Hints of the numinous

There is something about the music of Arvo Pärt which does not sit well with Italian fascist architecture.

There is something about the music of Arvo Pärt which does not sit well with Italian fascist architecture. Perhaps I am oversensitive, but vast stone lions and super-size friezes depicting epic battles conflict with Holy Minimalism in its most refined flights. Certainly Pärt’s music has its own grandeur and impressive spaciousness, but in the end it is a miniature artform, which cannot be said of much to do with Mussolini, certainly not of the Aula Magna in La Sapienza University of Rome.

It is not that I am squeamish. We have performed settings of the Requiem in school gymnasiums on rural American campuses; we have sung Byrd’s Four-part Mass under a tree in a botanical garden in Fez, Morocco. For that matter, we regularly sing settings of the Lamentations at Christmas-time and the Allegri Miserere in programmes optimistically entitled ‘Music for the Blessed Virgin’, which might not sell so well without it. But there was something disturbing about marrying Pärt with those stone lions. It was as if Mussolini was engaged in a very last-ditch stand at respectability.

There is little more respectable than Pärt’s music at the moment. On the occasion of the lions we sang his Nunc dimittis for the first time. We have repeatedly sung his Magnificat, which was not composed to go with the Nunc, evensong-style, but was written quite a few years earlier and which has established itself as a masterpiece of the genre. We also sang his Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen. This is pretty well the sum total of my knowledge of Pärt, whose music of course reminds me of that of John Tavener, much though I am told they both dislike the comparison.