The Fredösphere

The Shiavo predicament reminds me of an episode from the life of Olivier Messiaen.  His first wife suffered brain damage after an operation and needed to be placed in an institution.  After a time, he fell in love with one of his students.  As a devout Catholic, a divorce or an affair would have been impossible for him without compromising his beliefs.  It seems Messiaen remained chaste through the years until his wife died, at which point he remarried.

Messiaen's gentle piety drew me to him and made it easy for me to get to know his music, much of which is stylistically alien to my preferences.  Even now, hard-core pointillistic works like Des canyons aux étoiles remain repellent to me, but I have grown to love works like Et Expecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum and especially his organ works, preeminently Apparition de l'Église eternelle.

Extra-musical information, particularly biographical and historical, really helps me pay attention to a work and appreciate a composer's intent.  The exhortion to "just let the notes speak for themselves" has never worked for me.  Partly that's my weakness as a listener, and partly that's a philosophical position -- I have never really believed that even music itself should aspire to the so-called "condition of music."*  If you can't chant to it or dance to it, it's lost.

(Insert approximately 400 nuances and caveats here.)

(And if anyone tries to treat this post as an argument over the politics of the Shiavo case, I'll turn comments off faster than you can say Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine.)

*I suggest you google this quote yourself for more information.  I dare not choose among the many links; they can't even agree who first said it.  I've stopped counting at a half-dozen attributions:  Alexander Danner, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Santayana, Walter Pater, the German composer Chopenhaver (huh?), etc. ad infinitum.