The Day the Music Died
Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), the leader of the Protestant Reformation in Zurich, faithfully echoed his German predecessor, Martin Luther (1483-1546), in his expression of utter contempt for the Sacrifice of the Mass and the liturgy that solemnly—and joyfully—emphasized its reality. During Holy Week of 1525, when he felt that his influence over the governing City Council in Zurich had sufficiently matured, Zwingli demanded the abolition of the Mass as “blasphemous idolatry.” On Wednesday, April 12th, the Council voted by a bare majority to gave him the prohibition that he wished. Demonstrating the fact that this action was the coup of an ideological oligarchy, “the last Mass was celebrated before a great crowd of citizens ‘who wanted to have the Holy Sacrament administered to them according to the old custom, as before’.” The voice of the people revealed that “something that was still entirely alive was abolished by official decree.” From henceforward, services were to be focused purely upon the written “words” of Scripture stripped from contact with the living Word of God and the loving adornment traditionally given to His worship by a natural world that He had created and redeemed. (See H. Jedin and J. Dolan, History of the Church, V, 167-168).
There was no community singing. Quite otherwise than Luther, the musically gifted Zwingli gave no psalms and hymns to those of his church. The organs remained silent. With the singsong of the Latin choral chant, which was not understood, what pertained to music entirely disappeared.
The Grossmünster in the center of the medieval town of Zürich, from where Zwingli initiated the Reformation in Switzerland.
Yes, it is true that Luther, the founding father of the Protestant Reformation, unlike Zwingli, very much disapproved of the iconoclasm represented by “the day the music died” in Zurich. But this was only because he also—unlike the more rational Swiss reformer—willfully refused to accept the full logic of his own basic principle of the total depravity of mankind after Original Sin. Zwingli embraced that logic and ran with it, beginning the process by means of which the destruction of the liturgy centered on the Word made flesh unraveled the entire “liturgical” life of Christendom as a whole. This process eventually replaced a diverse, vibrant Christian community that was making its pilgrimage to eternity while singing the song of the “harmony of the spheres” with a drab collection of the living dead, chanting its enslavement to fallen nature in flat, cacophonous, monotonous words without any meaningful context or melody at all, on a journey to nowhere; words shoved down the throats of the bulk of the community in question by the strongest and most willful minority in its midst to boot and slavishly accepted by it.
Those following Zwingli took their place on this toneless and purposeless plod quite swiftly; others, following Luther and similar “conservative revolutionaries” like him, did so only gradually, as the dike waters they had unleashed overcame their attempts to use their fingers to hold them back. Both groups would have to pass through the still more convoluted but ultimately perfectly logical development of their message provided by the naturalist Enlightenment, itself advancing towards hell in similarly radical and moderate forms. In short, the “day the music died” in Zurich was a prophetic warning to the whole polyphonic chorus of a once charming Christendom of what it was that commitment to the anti-natural Protestant message and its unnaturally “naturalist” Enlightenment progeny would ultimately inevitably mean: silencing the schola and its song.
I think that the best way that I can succinctly introduce the full tragedy of this muzzling of the music of life is with reference to Dietrich von Hildebrand’s book on Liturgy and Personality. In this work—which I highly recommend for arguments against a multitude of evils—Professor von Hildebrand points to the basic difference and consequence of a liturgy that is Christocentric and one that seeks to take its guidance from the worshipper rather than from the God who is worshipped.
A Christocentric liturgy emphasizes that we, as sinners, are only saved and perfected through membership in the Body of Jesus Christ, whose flesh and blood we literally eat and drink under the communal authority of the Church, His mystical continuation on earth until the end of time. A worshipper-focused liturgy, rather than being primarily receptive to the corrective community and grace that comes “from above, from the Father of Lights,” looks first and foremost to the perceived “needs” of human beings for guidance as to how to shape it. The former, learning of mankind’s true necessities by focusing on the teaching of its Creator and Redeemer, knows that this blesses all earthly tools as God-given, but then purges them of their fallen sinful characteristics before happily using them in worship, in an ordered hierarchy of values, each in its proper place, all “for the greater glory of God.” The latter, even if concocted by well-meaning people, inevitably responds to the flawed, confused, and narrow desires of sinful men—especially its authors—who cannot accurately know what they require for their own betterment, confirming them in their blindness and encouraging them to “perfect” their dogmatic and moral slumber rather than awakening them to God’s divinizing grace.
