A Lesson to Artists, and the World, in Time of Crisis from Felix Mendelssohn
A PARABLE:
Humanity is enveloped by a dark night of crisis, despair, hopelessness. A few souls remind the rest that this will pass, that a time of future joy is assured; that we must trust in this. Night deepens, despair worsens, and humanity cries out, “will this night soon pass?” “Not while you doubt,” comes the answer. A long silence ensues, and then – daybreak. The darkness is gone, the new day is come, humanity rejoices and gives thanks: “so let us cast off the works of darkness and take up the weapons of light.”
This is the story of the central movements of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Lobgesang (Song of praise).[1] Composed in 1840, the work is officially designated a “symphony-cantata.” The central parable I just traced is preceded by a symphonic introduction and opening chorus, and followed first by the duet “This is why I sing your praise eternally with my song”; the work then closes with a powerful chorus urging the peoples of world to give thanks to God and celebrate the light. The result is a frame story – a set of joyous outer movements, set in the present, that recount the parable of the world’s passage from darkness through crisis into the bright light of day and urge present-day audiences to take solace in God’s goodness and in the knowledge that crisis will always pass, will always be superseded by light.
As Douglass Seaton has pointed out, the Song of Praise was written for the central German city of Leipzig’s celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. In keeping with that immediate context, the metaphor of night yielding to day, darkness yielding to light, and crisis yielding to joy was written to allegorize the spread of ideas, knowledge, and understanding via the printing revolution. More generally, it taught the idea of education (Bildung) as a process of self- and societal betterment. The Lobgesang, Seaton rightly argues, teaches the importance of our continuing to cultivate the values of learning and of optimism – even when they seem to be obscured by doubt and uncertainty, even in time of crisis.
But as a parable, the Song of Praise possesses multiple layers of meaning – among them, I think, another one that concerns the roles of artists, and of the arts themselves, in our own day generally and in the time of the COVID-19 crisis specifically.
Consider: the Song of Praise, as a work of music, is an artwork whose message spoke powerfully to contemporary audiences in its time, and continues to do so today. It is, moreover, a musical artwork whose defining feature – the enfolding or “bookending” of one historicized story into a present-day framework – was adapted from literature and storytelling, after the model of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1400), Christine de Pizan's Cité des Dames (City of Women, 1405), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), or countless films (my favorites are Neverending Story and The Princess Bride, Saving Private Ryan, and – an especially rich example – James Cameron’s Inception). And (here’s a fact that is generally overlooked) Mendelssohn himself wrote the story and conceived of it as a framework, as well as composing the music and figuring out how to musically create two levels of time and memory in a single series of movements that follow one another directly. Not only the story of the Song of Praise, but also its very nature, teach the centrality of the arts to our shared human experience. Without that audacious experiment in music-as-literature-as-shared-communal-experience, its message of the values of learning and optimism would have been less powerful, less enthusiastic, less immediately felt by those who experienced it. As Robert Schumann put it in his review of the premiere, the Song of Praise embodied “everything that can make people happy and ennoble them.”
There is more – for just as in today’s time of crisis many folks in the U.S. (Germany is a different matter) is looking everywhere but the arts for hope and the seeds of the way forward, until very recently the Song of Praise’s frame-story structure has been overlooked – with uncomprehending voices dismissing it as an unbecomingly derivative knock-off of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (another symphony with chorus that, while generally considered a masterpiece, actually is a unilinear series of movements rather than a framework). Failing to recognize the art of the artwork, we have continued to wander in darkness, and in so doing have missed its message of light as well as the brilliance of strategy that made it so illuminating to those who did understand it. We’ve turned a blind eye to our own redemption.
“The weapons of light:” these, I submit, are the arts – the field of human endeavor that produced Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, and (as I’ve argued elsewhere) that have historically lighted the way forward out of humanity’s crises. Over and over again, throughout history and across culture, it has been the arts that have changed human thinking and led the way out of darkness.
Yes, it’s true that neither a painting nor a piece of music will discover the cure for COVID-19; these things will be accomplished by the nurses, the doctors, the medical researchers who daily risk their lives for all of us. But that does not diminish the lesson that, concurrently with those professionals’ work, the arts will not only remind us of our shared humanity, but also lead us in marshalling the learning, understanding, and optimism that will be required to make our way forward out of this darkness is a powerful one.
It’s a lesson that we ignore at our own peril – and it was there already in 1840, in Mendelssohn’s Song of Praise. When the inevitable time for our emergence from this crisis arrives, let us cast off the works of darkness – of ignorance, of prejudice, of hate – and take up the weapons of light: the arts and the creative imagination they embody.
[1] In English, Lobgesang is conventionally translated “hymn of praise,” but Mendelssohn explicitly rejected the term hymn. “Song of praise” is more accurate.