Preface

THE LONG-STANDING TRADITION OF exploring biblical texts through musical settings continues to this day. For instance, we have been blessed within the last few years by a powerful presentation of the Saint John Passion by Sofia Gubaidulina, an important meditative work by Arvo Pärt, Passio, and a rich Pasion Segun San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov, whose song, "Luna Descolorida" ("Colorless Moon"), expresses the lament of Peter with a lyrical power that calls to mind the spiritually deep meditation by Orlandus Lassus in the late sixteenth century, Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St. Peter). The list could easily be extended—John Tavener's cantata Fall and Resurrection springs to mind, with its evocation of Genesis—demonstrating both the vitality of contemporary musical composition and the enduring spiritual power of the biblical texts.

Somewhat rarer are contemporary musical settings of Lamentations. We have a rich tradition of such music because of its position within the liturgy for many years, and perhaps in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11 there is today a special resonance to the text with its account of the desolation of the city, as Ronald Martinez observes in this issue of Logos in an article studying Dante's allusions to Lamentations. A broader account of the particular relevance of this text to the contemporary world is offered by Russian composer Vladimir Martynov in a note accompanying his 1992 composition, The Lamentations of Jeremiah:

The world as it has been bequeathed to us presents itself in the shape of ruins in every domain: ecological, ethical, and aesthetic. The historical antecedent of this state of affairs was the destruction of Jerusalem which was the origin of the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah. These lamentations are not only an expression of despair. They are also a prayer, in other words, a constructive expression of the consciousness of our error, of our betrayal of the superior reality, which led to the destruction of the historical Jerusalem and of the world in which we live. ¹

Martynov's composition was given a theatrical presentation in Moscow, winning an award as the best theatrical production of 1997, and such success testifies to the evocative power of this text in times of cultural upheaval.

Composer Ernst Krenek more than fifty years earlier had turned to Lamentations after emigrating to the United States following the ban upon performances of his music established by the Nazis in 1933. He began writing his Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae in late 1941, a work that remained unperformed until the 1950s. Krenek was not the only artist who thought of Lamentations in the context of World War II. Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited in 1945 includes allusions to the liturgical setting of the lament, and Charles as narrator upon his return to a Brideshead now converted to a military camp recalls the opening words of Lamentations (on the final page of the novel): "the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas ["How lonely sits the city that was full of people"]. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

There is, then, ample precedent both traditional and contemporary for finding in Lamentations a source of solace during times of great suffering, and great works of art whether musical or literary offer the appropriately broad horizon within which such solace can be sought and treasured. (In the Spring 2002 issue of Logos, H. Wendell Howard gives an account of the solace he found in the days following September 11 in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.) Few artists have probed deeper into the meaning that emerges from the midst of a crisis in history than Dante, as, again, Ronald Martinez demonstrates in his article in this issue, and many commentators in recent months have struggled to help us find a deeper understanding of our own historical moment since September 11, although the emergence of an artist to rival Dante's stature is highly unlikely. Theologian Rowan Williams tells us that...