Must we say without love the musicians who have dedicated themselves to the sacred? In divine love, as exalted by a Palestrina, a Bach, a Gesualdo da Venosa, human love purified, enlightened, transcended, undergoes this metamorphosis which, from the earthly, makes it celestial, and in an angelically pure soul like Mozart's, the same voice sings the delights of paradise and the sufferings of the earth, the transport of the mystic and the anxiety of the painful lover. those who think that Mozart's church music is profane do not understand that a spontaneous soul, truly pious, ingenuously inflamed by a love of which it does not need to analyze nature, does not use two different languages to speak to God or to the beloved woman: this soul speaks the language of love and, in truth, there is only one In the singular picture of Titian, which is commonly called Sacred Love and L 'Secular love, the sacred is represented by a noble and beautiful woman, strictly clothed, the profane by a voluptuous body naked and blond. Sacred and profane, however, drink at the same source; this source would not it be music? Titian, who has often been a lute or theorbo player, has not introduced any instrument here; nor do we hear the murmur of the spring leaping into a marble urn similar to an ancient sarcophagus.
In Titian, however, as with all really musical painters, the musical instrument does not need to be figured so that the whole composition is bathed in harmony. the melody is suggested by the singing of two voices that rise in silence: that of sacred music and that of secular music. One celebrates the glory and splendor of God and proclaims the love of which the pious soul is inflamed; the other translates the terrestrial passions.
"Which of the two powers can exalt the man to the most sublime heights, love or music? It is a big problem. But it seems to me that one could say this: love can not give an idea of the music, music can give one of love.Why separate one from the other? These are the "two wings of the soul".
Finally, one may wonder if it would not be appropriate, in a book devoted to music and love, to make room for a form of love that inspires a music that is quantitatively and qualitatively considerable: divine love. The problem of religious music, whatever it is - one thinks of the ragini of India, the Gregorian, as well as the cantatas of Jean-Sebastien Bach - demonstrates that this one is an act of divine love, and the pursuit of a union, possible or chimerical, between man and God, on the wings of song. To put the individual in agreement with the Divine, is the principle and the foundation of all sacred music, that it provokes the trance in the shaman, that it establishes a total harmony between the society of the men and the elementary forces of the Universe as in China, or whether it is the simple liturgical prayer of the Christian, or the Benedictus of Mozart's Requiem.
If we know how to listen to the voice of passion when it speaks beyond words, without words, we will also hear it in a sonata, a quator, a symphony. One is even allowed to think that the purely musical expression of love has more fullness and approaches the infinite and the absolute more than the one that is related to words.
source : Livre music et l'amour
i also love music