By Richard Knox
A blogger I follow is an amateur astronomer and celestial photographer. His main mission is politics, but at the end of his wonky posts he publishes photos of distant galaxies – stunning images that offer what he calls “perspective” on the minutiae provoking mass anxiety across the political spectrum lately.
Perspective is precisely what we crave, and what this concert is all about.
That craving is as ancient as human consciousness. Martin Sedek’s oratorio, Lux Noctis, “Light of Night,” begins and ends with a passage from the 7th-century treatise De Natura Rerum – “On the Nature of Things” -- by Isidore de Sevilla:
O light of night,
Light eternal,
Shine into us
And show us who we are.
Isidore died in 636, but he’s relevant today – not least because in 1997 Pope John Paul II anointed him patron saint of the internet. The pope declared that Saint Isidore might guide the faithful in the proper use of the technology (a cause that can certainly use our prayers).
Sedek was inspired to compose Lux Noctis by an anonymous Latin inscription he discovered on the inside cover of an ancient copy of Isidore’s treatise in a Bavarian museum:
We are here
We know not why.
We look to the stars
That shine among the dust
Of which we are made.
Sedek says the passage is “a surprising reference to the idea of our being made of stars” – a remarkably early departure from the Genesis creation narrative.
This notion that we’re made of star stuff is not merely a poetic figure of speech. Thanks to science, we now know the elements that miraculously coalesced to form all living things indeed have celestial origin. An exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City is called “We Are Stardust.”
“Every atom of oxygen in our lungs,” the exhibit teaches, “of carbon in our muscles, of calcium in our bones, or iron in our blood, was created inside a star before Earth was born.”
It’s a thought worth keeping in mind as you experience Lux Noctis. Sedek calls the work an oratorio -- a large-scale musical composition on a narrative theme. Its storyline tells a tale of how humans, from the ancient past to our time, have meditated on our place in the universe – sometimes with awe and reverence, sometimes feeling excruciatingly inconsequential – while contemplating the night sky.
Here’s a guide to the eight-movement oratorio:
Movement I opens with a short stanza from The Stars, a late 19th-century poem by American poet Madison Julius Cawein, intoned in the mode of single-voice Gregorian plainchant, alluding to the ancients’ belief that the stars contain omens and portents. The music soon blossoms into polyphony (literally “many voices”) with its “look to the stars” exhortation.
Movement II shifts abruptly to the time of the Industrial Revolution, when Romantic sensibility clashed with a public fascination with scientific discovery. A solo tenor represents Walt Whitman’s response to the dispassionate lecture of a “learn’d astronomer” that drives the poet out into the “mystical moist night air” to contemplate the “perfect silence” of the stars. The chorus joins him exulting in the “free flight” of the soul “away from books, away from art, the lesson done.”
The mood shifts again in Movement III to darker thoughts of mortality and the meaning of existence from Isidore’s The Nature of Things, voiced as in a Greek chorus chanting the age-old question: Why are we here? Why did we coalesce from stardust for brief moments of sentience, only to return to dust? This sets the stage for Edgar Allen Poe’s expression of morbid personal grief, voiced by solo soprano and tenor, over the death of his lover Ulalume, from his 19th-century epic poem of that name. The stars offer no solace. When Poe looks up he sees an “ashen and sober” sky that seems to offer the “Sybilic splendor” of prophecy but leaves the grieving poet in sorrow and bitter disappointment.
The poet’s personal grief is interrupted by contemplation of our universal mortality, but this time Sedek sets the “ashes to ashes/dust to dust” theme as a fugue, a form that conveys the overlapping, ever-repeating nature of every person’s fate. The movement concludes with a return to the personal perspective, in solo voices singing Poe’s lament over feeling cursed in a “Hell of planetary souls” – that is, endlessly circling in lonely isolation.
Movement IV quotes Poe again, in sonnet form and declamatory mode, this time in a more vehement rejection of Science, which (or “who”) “alterest all things with thy peering eyes” and preys vulture-like “upon the poet’s heart.” Rhetorically he asks: Who wouldn’t rather search for truth and beauty “in the jewelled skies?”
Movement V, “Strike the Gay Harp,” is a paeon to that other, nearer source of nocturnal light, the moon. It’s a rustic, rollicking gambol drawn from Thomas Moore’s early 19th-century collection of 124 Irish Melodies. Moore’s lyric imagines the moon’s gravitational pull as so irresistible that even stony statues “all start into dancers!”
