A personal note

On June 1, I was formally confirmed as a member of the Episcopal Church, the US branch of the Anglican Communion, at Grace Church, New York, Bishop Mary Glasspool officiating. This was not the result of any road-to-Damascus moment — the skies did not open and I did not drop to my knees (a good thing, given the condition of my knees at my age) — but a decision that I’ve been circling around for quite some time. In large part it was the result of reading and considering the Christian gospels for years, and that can have this kind of effect on some people. That effect was not unlike that experienced by E.V. Rieu, who translated the Gospels for the Penguin Classics series some years back (and I do wish they’d reprint that translation). In 1953 he spoke on the BBC with J.B. Phillips, who had just completed a translation of Paul’s letters himself:

Phillips: Did you get the effect (I think I mentioned it in the Preface to Letters to Young Churches) that the whole material is extraordinarily alive? I think I used there the illustration that it was like trying to rewire an ancient house without being able to switch off the mains, which was quite a vivid and modern metaphor, I hope. I got that feeling, the whole thing was alive, even while I was translating. Even though one did a dozen versions of a particular passage, it was still living. Did you get that feeling?

Rieu: I won’t say I got a deeper feeling …

Phillips: Yes?

Rieu: … But I got the deepest that I possibly could have expected.

Phillips: Yes?

Rieu: It — changed me. My work changed me. And I came to the conclusion, as I said, I think, in my Introduction, that these works bear the seal of the Son of Man and God. And they are the Magna Carta of the human spirit.

If I wanted to be glib, I could say that any church willing to include Jonathan Swift and T.S. Eliot as members is good enough for me. To be less glib, I subscribe to the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, and find in the church itself the profoundly radical inclusion that I recognize in these creeds and the Gospels. And this spirit holds in the art, literature, and music that I find most profound, and in which I find comfort and the most important intellectual, emotional, and psychic challenges and significance.

I am especially moved to do so by what I see in the world in which we are now living: there is, too, a political element in my decision, since our culture also includes our politics, and if I am to be honest with myself my spiritual life determines how I live in this culture. The Episcopal Church, as part of that radical inclusion I mention above, is a haven for the rights and dignity of immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, the underprivileged, individuals of every race, creed, and color, and the victims of war and conflict, among so many others. According to the Book of Common Prayer, confirmation is a sacramental rite in which the candidates “express a mature commitment to Christ, and receive strength from the Holy Spirit through prayer and the laying on of hands by a bishop.” And to me it is important that it is a public commitment. It is a statement of where I stand.

I should express my gratitude to everyone who, knowingly or not, contributed to my decision and confirmation. In terms of art and music, I have to offer thanks to radio klassik Stephansdom, which provided the soundtrack for the thoughts that led me to the decision (a tip of my hat especially to Ursula Magnes and her “Bach & Co.” program, in which she introduced me to the Lukas-Passion by Heinrich Schütz and Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri back in March, which made a difference; “Musica Sacra,” which follows “Bach & Co.,” is terrific too); in terms of literature, Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and Eliot’s Four Quartets; Reverend Don Waring and everyone at Grace Church, especially Associate Rector Reverend Julia Macy Offinger, who cheerfully saw me and the rest of the fine folks in our confirmation class through the process; and my family, who watched as their friend, dad, and husband took the hands.

Last years

Egon Schiele, Sitzende Frau mit hochgezogenem Knie, 1917. © Národní Galerie, Prag. Photo: National Gallery Prague 2024.

Opening tomorrow, March 28, at Vienna’s Leopold Museum, Egon Schiele: Last Years provides a comprehensive overview of Schiele’s work from 1914-1918 — the First World War — following the radically aggressive and discordant work of his earlier career. I’ve always been rather more fond of this late work; one of my favorite Schiele drawings, “Sitzende Frau mit hochgezogenem Knie,” dates from 1917. Unlike the early work, Schiele’s later art consists of rather less sensational landscapes and portraits, but to me they seem to exhibit a more compassionate perspective without sacrificing the sensuality of that early work: the erotics of the body shade into an erotics of the spirit.

The exhibition, per the Leopold Museum’s web site,

weaves together biographical and artistic elements, focusing on the ruptures and transformations in Egon Schiele’s “late works” from 1914 to 1918, a period that has received comparatively little attention until now. During this time, Schiele gradually abandoned the radical formal experiments of 1910 to 1914 and developed a more realistic style characterized by deeper empathy. His linework became calmer, more fluid, and organic, and the figures he depicted gained greater physical fullness. The exhibition also offers new insights into this pivotal period by incorporating contemporary archival materials, such as the previously unpublished diary of Edith Schiele.

The exhibition runs through July 13. There is a digital exhibition here, and the catalogue is available here. A short teaser trailer is below.

My five minutes and 25 seconds of fame

A special birthday gift this past weekend was a shout-out from radio klassik Stephansdom, and needless to say I was flattered and honored. They were also kind enough to accommodate my request for Scott Joplin’s “Reflection Rag” from my wife’s Syncopated Musings CD of a few years back. A tip of my hat, then, to Ursula Magnes, Christoph Wellner, and the rest of the gang at rkS. You can hear both their kind words and the music below.

The idea of community

Stefan Zweig in 1917

From Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell:

In fact, it must be said in all honesty that a good part, if not the greater part, of all that is admired today in Europe and America as the expression of a newly revived Austrian culture in music, literature, the theatre, the art trade, was the work of the Jews of Vienna, whose intellectual drive, dating back for thousands of years, brought them to a peak of achievement. Here intellectual energy that had lost its sense of direction through the centuries found a tradition that was already a little weary, nurtured it, revived and refined it, and with tireless activity injected new strength into it. Only the following decades would show what a crime it was when an attempt was made to force Vienna — a place combing the most heterogeneous elements in its atmosphere and culture, reaching out intellectually beyond national borders — into the new mould of a nationalist and thus a provincial city. For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Anyone who lived and worked there felt free of narrow-minded prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart. (44-45)

 

The world of yesterday

Vienna, 1900.

From Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell:

I myself have lived at the time of the two greatest wars known to mankind, even experiencing each on a different side — the first on the German side and the second among Germany’s enemies. Before those wars I saw individual freedom at its zenith, after them I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years; I have been acclaimed and despised, free and not free, rich and poor. All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life: revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration; I have seen great mass ideologies grow before my eyes and spread, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general. I have been a defenceless, helpless witness of the unimaginable relapse of mankind into what was believed to be long-forgotten barbarism, with its deliberate programme of inhuman dogma. It was for our generation, after hundreds of years, to see again wars without actual declarations of war, concentration camps, torture, mass theft and the bombing of defenceless cities, bestiality unknown for the last fifty generations, and it is to be hoped that future generations will not see them again. Yet paradoxically, at the same time as our world was turning the moral clock back a thousand years, I have also seen mankind achieve unheard-of feats in the spheres of technology and the intellect, instantly outdoing everything previously achieved in millions of years: the conquest of the air with the aeroplane, words travelling all over the world at the moment when they are spoken, the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the defeat of even the most insidious diseases. Almost daily, things still impossible yesterday have become possible. Never until our time has mankind as a whole acted so diabolically, or made such almost divine progress. (xiv; emphasis mine — GH)