ONE word came to mind when I walked for the first time into the church at St Patrick's College Maynooth for a performance of the Verdi Requiem the other day, and the word was, Pugin.
The genius of the greatest English architect of the 19th-century rings through the church; the scale, the neo-medieval frescoes, the exuberant delight in the Gothic an unashamed indulgence in vast oak stalls and the celebration of arches and ribs, all together redolent of a revived continuity - these spoke of Pungin.
Pugin was 25 years dead when the College Chapel was begun in 1875. But it was constructed in his spirit by his great Irish disciple McCarthy, as I learned from a handsome booklet prepared by the college for the Requiem. The church is and was, unquestionably, an extravagance, and a politically impossible one these days - no church project could now be contemplated which would absorb such vast quantities of capital.
But does that church not stand for the Catholic Church of the visibly beautiful, which commanded fine things to be done in the name of the Christian God, the better to feel his majesty?
If that was the aim, it has failed dismally, for the truly incomprehensible thing about St Patrick's College Maynooth in the past half-century is that it could have educated so many priests and sent them out into this world with such scant regard for aesthetics. There is barely a priest in the land who has not in his time gazed upwards at the ceiling of St Patrick's, who has not contemplated the magnificent stations of the cross, and who did not hear the sonorous rhythms of the ancient anthems of Roman Catholicism; and almost without exception, those priests when their turn came to build churches, imitated not the church of their youth, but instead toyed with pioneering architectural doodles which suggested the aircraft hangar as church, or the bus-shelter as church, or the met centre as church, or the Indian tepee as church, or even George Burns' toupee as church.
Anything but a church
The church as church as a possibility seemed beyond their ken. Thus we have seen in the past 35 years the exploration of all sorts of unsuitable artefacts as churches in any orgy of church-building, which just about stopped short of examining the ecclesiastical possibilities of a current-scone as church or seaweed as a cathedral. What terrible things occurred during these priests' time at St Patrick's that the one ecclesiastical style they did not attempt to emulate was the one in which they were trained to the priesthood?
And as with architecture, so also with the music; the sound one could hear being thrown out with the bathwater was the clunk of bathfittings, bath, taps, floors, ceilings, walls, bedrooms, landing, stairs, kitchen, and oh yes, the final thud was of the baby hitting the concrete, as the Catholic Church reformed its music, and embraced handclapping, exchanged signs of love with strangers, and indulged in a general air of tambourine idiocy with spotty teenagers singing Bob Dylan during communion, meanwhile ditching almost the entire body of music which had been commanded into existence by prince and prelate, abbot and abbess as they contemplated their sins and trembled.
All-forgiving godhead
Maybe fear of a hell is a barbarous thing, and maybe we are all better off believing in a ceaselessly benign godhead who forgives all. Maybe that sublime Divinity, if he exists, will forgive us everything, and heaven will be tenanted by Lenin and Pol Pot, Goering and Himmler and every leering chainsaw killer: but the last to be admitted, I do deeply trust, will be those who abandoned beauty and intellect and opted instead for modishly Warholian vacuities.
Which is about as ungracious a beginning as you can find to the celebration of a quite wonderful presentation of Verdi's Requiem by the University Choral Society with the Dublin Baroque Players. But it was hard not to wonder why it is that when those associated with the Catholic Church want to lay on something wonderful, they do not choose a specially-commissioned Mass to be sung by a lemur, two bedsprings and an old vacuum cleaner, accompanied by toenail clipper in C major, all to be performed in the newly constructed church of St John Lennon in which everyone, including the bishops, sit in deckchairs smoking dope and being agreeable to one another to the background strains of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely' Heart's Club Band, but instead reach into that vast repertoire of music which the church has done so much to ignore, and to present it in a classically constructed church according to classical prescriptions.
Champion of great music
The healthy hand of Ite O'Donovan was at work in the performance last Sunday, though I did not see herself there. Ite was for years the light that championed the great music of the Catholic Church when the encircling gloom of electric guitars and tambourines threatened to engulf it in darkness. Two of the main protagonists on Sunday - Paul Brady, a quite wonderful and sturdy bass, and John O'Keeffe, the inspirational musical director, owed much of their musical education to her during her tenure at the Pro-Cathedral.
But it would be an injustice to mention just those two, for the other soloists - an ebullient, confident Cara O'Sullivan, the marvellously strong and certain Deirdre Cooling-Nolan and the movingly lyrical James Nelson all contributed to a night in which even the staunchest atheist must have been caused to ponder mortality after a performance of such stunning musicality.
Composers are moved to their best by death. There is not a single dull note, not a dreary hemi-semi-demi-quaver in Verdi's Requiem. It demands a lot of its performers - orchestral as well as choral and solo - but it remains one of the most deeply satisfying yet still frightening items in the Christian musical canon, concluding with the awesomely bold soprano solo from Cara O'Sullivan, and ending in the words which most of us hope accompany us at the moment of death and which need no translation from the Latin - libera me.