Ink-Stained Hands

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?
~Michael Torke

Excerpts from poems about composers today. Have I ever posted about Bach? Oh yes, that's right, I have. Mozart, too.

an excerpt from The Stillness of the World Before Bach
by Lars Gustafsson

There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor partita,
but what kind of a world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-Tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love twined round
the gentler movements of the flute...

read the rest here

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an excerpt from To J. S. Bach
by Michael Thwaites

Most holy art
Expressing heavenly love to human heart -
The agony and sweat, the cry, the peace
That passed all understanding, Bach, but yours.

Your joy was new forever.

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an excerpt from Mozart's Requiem
by Anne Marie Macari

... the music that has everything
even terror, how believing

when I hear it, almost too beautiful to be
human voices, knowing it

so well I can almost sing
all parts, and want to sing,

a kind of purification, a prayer, like the story of him

still composing when he died — as if without
agony — music all over

the bed, last contractions, timpani, cellos,

his ink-stained hands.

read the rest here

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* More music links, including posts on other composers (Beethoven, Brahms, Lang, Whitacre, etc.)

No Water River has the Poetry Friday round-up this week.