A Light from the Baltic in Tbilisi – 28 September 2014

When you see Jūratė Landsbergytė in person, or listen to her play the organ, it is clear that she is an angel from the North, who has come to bring light.

However, my pleasure at latest recital at Saint Peter and Paul’s Catholic Church, Tbilisi, was not unmingled with regret that she’s much preoccupied, these days, with worries about Ukraine and the intentions of Russia: this came out very clearly in the conversations she and her friends were having after the concert.

We were tasting some excellent khachapuri and salad not far away from the church, at Marjanishvili; and later, recalling what I could make of the conversation (much of which was in Russian amid the London smog of cigarette smoke at our table) some lines of Conrad seemed to come back to me:

It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough, too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.

Why I should have felt that I am not sure; but I have been much influenced by these other words of Conrad:

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

[my italics]

This feeling might arise from the fact that Jūratė, as a daughter of President Landsbergis of Lithuania, has ipso facto an eirenic mission when she plays music, always to soothe and enlighten. She’s quite consciously an ambassador of Lithuanian cultural values wherever she goes (sometimes to Germany and the wonderful instrument at Riga) although the Lithuanian part of the program was more exciting in last year’s recital, when she played the rare but wonderful Fantasy and Fugue on the Kyrie from the Missa de Angelis by Česlovas Sasnauskas, a nineteenth century Lithuanian composer. The theme is perhaps the most charteristic clarion-call – and the most heartwarming watermark – of Catholic Christianity in the west:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4T4BkXvSPw

This is music which can bring peace to troubled souls and lead us to the necessary healing act of asking for mercy after witnessing or being party to traumatic and violent, and even murderous, events. Jūratė, currently looking at some trends in her national music in the light of Jung – so she tells me – would understand this, I think…

And it seems to me that there will always be this dialectic, this crazy swing, between the highest enlightenment clearly not of this world (with a centuries-old tradition behind it; and all the human input which that implies…) and the thoughtless, arrogant, retributive and evil things human beings are capable of doing, in thought, word, and deed, when the mind and spirit are not fully, and naturally, engaged; when the common charity and respect for the stranger and the other – which marks us out as a divinely-created species – are in abeyance…

These constants – this dichotomy – will always be operative, beyond the contingent reach of intentions and politics.

I conclude with some links to the most glorious of the pieces which Jūratė played on this occasion. Vierne gave us one of his lovely stealthy endings in ‘Lamento’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qozu9nMmJF4

from the Vingt-Quatre Pieces de Fantaisie ; and his ‘Hymne au Soleil’ from the same collection was marked by his confident full flight in the remotest of keys…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maoegdZH280

As I pointed out to Jūratė, Vierne (who was to die at the console of Notre-Dame after playing his 1500th recital there, on 2 June 1937) had written American dedications on these two pieces and several others: at this period of his life (the mid 1920s) he was touring America to raise funds for the restoration of Cavaillė-Coll’s masterpiece in France’s great iconic cathedral, the state of which at the time, according to Vierne, was perilous:

The organ is filled with dust and dead bats and swallows and is perishing from mildew and dry rot… A few days ago one of the biggest of the organ’s 5,264 pipes only just missed crashing down on a crowd of worshippers. This is all due to a lack of money. Notre-Dame parish is the poorest in Paris.

*

Jūratė boldly gave us some Tournemire (Charles Tournemire was a reclusive, mystical French organist who composed many quite specialized pieces on texts for the liturgical year). At their best they have a strange exaltedness; but much depends on having a fantastic French cathedral instrument, full of unlimited tone colours, at the organist’s disposal. Like Messiaen and Mahler, in my opinion Tournemire feels that he can sometimes break the rules of good taste in an overriding search to implement his vision: thus some of his music, as recorded here on one of the grandest organs of all, that of Saint-Ouen, Rouen

http://picosong.com/9acA

sounds not unlike the wonderful sounds which might emanate from a shipyard! So this must be most charitably considered a kind of ‘Teilhardian’ music, wherein all living and even inanimate things shout out the Glory of God. Otherwise, it risks being rather subjective and arbitrary; and not really conforming to Conrad’s imperative -

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line…  the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities--like the vulnerable body within a steel armor. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring--and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect

endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition--and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

Bach, however, most certainly does all of this; and in every bar – and magistrally so in BWV 546, the Great C Minor Prelude and Fugue, the piece with which Jūratė commenced her mission to enlighten and delight the congregation in Saint Peter and Paul’s Church yesterday.

