LOOK: Easter Morning by Caspar David Friedrich
I got to see this painting in person when I was in Madrid in 2018, and boy, what a beauty! Caspar David Friedrich was the leading painter of German Romanticism, exploring the spiritual and emotional connections between humanity and nature.
His Easter Morning shows a winding, tree-lined path at early dawn as winter gives way to spring, the leaves just starting to appear on the branches. Three women wrapped in shawls step onto the path, joining others who are making their way to church to worship the risen Lord. Although this is a contemporary scene, the women evoke the three devoted Marys of scripture who got up early one momentous Sunday morning to visit Jesus’s tomb.
LISTEN: All-Night Vigil, op. 37, no. 13: “Dnes spaseniye” by Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1915 | Performed by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, dir. Graham Ross, on Haec dies: Music for Easter, 2016
Dnes spaseniye miru byst,
poyem voskresshemu iz groba
i nachalniku zhizni nasheya:
razrushiv bo smertiyu smert,
pobedu dade nam i veliyu milost.English translation:
Today salvation has come to the world.
Let us sing to him who rose from the dead,
the Author of our life.
Having destroyed death by death,
he has given us the victory and great mercy.
Celebrated as one of the greatest musical achievements of the Russian Orthodox Church, Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil (Всенощное бдение / Vsénoshchnoye bdéniye) is an a cappella choral composition that sets texts from the All-Night Vigil, a liturgical service sung the evening before a major feast, including Pascha, the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord. The work premiered in Moscow in March 1915 with the all-male Moscow Synodal Choir and was warmly received but soon after, in 1917, was suppressed, like all church music, by the new Soviet government. For this reason, it didn’t become known in the West until the 1960s.
A troparion inviting meditation on the exalted mystery of the Resurrection, “Today Salvation Has Come” (Днесь спасеніе / Dnes spaseniye) is the thirteenth of the piece’s fifteen movements. It draws on the znamenny style of chant.
Art & Theology 