For me, Schubert's Ave Maria is one of the most beautiful songs that is ever written. Sang by many voices, but this one I found on YouTube sounds more pure then I have ever heard.

I went looking further on YouTube to find music I really love. So I found this piece from the Polish composer Henryk Górecki. My husband brought his CD 'Symphony nr 3' home once and said he had never heard more depressing music in his life. Well, I had to agree. But so beautiful, especially this part.

This song is so attracting to me that I have to listen to it over and over again. It is the fourth of the four last songs from Richard Strauss, sang here by Jessye Norman. And although I mostly never really listen to the lyrics, with this song I do. Well, to be honest it is hard not to, because it is so incredibly slow.

Wir sind durch not und freude gegangen

Hand in hand,

Vom wandern ruhen wir beide

Nun überm stillen land.

Rings sich die täler neigen,

Es dunkelt schon die luft,

Zwei lerchen nur noch steigen

Nachträumend in den duft.

Tritt her und laß sie schwirren,

Bald ist es schlafenszeit,

Daß wir uns nicht verirren

In dieser einsamkeit.

O weiter, stiller friede!

So tief im abendrot ,

Wie sind wir wandermüde -

Ist das etwa der tod?

Through trouble and joy we have walked

hand in hand;

we can rest from our wanderings now,

above the peaceful country-side.

The valleys fall away around us,

the sky is already darkening,

Only a pair of larks still rise

dreamily into the scented air.

Come here, and let them fly

For soon it will be time to sleep

and we must not lose our way in this solitude.

O broad, contented peace!

So deep in the sunset glow,

How exhausted we are with our wanderings-

can this then be death?

I love all of Beethoven's symphonies, but some pieces I love even more. This is the second movement from his seventh symphony. I think it has the same power that all of his work has, but this also is so peaceful and sensitive.

Another sensitive piece of music is the prelude of Wagner's opera Parsifal. Some pieces of Wagner's enormous amount of work I find really moving. And this part of Parsifal is one of them.

The music I listened to the most is Mozart's Requiem. Every once in a while I just have to listen to it. But only when I know I have a spare hour, and I do not have to leave the room. Then the volume goes up and I just undergo the music. It always gives me the feeling of being part of a bigger whole.

Here I can upload only pieces, so I had to make a choice from what was available on YouTube. And as I always want to hear it until the end I just picked the last part, Communio: Lux Aeterna, which means eternal light (just looked it up).  

But to my knowledge this is not completely composed by Mozart, as he did not finish the requiem himself.

Bach then now. There is so much to choose from, but one of his most famous, and I think wonderful, pieces is ‘Air' from his orchestral suite nr 3. I think it sounds so harmonious and etheric that I always have to repeat it several times.

Another really beautiful piece of Schubert is the adagio of his string quintet. It must be the two cello's that I find so moving I guess.

From Wiki: "It stands out for its somewhat unconventional instrumentation, employing two cellos instead of the customary two violas. Most other string quintets follow the example of Mozart and call for an ensemble consisting of the four standard instruments of the string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello), plus a second viola. Schubert decided to replace the second viola with an additional cello, thereby enhancing the richness of the quintet texture's lower register".

Totally different, but also one of my favorites is Mahler's second symphony. Very erratic at some points and very quiet at other. Not something I just play in the background, because then it just makes me irritated.

Bombastic and pretentious, but also very interesting and at some point very moving. The best known and in my opinion also most beautiful part is part four, Urlicht, sang here by Kathleen Ferrier.

Years ago, when we moved into our current home and where working a lot painting and renovating, I listened to Maria Callas.

I had put my favorite Callas songs on one tape and played that all the time. Especially when I was alone, then the volume went up. Breathtaking, litterly because then I sang along, although most of the time I had no idea what I was singing. But it gave me such energy.

I really love her voice. At times it not even is beautiful anymore, but what a passion. This song is from the opera La Wally (never heard the rest of the opera) and is definitely one of my favorites.

One of the most impressive and dramatic operascene's I find the commendatore scene from the opera Don Giovanni. I love this scene in the opera, but also in the movie Amadeus, which I watched many times.

