Tea at Trianon: Opera and Vatican II

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, September 16, 2016

Opera and Vatican II

From Crisis:

Opera is a pretty strange experience to begin with, but what I saw in those Austrian productions many years ago didn’t “fit”—that is, a “minimalist” version of Verdi (and Mozart) made no sense in Graz’s resplendent opera house.

I have often thought that this is the “problem” with the Novus Ordo liturgy when it is celebrated in a pre-Vatican II church: the fit is all wrong. Sure, it is valid and licit (as certainly as I can say, “I saw Verdi and Mozart performed in Austria!”) and no doubt fulfills our “Sunday duty”—but whenever I’m in a magnificent church, I find myself hungering for either a full-blown choir chanting with the pipe organ or, at Low Mass, the unbroken quiet of the numinous experience of the unbloody reenactment of the Sacrifice on Calvary while surrounded on all sides by stained glass that recounts our collective salvific history and statuary that actually resembles the saints.

This disconnect may account for why post-Vatican II churches look the way they do—that is, a sort of cross between something Lutheran and Low Anglican: they were never intended for a Solemn High Mass sung in Latin—they were meant as a sort of ecumenical meeting-hall. The “event” of the Mass had been lowered from the rococo style to the post-abstract-expressionism of the 1960s. (Read more.)