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Friday, October 14, 2005

I remembered, today...


...a passage from a lesser known Wayne Booth book (Booth died a few days ago), Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (note cool cover - I want to be sitting at that table!) which I'd always found moving:


It is Easter time, 1971, and I am sitting in Orchestra Hall in Chicago, listening to Bach's St. Matthew Passion. After the final grand chorus, climaxing more than three hours of listening, I sit in the silence - we have been asked not to applaud - with tears in my eyes. As I recover what we call my "self" slightly, I become aware that my wife on one side and my sixteen-year-old daughter on the other are weeping too, and that in fact handkerchiefs are visibly and audibly at work all over the hall. As we get up to leave, I meet a friend who is ordinarily loquacious; he lowers his reddened eyes and does not speak. Later in the corridor, another friend, ordinarily fluent, says, "That was really..." and bogs down, unable to say what it was, really.

Now I ask you, what do I know about the various persons and acts implicated in this "sentimental" experience? I am not asking you only what I feel (though it is true that part of what I know is what I feel) but what I know, using standards as rigorous as you care to devise. I submit that I know a good deal about Bach's artistic intentions across the gap of nearly two hundred and fifty years - not of course his motives ... but his artistic reasons, what his art was designed to do or be. If someone says to me, "Bach really intended to make you laugh, not weep, with that final chorus," or, "The whole thing was in fact an elaborate parody or put-on -- in fact a satire composed to attack the foolish pretensions of believing Christians as well as the conventions of baroque choral music," I know that he is wrong. I may still be wrong in many details of my "reading," but if so it will not be because he is right -- the issue cannot be resolved by saying that his opinion is right for him and mine is right for me.