Foundry United
Rev.
“Giving Up Money for Lenten: A Spiritual Excercise”
Sunday, March 27,
2011
Rev.
Desire and Contentment
I Timothy 6:6-10
Someone told me a while ago that he would never have really understood opera except he had a job during college in a shop where all of the workers, artisans who worked with their hands, were Italian immigrants.
He told me that the older Italian men in the shop talked about opera before work, during coffee breaks, during lunch, and after work. They followed opera, he said, the way his father and grandfather followed baseball.
In this way he learned, he said, that there are places where opera is the music of the people. Listening to the men he worked with, he learned, he said, that opera is about human passion. Opera, he said, is all about how to communicate the deepest and most intense human passions -- love and lust, anger, rage and hate, envy and jealousy and reconciliation, battle and surrender, victory and loss, ecstasy and grief. This is opera.
Gioachino Rossini spent most of his life writing operas. He wrote 39 operas. And these were Italian operas. These were bel canto operas. Rossini spent his life learning to put raw emotion into music.
After he had retired from opera, he accepted a commission to write music for the old liturgical poem the Stabat Mater…Mary stood…a lyric about Mary's grief at the cross of Christ.
Rossini used all that he had learned about putting human passion and emotion into music into the composition of his Stabat Mater. By the time it was nearly due to be performed he had finished only half of it. He asked his friend Giovanni Tadolini to help him finish the work.
It was performed and the audience wept. Rossini's friend Tadolini died and his estate sold the work to a publisher. Rossini sued, and there were suits and countersuits and more countersuits and Rossini lost.
Rossini rewrote the work and sold the performance rights of his version to friends. The friends who bought it, instead of doing a performance, quickly resold it for two or three times the profit. It was all very commercial and, in many eyes, a bit tacky.
It caused the young Richard Wagner to write a caustic essay about how the love of riches had perverted the composition of sacred music which, he thought, should be a holy task and an art.
So Rossini's Stabat Mater comes to us, beautiful as it is, carrying within it the echoes of lawsuits between the families of lifelong friends, family feuds, betrayals, and bitter conflicts about money.
A good reminder for Lent.
I Timothy warns us. "In their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.…There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment."
Poor Rossini. Such a beautiful passionate work, his Stabat Mater; in some ways the culmination of a lifetime.
Yet, I wonder if he could think about it without remembering the betrayal and conflict that accompanied it. Those who desired to become rich off of it. His own passion to protect what was his. Suits and countersuits and betrayals among families of lifelong friends.
Here's the thing: The money now has pretty much rotted away or sits in museums. Only the beauty remains. May we learn from this, this Lent.
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