St Cecilia’s music giving harmony to the cosmos
Publicity had to tread a careful line in its promises for the first performances of Handel’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day. “Particular care is taken to have the House secur’d against the Cold,” said the public notices, “constant Fires being order’d to be kept in the House ’til the Time of Performance.”
It was first played on November 22 1739, St Cecilia’s Day itself (as it is next Monday), at the beginning of a winter when the Thames froze. But the audience didn’t want the fires to burn them up in the crowded theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was where The Beggar’s Opera had opened as a smash hit 10 years earlier.
Handel was using the words of the ode written by Dryden in 1687. What a Baroque creation they make together. Certainly the poetry benefits from the music. It has a way of celebrating the obvious in a sort of gnomic way: “The double, double, double beat / Of the thund’ring drum / Cries: ‘Hark the foes come!’ ” Here the timpani have a chance to show off.
The passage echoes the words and music of Dryden’s
King Arthur set by Henry Purcell and performed in 1691: “‘We come, we come, we come, we come,’ / Says the double beat of the thund’ring drum.”
I suppose the most craggy Baroque venture in the Ode for St Cecilia’s Day is the stanza on the violin: “Sharp violins proclaim / Their jealous pangs, and desperation, / Fury, frantic indignation, /Depth of pains and height of passion, / For the fair, disdainful dame.”
This seems a long way from the saint in whose name the performance was given. St Cecilia was a martyr venerated in Rome from the fourth century, and not much is known about her life. She figures in the list of Roman martyrs whose names feature in the ancient Eucharistic prayer or Canon of the Mass. Her patronage of music is almost accidental, for her legend merely says that during her unwanted marriage ceremony she sat apart singing to God in her heart.
Her body was transferred from the Roman Catacomb of Callixtus in the ninth century to the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, reputed to have been built on the site of her house. Certainly a house from the early Roman empire was found during modern excavations.
Beneath the high altar, sheltered by a fine spiky 13th-century Gothic baldacchino or ciborium, is displayed a white marble statue of the saint lying on the ground, her head wrapped in textile but her neck exposed to show the three axe strokes mentioned in the 5th-century account of her martyrdom.
Sculpted in 1600, it made the name of Stefano Maderno, then in his 20s. He left a sworn deposition that he had represented the body just as he had seen it the year before, when St Cecilia’s tomb had been opened. His sculpture is theatrically Baroque in a manner that might have
appealed to Dryden and Handel.
But in his ode Dryden had a larger purpose than to run through the peculiarities of different musical instruments. He attributes to music the very order of the cosmos: “From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony / This universal frame began. / When Nature underneath a heap / Of jarring atoms lay, / And could not heave her head.”
It’s an idea that goes back to Pythagoras, who had found that musical notes correspond to the lengths of strings and harmonies are proportionate. He proposed that the sun and planets emit their own music in orbit.
In his treatise on music, good old Boethius, the philosopher and Christian martyr, who died in 524, passed on this theory to the Western world.