Traditional Christendom as a whole was Christocentric in nature. Following the model given by the Savior and His Mystical Body, which taught that the human person reached perfection through membership in a supernatural community, Catholic Christian civilization spontaneously organized individual activity on the earthly level through natural communities, ranging from families through to schools, guilds, militant lay crusading and religious “orders,” cities, and states. It understood from the supreme communal model that life in community makes us aware of insights, merits, and, perhaps most importantly, flaws in our thinking and behavior. Moreover, wave after wave of different monastic influences over the development of Christendom gave to all of its component communal elements a liturgical character as well. Monks dedicated to the hours of prayer drilled in the teaching that everyone was on an earthly pilgrimage to eternal life through Christ. They stimulated bishops, popes, and Doctors of the Church to encourage the use of all of the physical tools of nature created and redeemed by a good God to reach that safe port, and to do so in the many distinct ways offered to different individuals in their manifold natural conditions and in fulfillment of their varied natural responsibilities. In consequence, each had its particular customs, symbols, feasts, patron saints, and place in the pilgrimage to God through Christ. Each sang its own special song, danced, and made merry in its own unique but clearly Catholic way. Each admitted—even if, alas, it did not necessarily always match its behavior to its beliefs—that it needed the grace that came from the highest of liturgies—that of the Eucharist; of Holy Mass—to ensure that its own melody, movements, and merriment fit into the proper hierarchy of values guaranteeing the harmony of the spheres.
Catholic Christendom could thus be said to have viewed the universe as an Unfinished Symphony. It called an orchestra together under the vaulted hall of the heavens, and explained to the musicians that a composer had given them parts of a magnificent piece that He had prepared, in order to test their ability to play it. It noted that the entire symphony would be given to them only after successful performance of the first movement. The musicians worked hard, though some fell by the wayside. They began to polish their instruments, put on their finest clothing, and walked with confidence and quiet pride as they realized the quality of the music with which they are dealing. They waited for the day that they would be given the rest of the piece with humility and with joy. They knew that they could finish the Unfinished Symphony.
In Zurich, on “the day the music died,” the baffled citizens of that still Catholic city had played out for them a “prelude” to what was inevitably to come with the consequences of acceptance of the doctrine of total depravity: a prohibition of the completion of the Unfinished Symphony and the silencing of the sounds of the harmony of the spheres. This outcome was unavoidable regardless of the fact that Luther, the actual founder of Protestantism, did not himself “personally”—and quite illogically—particularly desire the dreadful hush that would ensue.
For what the pillar doctrine of the Protestant Revolution teaches is that nothing wrought by man and nature can please a God reduced to righteous anger due to the betrayal accomplished by Original Sin. No community, beginning with that of a supposedly “Mystical Body of Christ” now identified as the “Whore of Babylon,” and ultimately continuing to include that of the State, the school, the guild, and the family can be of any value to the wretched, valueless individual, who is driven back to begging for the mercy of the angry God alone to enter His realm; no community, and no Catholic “good work” making use of all the tools of an originally good natural world, corrected of its sins and become thereby so very many valuable steps on an earthly stairway leading to heaven. And all this was drilled in by a liturgy of “words” preached by the charismatic oligarchs leading the Revolution not to a real congregation, but to a basically inchoate mob of cowed “individuals” who needed to be told that each and every one of them and each of every one of their actions was contemptible and could not be otherwise.
“Thud” is the only musical tone that can accompany the pastoral approach that the doctrine of total depravity entails. But to make matters worse, that “thud” did not maintain the charismatic oligarchs in their commitment to unite atomistic individuals in the construction of a new social “pen” composed of terrified sinners. Instead, and quite ironically, what it actually did was to breed ideologues preaching the replacement of the real society and authority of complex Catholic Christendom, composed of many communities working to perfect their members, with a jungle like pseudo-civilization in which all of the unredeemed sins of fallen individual men misusing nature somehow become untouchable “needs” which must perforce be satisfied.
This is not the time or place for us to show how the liturgy of Zurich on the day the music died drastically changed from one focused on answering the “needs” of a depraved people by abandoning the confection of the Sacrament and the eating of the Body and Blood of Christ, and preaching the absurdity of the attempt to correct the flaws of God’s good natural world so as to use all of its elements as a stairway to heaven; how it changed to a message that would have seemed grotesque to the initial Protestant revolutionaries themselves. But change it did. Losing its Christocentric focus, the liturgy of “modernity,” moving from Zurich Protestantism to the Enlightenment and, finally, to the madness of our own End Time, came to preach with fine-sounding, disconnected, undefined “words” the importance of satisfying the “needs” of men subject to natural passions no longer viewed as depraved but obvious, and built into the machine of the universe. This liturgy is “preached” today, in exactly the same manner, by the “religious” authorities of Progressive Church, Press, State, and of all the emasculated communities manipulated by them alike.
