It seems that Christ was born with the sound of choral music in his ears. That, at any rate, is what is to be deduced from many of the works of art that the manger scene has subsequently inspired. There is the holy family gathered round the crib, gold and lapis lazuli everywhere, beneficent animals kind of smiling at the smiling Christ child and, raised rather above all this, angels singing. Perhaps officially they are sexless — Wikipedia isn’t very discursive on the gender of the cherubim and seraphim — but as far as I can see they look like girls and are meant to be men. This makes for all sorts of interesting speculation, not least in the matter of what they sounded like.
It used to be a favourite game trying to work out how choirs of the past sounded from looking at contemporary depictions of musicians’ facial expressions and general posture. I remember years ago accompanying one of the doyens of this topic — Howard Mayer Brown — around the castles of the Loire, examining tapestries for what they had to tell us about performing angels. Every heavenly grimace was analysed for suggestion of what it might tell us about the vowel sound being produced, and the tone quality underlying it. The conclusion was always ‘nasal’, which in turn led to an ensemble singing style in some British early-music groups, typical of the Seventies and Eighties. Mercifully, this has now gone out of fashion.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the angels’ male-inclined androgynous appearance is that they were either castrati or falsettists. This would give a tessitura of upper voices. At the same time, I don’t get the impression that each singer is doing anything very individual — the heads all tend to be looking the same way while producing the same grimace in unison — so I fear we are back to the chestnut beloved of so many: vague, swirling, incense-laden singing from a great distance, reverberating down a gothic nave, the original ‘angelic choir’. I suppose none of us would mind being wafted up to (or down from) heaven to such sounds, but the cliché of it for those fully active here on earth sticks in my throat. Very few good composers have written music sufficiently amorphous to deserve such treatment; and those who did, such as Meyerbeer or Pfitzner, tended to write it as if for massed strings, not for voices at all.
And then, of course, Christ also died to the sound of choral music in his ears. In fact, every time Christ was being unusually holy, as depicted in later centuries, there is the possibility that a choir of angels will be in attendance, noiselessly mouthing their upper-register eternal song of no specific content. It must have been for him like the smell of paint to the royal family: a constant which with time he learned to ignore, despite quite possibly longing for the contribution of some tenors and basses to give the ensemble some body and bring the sound down to earth.
I’ve often wondered what it must be like to die in the middle of a recital. In fact, it happens more often than we might suppose, since elderly people like going to concerts and apparently can find them very restful indeed. Certainly in the kind of repertoire I represent there is plenty of scope for letting go permanently, to the extent that we have several times had to stop for people to be carried out. It is not always clear whether to take this as a compliment.
But it is not just members of the audience who pass away at concerts. The great Italian conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli died in April 2001 of a heart attack while conducting a performance of Verdi’s Aida at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Ironically, that performance was itself dedicated to the memory of the company’s late chief director, Götz Friedrich, so that by the next evening the pile-up of references had become oppressive. Richard Hickox similarly died in 2008, if not quite on the podium then very soon off it.
Sometimes such a death can produce an interruption that time never does address. My wife’s mother, while a student at music college, was taking part in a performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah when the conductor died halfway through. As fate would have it, she never again had the opportunity to sing the work, and so never discovered at first hand what the second part of it contained. To her dying day — which was in August — she regretted this and often referred to it. I wonder if an angelic choir has yet made good the omission for grandma and, if they have, what style they sang it in.
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