Triple contrast follows in Movement VI, which melds solo and choral voices in three themes united by a profound sense of aloneness. First comes the bleak unbelief of Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem “Easter Day,” who rejects the “unwise” dogma of the resurrection and the promise of an afterlife. His atheism renders this world as one inescapable tomb. “Eat, drink, and die,” goes the rueful lyric, “There is no Heaven but this!”
Next comes “Last Call,” a poem by Martin Brekk, set for solo tenor, about the lugubrious closing-time ruminations of a tipsy fellow who sees his empty glass as “a space like the ocean between stars” and wonders if anyone will ever think of him when he’s gone. This thought is taken up more philosophically in chorale form in a melancholy lyric by the beloved English poet Rupert Brooke, whose life was cut short on a World War I battlefield. Though the stars seem “so close and bright,” Brooke writes, they “swim in emptiness.” So it is with us star-gazers: “Heart from heart is all as far/As star from star.”
In Movement VII, a solo soprano captures familiar thoughts and emotions experienced as we contemplate the starry sky. The sense of privilege that comes in the witness of “so much majesty” is simply and eloquently set down by the American poet Sara Teasdale, from whom we will hear much more in this concert’s second half.
And finally, Movement VIII brings us to a comforting perspective in one of Shakespeare’s 17 “procreation sonnets.” Sonnet 14 rejects ancient notions that the stars contain omens and prophecies for individuals or societies. Shakespeare instead grounds his hopes in the here-and-now – in the “constant stars” of his loved one’s eyes and the opportunity to perpetuate one’s existence through the creation of new life.
Sędek considers Sonnet 14 as “a fitting end to the journey of this work with its invocation of ‘truth and beauty’…as a means of continuing the circle of life and the pursuit of those two ideals – in whatever form and balance they are found in our respective lives.”
The concert continues after intermission with Os justi, a gem of late 19th-century music by Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. Noting that 2024 marks the bicentennial of his birth, the New York Times observed that classical music performance is currently having a “Bruckner Moment.” Os justi blends Romantic sensibilities with flawless Renaissance-inspired choral polyphony. Its Latin text (in translation below) “perfectly fits the context of our concert,” says Master Chorale Director Dan Perkins.
The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom
And his tongue speaks what is just.
The law of God is in his heart;
And his steps will not be impeded.
Taken from Psalm 37, Bruckner’s text contains no cosmology, but it distills themes implicit in Lux Noctis. “The first lines, centered on wisdom and justice, speak of reason and logic – in other words, science,” Perkins notes. “The last two focus on what is in the heart of the righteous, which is all about intent and motive.”
Bruckner’s setting – first firm and declamatory, then softer and more inward – reflects the Psalm’s idealized duality.
The program concludes with For a Breath of Ecstasy, a 2017 composition by the American composer Michael John Trotta that sets seven of Sara Teasdale’s poems from Love Songs, a collection published in 1917 which won an award that would become the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
Teasdale’s poems are marked by clarity and a simple, direct lyricism. Because of their elegant and unforced rhythmicity, they’ve often been set to music. A contemporaneous review of Love Songs in the New York Times Book Review noted that “Miss Teasdale is first, last and always a singer” – referring to her poetic, rather than her singing, voice.
On its face, Teasdale’s poetry is gentle and transparent, with imagery both rich and precise that often conveys a warm appreciation of life’s beauty. But, like her better-known predecessor Emily Dickinson (their lives overlapped by two years), Teasdale’s poetry also contains depths of feeling and troubled experience.
And indeed, her life was a difficult one. Born to privilege in St. Louis, she was a frail, solitary, over-protected child whose nearest sibling was 14 years older. She had numerous suitors, including the charismatic poet Vachel Lindsay. But Teasdale married and divorced a businessman who often traveled and left her alone. She endured lifelong depression, suffered physical health problems, and became semi-invalid. Teasdale took an overdose of barbiturates and died alone in her Fifth Avenue apartment at the age of 49.
“Each of the movements of For a Breath of Ecstasy,” Trotta says, “chronicles Teasdale’s search for solace amidst life’s many storms.”
Master Chorale baritone Richard Knox is a writer who lives in Sandwich, N.H.
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