Riccardo Muti in Harmony with Ratzinger

by Andrea Tornielli,
From IlGiornale.it, April 29, 2010
http://www.ilgiornale.it/cultura/riccardo_muti_armonia_ratzinger/29-04-2010/articolo-id=441473-page=0-comments=1
Translated by Father Richard Cipolla

Riccardo Muti is a great ally of Ratzinger. The maestro confesses his admiration for the Pontiff who has made beauty, music, and the recovery of the sacredness of the litugy the monogram of his pontificate.

“ It is a great gift for humanity and for the Church at the beginning of the third millennium to have a Pope who has claimed a space and respect in the Church and in civil society” for music, “for this high expression of what it means to be human,” writes Muti in the preface for the book Lodate Dio con Arte (The Praise of God with the Arts) (Marcianum Press, 270 pages, euro 24, to be published in mid-May), which brings together for the first time all the writings and speeches of Joseph Ratzinger dedicated to music.

“ To sing is like flying,” confided the Pope on the occasion of a concert given by the Regensburg Domspatzen—“ a take-off towards God, an anticipation in some way of the song of eternity.”

Muti supports Benedict XVI who intends to rescue the fortunes of liturgical music: “ The Pope is right when on several occasions he laments the low level of music for general use, in particular of the music and songs used in churches in the last ten years or so above all by us in Italy. But the cause is the inadequacy of musical education. What is done in our schools is too little, and the optional and supporting activities are only for the fortunate few. In the parishes, then, at least in Italy, I think that education in Christian music is one of the least concerns of our parish priests and perhaps also of our bishops.”

The maestro, drawing on the writings of Ratzinger, hopes for the rebirth of musical education. “ I am indeed thankful to the Pope,” he writes, “for having brought back to its rightful place attention to music outside and within the Church, placing it simply as an essential part of human life. His own studies are illuminating above all with respect to sacred music. They clear away the terrain of equivicators and fundamentalists for and against, who in these years have created division rather than dialogue and a common seeking for the good of the Church and her liturgy. Ratzinger’s writings offer a rational reason for the uneasiness that so many feel when going to Mass. But they also make one hope in a revival of the musical arts that will be of great service to the liturgy and to the life of our world.”

Among the more significant passages cited in the book, there is the one in which Benedict XVI, reflecting on the theological basis of sacred music, affirms: “ If the Church must transform, to make better, to humanize the world, how can she do this and at the same time renounce beauty, beauty that is one with love and is with it the true delight, the greatest approach to the world of the Resurrection? The Church must be ambitious; she must be a house of beauty, she must lead the battle for “spiritualization,” without which the world becomes the “first circle of Hell.” Let the Church seek what is fitting for the liturgy and to the participation of the faithful, but let her do this above all because what is fitting is also beautiful and worthy of the most important action of the Church in which it is used.”

“ In truth a Church that makes only a ready-to-use musical product falls into being of no use and becomes herself of no real use,” affirms the Pope. The Church “ must be a place of ‘glory’ and in this way also a place in which the cries of humanity are brought to the ears of God….(She) must arouse the voice of the cosmos glorifying its Creator, and therefore beautiful, habitable, loveable.” This is a kind of distillation of the approach of the Pope to sacred music and in general to the liturgy.

Translated by kind permission of Andrea Tornielli