Music: Next to Godliness

The great and gloomy Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, has turned up in many strange guises. The philosophy of the once-obscure 19th century theologian has been abused to label everything from “existentialist” hairdos to literature, and his troubled probings of Man, God and Infinity have inspired a modern philosophical fad as well as the “crisis theology” of contemporary Protestantism. Last week Kierkegaard appeared in music. His musical interpreter: U.S. Composer Samuel Barber, 44, who studied Kierkegaard for a decade, and made him the subject of his first major composition in four years.

Many contemporary composers seem to be reaching for words to go with their music, and for religious themes. Barber’s 20-minute work used as its text none of Kierkegaard’s intricate philosophizing, but some simple and often beautiful prayers which Composer Barber culled from the preacher’s writings. The work begins with plain chant, moves on to orchestral fortissimos. a restrained soprano solo, joyous choral passages and occasional Dies Irae trumpet blasts. But the overall effect is quiet, without either the sweetness or the grandeur expected of religious music. It is clean rather than austere. But at its best, the music matches the tender earnestness of the prayers’ poetry:

Father in Heaven! . . .

Hold not our sins up against us but

hold us up against our sins: So that the thought of Thee should not

remind us of what we have committed But of what Thou didst forgive; Not how we went astray, but how Thou

didst save us!

After last week’s Carnegie Hall performance by the Boston Symphony, the critics emerged dazed, uncertain, but impressed. The Times’s Olin Downes wrote, somewhat existentially, that one “wonders whether many pages of the score are not symbolic rather than expressive, or attemptedly expressive, of what cannot be communicated.” The Herald Tribune’s Paul Henry Lang found the work a “serious, moving and convincing piece.” On one point, most of the critics were agreed: they wanted to hear Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard again.