Here is an impressive performance with English subtitles, which is nice because at last I know what they are singing.

Another one I found on Youtube with translation is Carl Orff's ‘O Fortuna' from his Carmina Burana. I always found that very impressive, but with the translation it is bone chilling.

O fortune

like the moon

you are changeable

ever waxing

and waning

hateful life

first oppresses

and then soothes

as fancy takes it

poverty

power

it melts them like ice.

Fate - monstrous

and empty

you whirling wheel

you are malevolent

well-being is in vain

and always fades to nothing

shadowed

and veiled

you plaque me too.

Now through the game

I bring my bare back

to your villainy.

Fate is against me

in health

and virtue

driven on

and weighed down

always enslaved.

So at this hour

without delay

pluck the vibrating strings

since fate

strikes down the strong man

everyone weep with me!

Well, thinking of Beethoven and piano it is hard not to think about his Moonlight sonata. It is just so very sensitive and poetic, that it alway seems to bring me in a special state of mind.

I especially like this version. It is still very sensitive and poetic, but it also has a certain firmness.

I may be fascinated by Beethoven, that is nothing compared to the fascination of Leonard Bernstein for Beethoven. Here are some quotes of what he, in this video, says about Beethoven and his 9th symphony.

"Universality of thought"

"Purity and directness of communication"

"The magic no amount of talk can explain"

"Perhaps there was in Beethoven the man, a child inside that never grew up, that to the end of his life, remained a creature of grace and innocense and trust. Even in his moments of greatest despair. And that innocent spirit speaks to us about hope and future and immortality"  

"As despairing as we may be, we can not listen to this 9th symphony without emerging from it changed and enriched, encouraged"

So the first about 3 something minutes, Bernstein is talking about Beethoven and then the music starts...

I was very intruiged by what Leonard Bernstein said about Beethoven, so I went searching what more he did say about music. I found this video on which he talks at Harvard, where in the early seventies he did a series of 6 talks called ‘the unanswered question'.

Here at this video I feel he really touches upon the essence of music as the medium for our soul. I tried to write down what he says in this video, but some things I did not hear or understand well enough, like metaphor. But the overall line is extremely interesting, at least to me it is.

He starts with some demonstration on the piano in an attempt to show how he percieves certain music himself.

"But, did Beethoven feel all that, or even anything like it? Or did I just make up those feelings out of the bleu? Or are they in some way, to some degree related to Beethoven's feelings, which have been translated to me through his notes?

Of course we will never know, but the probability is that both are true. And if so we have just revealed a major ambiguity, a beautiful new semantic ambiguity to add to our fast growing list.

But whichever is true, the basic point remains, music does possess the power of expressivity. And the human being does innately possess the capacity to respond to it. Everyone agrees on that in one way or another. Even William James who regarded our reaction to music as nothing but a nervous tic.

Where they disagree is in making the distinction between what music expresses and how it expresses it. The what is very hard to pin down, as we have seen.

But the how, we do know about and that is metaphor. In any sense that music can be conscidered a language, (and there are some senses in which it can not be conscidered a language) in the sense in which it can be, it is a totally metaphorical language.

Conscider the word metaphor. Meta = beyond and phor = carry. Carying meaning beyond the literal, the tangeable, beyond the grossly semantic. To the selfcontained ‘ding an sich' of musical meaning.

Metaphore is the generator, the powerplant of music, just as it is of poetry. Aristotle puts metaphor midway between the unintelligeable and the commonplace. A marvealous remark. It is metaphor, he says, that most produces knowledge. The artist can not help but agree, nor can the lover of art.

It even more strikingly, he says, that metaphor accomplishes the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything. And by everything he obviously meant our interiour lives. The things that can't be named otherwise. Our psychic landscapes and actions.

And it is thus that poetry and music, but especially music, through its specific and far reaching metaphorical powers, can and does name the unnamable. And communicate the unknowable".

While searching for my favorite classical music on Youtube these last two weeks, I found myself looking constantly for certain parts of the Matthew passion. And it got me wondering why I especially love that so much.