I link to it here in a very smooth performance by the late Gustav Leonhardt – a little bit slow in the Fugue, where there is, alas, a single wrong note; and rather fast in the Prelude, which I prefer at about half the speed at which Leonhardt and Jūratė took it: for to me it seems to speak of realities at least as distant as the planet of Mars…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ALzS5oTvU

But with Bach, the same reality can always be viewed in countless different ways…

(Image of Martian craters taken by Indian Mangalyaan space probe last week…)

*

In conclusion, the manner in which my thoughts gathered this morning, when I set out to encapsulate the ‘kind of light’ which yesterday’s recital, in Conradian terms, ‘...threw’ has itself a reassuring pattern: and a moral which might console those lamenting an apparent shift in political logic in eastern Europe over the last year or so, and the perceived vulnerability , at times, of our present existence… And reassure, too, anyone thinking that things will not work out for the best, provided they bring their zeal and best energies to the task. I think this minusucule incident shows that everything is ordained; and that a sparrow will indeed not fall from Heaven without God’s consent. (Although I cannot but help think that something as wonderful as a paradigm-changing political revolution driven by a nation’s moral will and courage alone – and headed by a musicologist (!) – which happened in Lithuania in 1990 – is by its very nature not something which is likely to delaminate from the pages of history…! It is just too odd and too unexpected…it carries with it what was said of Helen Wadell – ‘the mark of the Maker’.)

*

My young neighbor Nikoloz, pictured above, regularly comes from Block 9 across the way to our Block 7 to be minded by my next-door-

neighbour, Irina. But today, when I went out to buy the bread, he was inconsolable: he wanted his mother. I tried to calm him, as we are good pals, but his grief this time was intense and unstoppable.

While I was out getting the bread I considered making another purchase at the shop, but as I would have had to wait, I decided to postpone it – I did not want to be distracted from my thoughts.

But to my consternation I could still hear Nikoloz’s sobbing on my return, which had followed me down the path, until I was out of earshot, as I set out…

Then I was aware of a smarly-dressed lady, Nikoloz’s mother, obviously called back from setting out for work, who was approaching our block at some speed. I let her pass ahead of me, as I clutched my loaf of bread.

I had already decided to offer some bread to Nikoloz – he usually asks for a bit if he sees that I am carrying some – but before I reached my door I could see that he had been transferred from Irina to his mother’s arms, and his sobbing was turned off as suddenly as if someone had clicked a switch. This was seconds before I made it to my flat, but so rapid was the transformation in his mood that he even asked for some bread before I had a chance to tear a chunk off for him from the end of the loaf.

His mother thanked me, and that was it.

But what was amazing was the general effect of the moment when he stopped weeping. It was exactly like the conclusion of those stories in the New Testament when a person is healed or a situation put right: there was a sudden, unaccountable absence of the previously prevailing problem: which did not merely cancel out the problem, but mathematically, seemed to leave some small change over… There was not just a healed, calmed situation, but a palpable blossoming… It was as if the situation which now prevailed was a lot better than it might have been had Nikoloz

earlier simply stopped crying. It was as if something had been added – and as if something had been improved – it was a blessing, in short.

You need to view this with the eyes of faith to understand what I mean; but the very fact that my arrival (brought forward in time by my having not dallied in the shop, yet delayed a little by having allowed Nikoloz’s mother to pass) coincided perfectly with the moment at which Nikoloz – just calmed – was now was happy enough to ask for bread, speaks for itself. It was a kind of divine intervention. Indeed Nikoloz even ventured the comment that this was my house, after happily taking from me his little chunk of the bread.

It was a communion to add to all the others, I suppose: which at different levels and in different ways, are – I hypothize – happening all around us, all the time. This one was even symbolic. He wanted his mother, and he wanted bread. What could be more natural or permissible than that?

The essential goodness of the human being and the divine innocence of children will carry all before it.

Here is a picture of the Church of Saint Paul from the outside. It was built in 1808, in an Italianate style, and restored in 1999 in time for a visit from Pope John Paul II – the pope who spoke about the need for Europe ‘to breathe with two lungs’ – meaning that the Orthodox and Catholic, Eastern and Western, halves of Europe needed to be united and in balance; which obviously would depend on healing between all neighbouring countries

and Russa. In this spirit, Pope John Paul restored the itinerant icon of Kazan to the Russian Church in 2004.

The interior of the church is equally attractive

and here it is in Lent:

The organ is from Lvov, Ukraine, and dates from 1886. Here is Lila, the regular Organist, and one or two singers, at Eastertide 2013…

That Jūratė could play on such an inadequate instrument, conceived entirely for hymn singing, anything of merit at all, is quite surprising.

That she could play music of the quality we have heard is wonderful and astonishing.