The following excerpt from Luigi Giussani, Spirto Gentil: An Invitation to Listen to Great Music is published with permission from Slant Books.
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Injustice and Mercy
Tomàs Luis De Victoria
Tenebrae Responsories
Choir of Communion and Liberation directed by Pippo Molino
If you are someone who listens always and only to rock music or the like, it takes time to understand classical music. You do not follow it the first time. It is like when my late father would drag me along, as a boy, to listen to polyphonic music, which he liked very much, and I was always angry, because I could not see the order in what seemed to be a great confusion of notes and voices—in other words, I did not have the key. The first time I began to understand something was when, at the age of thirteen, I heard a choir intoning Victoria's Caligaverunt. After the first notes, when the second voice came in, I got the key for understanding it. From that time I have liked polyphony more and more. All of it.
Thus I began to feel enthralled by this music that seems—and often is—always the same, like a continuous repetition. And yet one never tires of it, because it reveals the horizon of the soul and the heart, filling them with light and warmth, as Victoria's Christian heart must have been when he wrote these Responsories for Holy Week. All religious efforts try to interpret the Mystery: the Christian method instead is to repeat the word heard. To repeat—that is, to follow. You cannot repeat a word twenty times without it changing you.
Victoria is a great travelling-companion given to us by God—the greatest polyphonist, as great as he was humble, and therefore less famous than others. The human voice has a power infinitely superior to that of any orchestra, and polyphony represents the expressive peak of vocal music.
Victoria's Responsories for Good Friday are, in our memory, the highest, the most profound, and the most suggestive point of reference in religious song.
The motets of Holy Week communicate the conscious, tender, adoring, and sorrowful emotions of what Christ is for man. The Caligaverunt is surely one of the most beautiful pieces: as the soul is pierced through by this sublime music, we can understand easily what we normally lack and is evident here. Here what dominates is not one's own feeling for that man who is dying, but rather that man's own sorrow, sorrow for the man who is dying. Si est dolor similis sicut dolor meus (if there is any sorrow like my sorrow): but these are the words of those beneath the cross, of Our Lady, of Saint John. In the forefront is placed the reality of the Man-God put to death, sorrow for Christ. This chant documents an aspect of the awareness of being sinners that is not easily found: that si est dolor is surely the most human cry that can be heard in music, more human and more humanly religious than all music, along with the lament that follows: sicut dolor meus. The thing that truly breaks through—that brings about awareness of my own sin—is Christ's sorrow, like the sorrow of a child before his mother’s weeping: what dominates is the other person, not concern for your own tranquility or your need to be put at peace. There is Christ’s sorrow—“look all you peoples and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow”—and sorrow for Christ, sorrow before Christ for the way we have mistreated him.
At this point Victoria leads us into a new phase: affection that is spurned, election refused, plots hatched around him, all the more treacherous because the work of a friend, a disciple. Against him are ranged the elders of the people, those who should show maturity but, now that the time has come, prove worse than the others. The high priests, the teachers of religion, the Pharisees, the intellectuals of the time: “Come, let us put poison in his bread and blot him out from the land of the living,” let us uproot him from the meaning of life, we do not need him to give meaning to our life [he who is the root of everything!]; let us uproot him from the land of the living; let us get rid of him. And then there are his own who abandon him: “Were you not able to watch just one hour with me?” So the world is like a great darkness in which the source of light is death, the supreme paradox: the death of life, the death of Christ.
This hatred for Christ, as Jesus himself said in his last discourse before dying, leaves its mark on history; in this hatred, the action of the father of lies develops and takes up concrete form, day after day, by means of all the various powers, whether political, economic, or clerical: hatred for him is the necessary conclusion for every human power that will not draw its conscious, humble, and dramatic origin from obedience to that supreme power that makes all things, to the destiny of victory and glory that are properly Christ’s, the justice of God. The world is submerged in falsehood, says the Bible. In the end it is violence that defines the destiny of every power: “Come let us put poison in his bread, and so we shall uproot him from the land of the living,” let us not speak of him anymore. This in the end is the content of the educational method the world uses in all its expressions: let no one think of Christ anymore. Christ is a name worthy of honor if you like—you can think of him while reading about him in books—but he must be totally banished from man’s life as a whole, from life in society, from the family, from the raising of children, from relationships in the workplace.
Finally, the Responsories bring us to the killing—the height of injustice—which he accepts out of love for us. His friends are either asleep or have become traitors; the world, the intellectuals, the religious elite, the powers, plotted together. Has the Father abandoned him, too? No. It is just that his obedience has to go all the way: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
But how can the terrible and the pitiful go together; how can justice go along with mercy? How can the terrible thing we are witnessing—this injustice that we hear in Victoria’s polyphony and the pity of Christ expressed on the face and in the heart of Mary—coexist? It’s an injustice because “every day I was with you teaching in the temple,” in the light of day, among the people; you have come to catch me through treachery at night because you are in the wrong. But in the face of such injustice and greater than this injustice, his mercy overflows all bounds; because no one could be found who would acknowledge me, “no one righteous has yet been found who would acknowledge me.” Mary was the only one. But it is the same for each one of us, because there is something in us—however timid, confused, or contradictory—that acknowledges you, Jesus. We have to set free this hint of true feeling, this hint of true judgment, of nascent affection, we have to set it free. We have to leave our heart free as regards what little native justice it has before Christ. With his splendid notes, Victoria invites us to do this.
Polyphony is really a peak: and yet the search for truth, living the truth, is a music even greater than Beethoven's symphonies and the motets of Palestrina and Victoria too. This is what we are called to.
