The Fine Art of Listening

ēʹ-mō: adj. (informal) emotional; sensitive.

Ok, so I got a little carried away. All joking aside, this is some of the finest stuff ever written. And I do find it’s a perfect soundtrack to the lonely midnight hours.

The bitter cold weather of December has arrived.

The death of a child is a difficult thing to experience. I have not lost any of my children, but I have had nightmares where I have. A dream like that is enough to keep me awake for the rest of the night.

19th century German poet Friedrich Rückert lost two of his children to scarlet fever. He dealt with his grief by writing a set of 428 poems on the death of children. Composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) selected five of these to set for voice and orchestra. This is the fifth of the set, titled “In diesem Wetter” (In this Weather). Mahler’s genius of composition lets you feel the blowing winds, the stinging raindrops, the anxiety of a parent whose child is lost forever, and, at the end, a sense of peace and acceptance.

In this weather, in this windy storm, I would never have sent the children out.
They have been carried off, I wasn’t able to warn them!

In this weather, in this gale, I would never have let the children out.
I feared they sickened: those thoughts are now in vain.

In this weather, in this storm, I would never have let the children out,
I was anxious they might die the next day: now anxiety is pointless.

In this weather, in this windy storm, I would never have sent the children out.
They have been carried off, I wasn’t able to warn them!

In this weather, in this gale, in this windy storm, they rest as if in their mother’s house:
frightened by no storm, sheltered by the Hand of God.

 

N.B.: This post isn’t about freedom. Or Braveheart (although I do love the music from the movie …)

Today is St. Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland (hence, Braveheart … and “freedom!” But enough about that.)

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) visited Scotland in 1829. The trip had a profound effect on him; not only did he compose his famous Hebrides Overture (also known as “Fingal’s Cave”), he began work on the Scottish Symphony, which was not completed until thirteen years after his trip. When it was first performed, it did not bear the name “Scottish” – it was merely “Symphony No. 3” – but after Mendelssohn died, some of his letters revealed that the wild Scottish landscape was the inspiration for the piece, and the name has stuck ever since. He specifically describes a marvelously gothic scene from the ruins of Holyrood Chapel:

“In the deep twilight we went today to the palace were Queen Mary lived and loved…The chapel below is now roofless. Grass and ivy thrive there and at the broken altar where Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed, and the clear heavens pour in. I think I have found there the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony.”
~R. Larry Todd, ‘Mendelssohn’, in D. Kern Holoman (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century Symphony (New York: Schirmer, 1997), pp. 78–107

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQuPWR93Nkk

By the way (back to Braveheart … haha), if you want an interesting read, check out the Wikipedia article on Braveheart – especially the sections “Release and Reception” and “Historical Inaccuracy.”