Mohammed and Mozart, a Christian approach to comedy and satire
A sermon preached at the Parish Church of St Mary le Strand on Sunday 19 February 2006 by Mr Colin Spinks, Director of Music
Words from Homer’s Iliad: “And there was laughter in heaven…” In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I perhaps first need to explain the non-Scriptural introduction to what I have to say this morning. Father William suggested a while back that I might like to speak, in the 250th year of his birth, about the life and works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I must admit to being rather stumped for things to say until the unfortunate events of a few weeks ago involving the publication of the now infamous “Mohammed cartoons” which led me to think that there might be something to say about the Christian approach to comedy and satire and that Mozart, a well loved child of the Western Enlightenment and a notorious scourge of authoritarian pomposity, represents a key figure in Western Christianity’s learning to deal with satirical and even quite offensive criticism.
Father William has spoken very eloquently in previous sermons about the close parallels between the Gospels and the works of Greek Tragedy. In doing so, he may well have quoted the shortest sentence in the Bible. At the grave of his friend Lazarus we are told simply that “Jesus wept”. The Evangelist is at pains to evoke in his readers pity and fear, the two quintessential responses of the audience of Greek Tragedy, by showing his own “tragic hero” (Christ) as a fully human being who experiences our own emotions of grief and loss.
Problematically for me as I try to talk about comedy is that nowhere in the Gospels can we read, “Jesus laughed” (hence my resorting to pagan literature as my opening gambit). This simple fact is the basic tenet of one of my favourite novels, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Set in a mediaeval castle run by the Benedictines, it describes the brutal murders of several of the Brothers and the hunt for the killer. It turns out that they are killed because of their knowledge of a certain book in the Library, and that book is Aristotle’s Poetics, volume 2. The first volume which survives to this day is concerned with tragedy, the second, which does not survive, deals with comedy. The murderer is so stringent in his belief that laughter and comedy are contrary to the Gospel that he kills lest the book lead anyone astray by its legitimising of satire, vulgarity and offensiveness. The message of the novel is crystal clear - those who fail to laugh at themselves, and who take their religion too seriously run the risk of falling into far greater sin than the frivolity they attempt to smother.
For the Ancient Greeks religion and comedy were much closer bedfellows. Performances of satirical, highly offensive and obscene comedies took place alongside the great tragedies as part of religious festivals and it was under the shadow of offerings to the gods that the prominent politicians, writers and thinkers of the day, sometimes even the gods themselves, were ridiculed and lampooned. There was laughter in heaven as well as on earth.
The divine laughter in Homer’s Iliad with which I began takes place in a charming episode of light relief away from the blood and thunder of the Trojan War. Vulcan, one of the minor gods, who is a sort of blacksmith/handyman has hatched a plot to snare Mars and Venus in bed together and expose them to ridicule in front of the other gods.
Fast forward some 2,500 years and we find the same characters again. In Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, in a performance of which I am taking part this coming week, we hear Figaro sing: “The lovely Venus hides her light, With Mars co-joined in love’s embrace. Vulcan’s the part for me to play and catch them in the net”. The comedy of Beaumarchais from which the plot of Mozart’s opera is taken was a sequel to an earlier play by the same author, The Barber of Seville set to music by Rossini in 1816 and dealing with the intrigues by which Count Almaviva, assisted by the barber Figaro, secured the hand of the rich heiress Rosina despite the opposition of her guardian Doctor Bartolo. In The Marriage of Figaro we find the count tired of his wife and trying to seduce Susanna, her maid, who is engaged to Figaro the Count’s valet. After a series of complex twists and turns a plot is hatched to lure the Count into the garden at night to meet Susanna and thus expose him.
Mozart was not only an extraordinary musical genius but a man who lived through the Enlightenment, the great change from the old society to the modern one we still inhabit, when people began to move away from allowing themselves to be ruled by parents and superiors to standing alone and rebelling against them. Beaumarchais’ comedy reflected the increasing impatience of the plebian classes with aristocratic bullying, in particular the sexual harassment of young plebian women; it showed a nobleman defeated by the spirit and ingenuity of the lower classes. Figaro’s long soliloquy set the career of that versatile tradesman, his talents baffled at every turn by privilege, against the easy life of his master the count, who had merely taken the trouble to be born.
Had Mozart lived in Ancient Greece, his famous buffoonery and lavatorial humour would have made him an ideal comic poet. Had he been French rather than Austrian, his status as a talented professional, like Figaro, dependant on the great but frequently thwarted by them, would have made him the ideal revolutionary. In more conservative Central Europe, the Emperor and nobility still felt sufficiently secure to indulge the musical genius and even join in laughing at their own class. Even so, the music clearly displays the agenda which Mozart espoused. Traditionally in comic opera the music sung by the upper classes was highly elaborate and complex, that of the lower classes much simpler. Throughout the opera we notice the servants rising to the musical level of their superiors. Furthermore, Figaro’s opening aria is a minuet, a traditional upper class dance, in which he sings: “You [the Count] may go dancing, but I’ll play the tune”. From the outset, the agenda is set by the serving classes, just as it was indeed in the comedies of Aristophanes 2,200 years earlier.
By juxtaposing 18th century opera and Comedy from the 5th Century B.C., I have endeavoured to show something of the perennial nature of the need society has to express through satire and laughter a healthy contempt for the excesses of those in authority. Our Old Testament reading this morning from Proverbs reminds us that the three millennia that have passed since Vulcan first caught Mars and Venus together are but as nothing compared with God’s eternity and His eternal Wisdom. John’s Gospel expounds with beautiful clarity that that Wisdom is embodied in the person of Christ who has existed since before the world was made. “We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”.
And what is truth? Well, rather than standing here for the next three millennia debating that question, I will simply suggest that if I had to choose one basic truth from the complex web of Holy Scripture, the teachings of the Church and our Spirit-enlightened reason, it would be this: that God fundamentally stands alongside those who are oppressed and thwarted and abused by those who have power over them and against their oppressors. This is clearly how the Virgin Mary read the plot. On hearing the news that the Word was to be made flesh and dwell among us, she sings: “He has put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the humble and meek”. What a contrast between the one who has “regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden” and Count Almaviva’s treatment of Susanna!
As I mentioned earlier, Mozart lived through a time of great change, an Age of Enlightenment, in which many accepted truths, including Christianity itself were questioned and held to account or even ridicule. Although he personally remained a believer, he had a healthy disrespect for the pomposity of the Church and since his day the Church has had to deal increasingly with being the butt of humour and offensive satire. Father William helpfully suggested last week that comedy be regarded as acceptable to the extent by which it points to the truth. I would suggest that applies in equal proportion to the humourist and the butt of the humour. Often the satire that offends the most is that which contains an element of unpalatable truth about ourselves and we would do well to measure our outrage by bearing that in mind.
Good comedy, or perhaps God’s comedy, that foolishness of God which is wiser than Man’s wisdom, points towards the truth, towards putting down the mighty (and these days that could be anyone!) from their seat and exalting the humble and meek. And that is something that Vulcan, Aristophanes, Figaro, Mozart and a carpenter from Nazareth knew all too well.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.