The “thud” of the “music” accompanying such a sick liturgy is the sound of the slamming of our minds and hearts into the flesh of a Creation that now wants to know nothing whatsoever of its sinful rejection of God’s original plan for it, or what it is that it can know and do to lift itself out of the pathetic, parochial, debasing, and blinding consequences of the Fall. “Restore all things in fallen nature” could readily serve as the official motto of the preaching “liturgy” of our time. And the “mercy” offered by the ecclesiastical authorities under these circumstances comes at the expense of dumping a thick, wet blanket over all of nature’s healthy characteristics and tendencies—whose cultivation is treated as though it were an arrogant reproach to the poor suffering vices they would uncharitably help to repress.
Rather than end by offering one of the many contemporary examples of the debasement of the glorious liturgical-minded world of Catholic Christendom due to the consequences coming from the teaching of “the day the music died,” I would ask you to consider one closer to the initial destruction at the hands of the naturalist, Enlightenment, revolutionary heirs of the original Protestant heresiarchs. Listen to J. J. Norwich’s account of the enslavement—ending in tragic self-enslavement—of a people to a liturgy of meaningless words guaranteed by rejection of the Christocentric liturgy focused on the full message of the Word Incarnate celebrated in Venice in 1797 soon after its takeover by Napoleon: (J.J. Norwich, A History of Venice [Knopf, 1982], pp. 632-633).
It was Sunday, 4 June—Whit Sunday, a day which in former years the Venetians had been accustomed to celebrate with all the pomp and parade appropriate to one of the great feasts of the Church. But this year, 1797, was different. Shocked and stunned to find their city occupied by foreign troops for the first time in its thousand years of history, the people were in no mood for rejoicing. Nevertheless, General Louis Baraguey d’Hilliers, the French commander, had decided that some form of celebration would be desirable, if only to give a much-needed boost to local morale. He had discussed the form it should take with the leaders of the Provisional Municipality, in whom, under his own watchful eye, the supreme political power of the new Republic was now entrusted; and plans had been accordingly drawn up for a Festa Nazionale, at which the citizens were to be given their first full-scale public opportunity to salute their “Democracy” and the resonant revolutionary principles that inspired it.
Those who, prompted more by curiosity than by enthusiasm, made their way to the Piazza that Sunday morning had grown accustomed to the “Tree of Liberty”—that huge wooden pole, surmounted by the symbolic scarlet Phrygian cap which bore more than a passing resemblance to the ducal corno—rising incongruously from its centre. This they now found to have been supplemented by three large tribunes, ranged along the north, south and west sides. The western one, which was intended for the sixty members of the Municipality, carried the inscription LIBERTY IS PRESERVED BY OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW; the other two, destined for the French and other less distinguished Italian authorities, respectively proclaimed that DAWNING LIBERTY IS PROTECTED BY FORCE OF ARMS and ESTABLISHED LIBERTY LEADS TO UNIVERSAL PEACE. The Piazzetta was similarly bedecked, with a banner in praise of Bonaparte stretched between the two columns by the Molo, one of which was draped in black in memory of those brave Frenchmen who had perished victims of the Venetian aristocracy….
After Baraguey d’Hilliers and the Municipality had taken their places, the bands began to play—there were four of them, disposed at intervals around the Piazza, comprising a total of well over 300 musicians—and the procession began. First came a group of Italian soldiers, followed by two small children carrying lighted torches and another banner with the words GROW UP, HOPE OF THE FATHERLAND. Behind them marched a betrothed couple (DEMOCRATIC FECUNDITY) and finally an aged pair staggering under the weight of agricultural implements, bearing words “referring to their advanced age, at which time liberty was instituted.”
The procession over, the President of the Municipality advanced to the Tree of Liberty, where, after a brief ceremony in the Basilica, he proceeded to the most dramatic business of the day: the symbolic burning of a corno and other emblems of ducal dignity (all obligingly provided for the purpose by Lodovico Manin [the last doge] himself) and a copy of the Golden Book (of Venetian aristocrats). He and his fellow-municipalisti, together with the General and the senior members of his staff, then led off the dancing round the Liberty Tree, while the guns fired repeated salutes, the church bells rang and the bands played La Carmagnole. The celebrations ended with a gala performance of opera at the Fenice Theatre, completed less than five years before.
This was the level to which Venice had sunk within a month of the Republic’s end—the level of tasteless allegory and those empty, flatulent slogans so beloved of totalitarian governments of today: a demoralization so complete as to allow her citizens, many of whom had been crying “Viva San Marco!” beneath the windows of the Great Council as it met for the last time, to stand by and applaud while all their proud past was symbolically consigned to the flames.
Long live “the music of the harmony of the spheres” and the liturgy of the Holy Mass that faces God in its prayer encouraging the completion of the Unfinished Symphony! Down with the “thud” of the liturgy of Modernity!
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