We have been very blessed over the summer to have our erstwhile Music Director and friend, Kento Stratford, playing for us, while we consider the direction we wish to take with our music program in the future. We continue to be blown away by his outstanding skill on the piano and organ, his ability to take a simple hymn tune and improvise, playing different variations in different keys, seemingly out of his head, often as the prelude or postlude to our services. Kento tells us that he didn’t start playing piano until he was fifteen years old, which I think is quite astonishing given the consummate musicianship he has developed before the age of thirty.
Where does such talent come from? I truly believe that in cases of inexplicably early musical prowess, one is born with it. Mozart, trained by his father Leopold, at the age of five was already competent on keyboard and violin, had begun to compose, and had performed before European royalty.
I know how difficult it is to learn to play piano when you are not “born with it.” I had music lessons for a few years as a child, until at the age of eleven I messed up a recital and was so devastated that I refused to continue. My parents caved in and let me quit, for which I have never forgiven them. Later, when our boys were teenagers, I tried again with a local music teacher and got to about the Grade Seven conservatory level before I finally accepted that I had more than reached my level of incompetence, and decided to waste my money no longer.
During these summer months when the choir is taking a break, in place of the usual choir anthem, Kento has been playing a “reflective instrumental”, perhaps a variation on one of our hymns or a short piece of classical music suitable for a church service. In years gone by, when our Music Director of almost fifty years, Eric Medhurst, was with us, he would often treat us to a piano solo during the offertory, in the pre-covid days when we actually passed the collection plate. Occasionally, the piece he chose would run longer than the taking up of the collection, a practice that was sometimes met with objection from a few who felt that a church service was not an appropriate venue for a classical piano solo. At one point someone was heard to say that “the church is not a concert hall!”
Well, I beg to differ – the church is indeed a concert hall. In fact, it was the first concert hall, often the first venue for the great European composers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to showcase their music.
In the early 18th century in the cathedrals, monasteries, and larger town churches of the Baroque era, the general assumption was that the organists or choirmasters would compose their own music, as well as play and conduct. Organists had to improvise or write out music to accompany solemn places during the service and play long pieces to see the congregation out at the end of the service. Many of our most beloved European composers were, in their early years, church organists, playing and composing for their own congregations before bringing their music to the larger stages of the courts and the opera houses.
The great English composer of the Baroque era, Henry Purcell, was the organist at Westminster Abbey, writing much sacred music for performance there, as well as a great deal of music for the London theatre. (I have a special place in my heart for him. When Bob and I were married, my Dad and I walked up the aisle to Purcell’s “Trumpet Tune”, superbly played by my great aunt Margie, who was a well-known concert pianist in Nova Scotia).
Johann Sebastian Bach, ten years old when Purcell died in 1695, was at the age of eighteen invited to inspect and give the inaugural recital on the new organ at St. Boniface Church in Arnstadt, Germany, and shortly thereafter accepted the position of organist at that church. Four years later he moved on to the post of organist at St. Blasius Church in Muhlhausen, where he persuaded the church council to undertake an expensive renovation of the organ and in return wrote and performed an elaborate cantata for the inauguration of the new church council. He was twenty-two years old at the time.
Joseph Haydn was a protégé of Georg von Reutter, director of music at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, one of the leading music centres in Europe.
George Friederic Handel, while studying law at the University of Halle to please his father, played the organ at the local Protestant cathedral.
A hundred years later, Antonin Dvorak, renowned Czech composer who spent some years as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City (from where he wrote his well-known symphony “From the New World”) was a church organist in his earlier years. Most of us would recognize the largo from the New World symphony as the beautiful piece “Goin’ Home.”
Stupendous music has resonated from the cathedrals and basilicas of Europe for hundreds of years and continues to do so in the twenty-first century.
A number of years ago Bob and I spent three weeks in Eastern Europe, visiting Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Split, Zagreb, Dubrovnik, and smaller places in between. Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Zagreb are not at all shy about celebrating their vast and splendid music heritages. Night after night, many of the great cathedrals, churches and palaces in these cities were packed with people listening to orchestras and singers performing the music of Bach, Mozart, Strauss, Dvorak, Liszt, and others. It is a huge attraction for tourists, not to mention a money-maker for the cities.
We had the privilege of attending such a concert in Vienna, and it was very much a highlight of our trip. All over that city there were people in eighteenth century costume, complete with knee-breeches, frilly shirts, buckled shoes and wigs, promoting these concerts, handing out flyers and selling tickets. We were with our over-large group of forty-six people one morning, listening to a dreadfully boring tour guide who looked like he would rather be anywhere else, as he led us on a walking tour. We kept passing sandwich-board signs advertising concerts, and people in costume handing out fliers, and we said to each other, “That would be fun! Let’s get tickets.” Others in our group overheard us, and they wanted to come too. In the end, ten of us got tickets to a Mozart/Strauss concert that night.
This one was not in a cathedral, but at the Imperial Palace, the Hofburg, official residence of the President of Austria. The building has housed, in the past, some of the most powerful people in Austrian history, including members of the Hapsburg dynasty. The opulent room was enormous and every seat was taken. The fabulous Wiener Hofburg Orchestra played Mozart and Strauss like I have never heard before. They were accompanied by five soloists – two sopranos, a contralto, a tenor, and a bass – who sang operatic arias from such works as Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Die Fledermaus, and others. The final two pieces on the program were Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz and Radetsky March. What’s not to love about that? One of our friends, who claimed to know nothing about classical music and didn’t think he would like it, but who came to humour his wife, marvelled at the fact that he recognized almost every piece, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Some of the world’s best known and loved melodies, including a number of our hymn tunes, come from operas.
While we were being thus entertained in Vienna, there were concerts happening in St. George’s Basilica and the Church of St. Francis in Prague. Budapest was showcasing the music of Mozart in St. Stephen’s Basilica, Liszt and Vivaldi in St Michael’s Church, and a variety of composers in Matthias Church. In Zagreb, there were concerts at St. Mark’s and St. Catherine’s. And I have no doubt that similar events were taking place all over Europe.
If all music has as its final end the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul, as Bach thought, then we should have no qualms about relaxing, for a few minutes in the middle of a worship service, and offering to God, along with our financial contribution, the beautiful music that is being so superbly played for us, and thanking Him humbly that we have someone among us who can give us this gift.