I am not religious, although I did grow up in a Romancatholic environment. I had to go to church every Sunday, and boy, did I hate that. I could only hear bla, bla, bla, and when I got to puberty I always went somewhere else without my parents knowing it.

Later on I did not have to go anymore, just once, on the evening before Christmas. Then we all went together and had a coffeetable afterwards. That, I liked a lot. And Eastern was only important because of the party wich took place 40 days before it. In the south of the Netherlands that is the time of Carnaval. Traditionally it was the last time you could have a party before the fasting began. The party lasted four days and you had to dress up, become someone else. And above all, there was a lot of beer.

But years later, when my father got sick and he could hardly do more than stay at home and listen to some music, I wanted to search for music he might like to hear. And him being religious, I thought of the Matthew passion. So in all kind of ways I started to listen to that music, to find out what he would like to hear most. And I got more and more involved in classical music, which was not something I grew up with.

During that search I heard one aria once, sang by a jung boy, a male soprano, which was so very moving that I was lost forever. And I kept looking for such music. The years that followed I listend to all kind of different classical music and found some amazingly beautiful pieces, that I sometimes had to listen to, over and over again. Especially in the period after my father died.

On his funeral my daughter sang Ave Maria, accompagnied by my sister on the guitar. It was not live, they recorded it on tape and my daughter only just started singing lessons at that time, so she did not have a soprano voice yet. But it was the most moving I had ever heard. And suddenly I could understand religious feelings and see the value of a church. Where else could it sound so heavenly.

Well, not that it did help much in getting me more into church, I still almost never get there. But it certainly influenced my preference of classical music. If I look through what I collected here, a lot of it is based on religion. Schubert's Ave Maria, Mozart's Requiem, Wagner's Parcival, Mahler's Urlicht, Gorecki's Sorrowfull song and last, but certainly not least, the Matthew passion.

In the Netherlands, the Matthew passion is often perfomed on many places in the passion time. There even is a sing along passion, which I would love to join. But as I can not sing (my daughter certainly did not inherit her voice from me) it is better that I don't.

Searching now on Youtube for my favorite parts, I found out that it had to sound a certain way for me. I will keep searching and blog about it, if I find what I like most. As a start I will begin with the end, ‘wir setzen uns mit tranen nieder'.  

Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder
Und rufen dir im Grabe zu:
Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh!
Ruht, ihr ausgesognen Glieder!
Euer Grab und Leichenstein
Soll dem ängstlichen Gewissen
Ein bequemes Ruhekissen
Und der Seelen Ruhstatt sein.
Höchst vergnügt schlummern da die Augen ein

We lay ourselves with weeping prostrate
And cry to thee within the tomb:
Rest thou gently, gently rest!
Rest, O ye exhausted members!
This your tomb and this tombstone
Shall for ev'ry anguished conscience
Be a pillow of soft comfort
And the spirit's place of rest.
Most content, slumber here the eyes in rest.

There are two aria's in the Matthew passion, that are my absolute favourite and one of them is ‘Aus liebe'. It is such tender and pure music. The soprano voice melting together with the flute, I think it is very moving.

This was the aria I heard once, performed by a soloist from a boys choir, which had such an impression on me. But I now also found a recording of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf which is beautiful as well, but for me has a different expression.

Aus Liebe,
Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben,
Von einer Sünde weiss er nichts.
Dass das ewige verderben
Und die strafe des gerichts
Nicht auf meiner seele bliebe.

For love
For love my Saviour wishes to die
Though he knows nothing of any sin
That eternal ruin
And the punishment of judgment
Might not rest upon my soul

My other favorite aria from the Matthew passion is the one that is considered the most beautiful aria by most people. It is sang by male as well as by female altsingers. I always found it a little odd at first to hear a man sing so high, but I got used to it. And after all, Bach wrote all aria's for male voices.

Some prefere one above the other, but I like both. As long as it is done in a certain considerate way, where the violin merges together with the voice.

On Youtube I found a recording of a male singer, Andreas Scholl, which I found very moving.