We Sang Mozart

 

We sang Mozart on a Sunday afternoon. We’d been practicing Mozart for two and half months—together and on our own—but on that Sunday afternoon, we sang Mozart. We sang his Solemn Vespers and Coronation Mass.

I was one of fifteen basses in a hundred voice choir, and there were four soloists and a small orchestra of instrumentalists and one determined conductor. Months of hard work came together inside a glorious quasi-Gothic church sanctuary, and it was as if the building itself—bright shining stained glass and all—was singing Mozart.

I did not sing Mozart the way the best of Mozart’s singers sing him. I did just okay, though better for me than I’d expected a couple of days before. I think that I found some notes that others missed, and that others got rhythms that I messed up, a holy harmonization of just right and almost right, with a wayward just plain wrong as well along the way. We came together as one—even when we had to be dragged back together when too many of us tried to outpace our conductor’s tempo, his face first almost panicked, then relieved.

We all sang Mozart despite our lacks, amateur singers that most of us are.

We sang Mozart on that Sunday, and for a while, embraced in that space’s rose-tinted late afternoon light, something of the holy—of the wholly other—shined through our faces from deep in our souls. (Did anyone see it?) Genius touched us, and we returned his touch: his music’s assurances and shocks, chords and progressions we could not imagine until we heard them, surprises of syncopation and dissonance that transformed sounds sung in time into music that sounded eternal, celebrating living life and loving love the way the creator celebrates, banishing all things ugly, hateful, and deathly.

We sang Mozart on a Sunday afternoon, and for a time we were where no one else will ever take us.

Soli Deo Gloria.