday of Easter, Daily Office Year Two, with the First Sunday of the month. That has happened only once before in my tenure, in 2002.

I scratch through the title, and insert a replacement: the Pièce d’Orgue by Bach. That I can (hopefully) brush up in a week. Here is the link to where I played it last year at the Great Vigil.


Holy Saturday
I am again the officiant for the little services in the morning, attended only by Fr. H., his wife Jean, and me: Matins, and the Liturgy of the Day (BCP p. 283). After that, I spend all of the day on the bench, as much as I can physically take. I sing Evensong in my office as the sun sets, and it is time.

We have a longer-than-usual warmup, but it is not enough; we barely touch the Psalmody which is so much a part of the Great Vigil. Much of the time is spent on the logistics, which are complex.

My heart is not in it. I just want to get through it and be done.
But the liturgy is stronger than that: by the time the parish hall is filled with the candlelight, all of it finding its source from the Paschal Candle, and the Deacon, my friend Judith, is singing the Exsultet, I am carried away.

This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

After the Nine Lessons and their Psalmody, the congregation processes toward the Church for the Eucharist. I take the shortcut to be at the organ. The Rector desires instrumental music as the congregation enters the brightly-lit church after the announcement that “The Lord is risen indeed,” and my music from last year (Bach: Christ lag ins Todes Banden) was too short. So I am playing some Messiaen: “The resurrection of Christ.”

I have wondered how this will go; it is very loud, and not as accessible to the listener as the Bach.

It is magnificent. The choir is ringing handbells throughout, and the combination of Messiaen and bells is overpowering. Here is the YouTube link, but it barely captures how it was.

The choir sings, the Eucharist is good, I play the Vierne, and we are done.
I will hopefully have a bit more to say about these things, but not today.