Old Stuff

Passion Chorale

We've had J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion in the CD player for a few days now. Ordinarily I perceive "opera" as a hideous grotesquerie - so often (in my very limited experience) the singers are arrogant show-offs who will not serve the music; plus, a lot of operas are about, if you'll pardon the expression, shit - not much more than 200-year-old soap operas. Yawn.

On the other hand, Bach's St. Matthew Passion is truly one of the highest achievements of Western civilization. Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. says the same somewhere - Gratitude, perhaps? I can't say much more than that about it - I don't know the technical terms like Nat Tunbridge does - but this stuff is God's own Beauty. When the Passion Chorale, better known perhaps as the tune to "O Sacred Head Surrounded", begins, everyone in our family stops in awe and listens to God with devotion and filial piety and love.