February 3, 2009
Tuesday

When in some future time I shall sit in a madly crowded assembly with music and dancing around me, and the wish arises to retire into the loneliest of loneliness, I shall think of Iona.
— Felix Mendelssohn, 1809-1847
German composer who visited the Inner Hebrides in 1829

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn. Though he died before he was forty, he left a large body of work, including five symphonies, concerti for the piano, the violin, the viola, the cello, and the clarinet, chamber music, choral music including operas and oratorios, and concert overtures, including the wonderful Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal’s Cave.

Above you see a picture of the uninhabited island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides off the western coast of Scotland.  The entrance to Fingal’s Cave can be seen at the right. To give you some sense of the scale, consider that if you were standing there, that little whitecap wave at the left corner of the entrance would be over your head. I took this picture on May 19, 1990, during the two weeks that I spent on the sacred and magical Island of Iona, a much larger but still very small island (population about 125 people and lots of sheep) where I’d gone on a spiritual pilgrimage.

Reaching Iona is no easy matter, requiring a ferry ride from the mainland of Scotland to the island of Mull, a three-hour bus ride across Mull to its southern tip, and then a short ride in a stand-up-in-it open boat to the jetty on Iona. It is even more difficult to get to Staffa, more difficult still to enter the cave. You take that same open boat from Iona to a spot on the other side of the island, climb to the broad flat plain at the top and walk across, and then descend by a steep and narrow path to the entrance. The trip to the island can be accomplished only if wind and tide conditions are amenable. Descent to the cave and and the walk into its depths can be accomplished only if you have the courage and the will. This video captures the essence of the experience I had:

 

I first knew Mendelssohn’s overture my senior year in high school, in Music Appreciation, a three-days-a-week elective. Each week we studied a different composition, reading about it first from a three-hole-punched leaflet that had a brief biography of the composer, an explanation of how the piece fit into his canon as well as into the whole of classical music, and study questions that we answered on loose leaf paper that we filed in our binders with the leaflets. Then we heard a recording of the piece. There were only eight of us in the class, and one of them was the tall and handsome Michael Vergot, Number 30 on the basketball team, Number 1 in my heart, a devotion that had no utterance in a kiss but was expressed in a solid, reliable, and mutually supportive friendship, exactly the kind of friendship our teacher Father Haney advocated for us, one that would set the tone for all my future friendships with men.

Michael and I were both very drawn to the haunting Fingal’s Cave. We liked the mythology, the symbolism, the idea of Fingal the fair stranger (fhine gall), the hero of Irish folk tales, a hunter-warrior always on a journey. The piece was part of the program for the Harrisburg Symphony’s concert of March 9, 1965, which happened to be my eighteenth birthday. My parents were violinists in the orchestra and had season tickets for me and my sister. I was able to persuade them to let me invite Michael to use my sister’s ticket so we could hear this piece performed live. It was a magical night for me, and I can still tell you what I wore — a green rayon shift that had a long paisley print scarf  in swirls of orange and emerald and turquoise, an item that might even pass fashion muster today (seen at left in a publicity photo taken when I joined the Harrisburg Symphony). For two hours I got to sit beside this boy I liked so much, go out for something to eat afterward, and pretend I was his girlfriend.

I never hear Fingal’s Cave without thinking of Michael. I would play the piece myself at least twice in the fifteen years after high school that I was a violinist in the Harrisburg Symphony. When I undertook the pilgrimage to Iona I didn’t  know until I got there that the cave was so close and that you could actually go there. I thought it was part of Ireland. It’s not, and in reality, it’s not really part of Scotland either, although both islands lie within the governmental boundaries of that country. There is a thin line between heaven and earth there, and when you sail across the sapphire and amethyst water and enter the cave, you cross it.

During the time I was at Iona I worked with The Castle and the Pearl, a book designed to help me develop my personal mythology. One of the first exercises called for me to imagine a courtyard filled with all the people I have ever known, and then choose nine of them to come inside to a banquet. I was then to make speeches to each, saying what I have always wanted to say. I did the exercise of assembling The Nine the night before the trip to Staffa, and Michael was among them. I carried their names and their images with me to morning prayer and Eucharist at the Iona abbey, and later, when I walked into the cave and felt myself almost transfigured by the energy there, I scratched their initials into the ancient basalt. It was a sacred and intimate gesture, and I don’t think I ever told any of The Nine what I had done. When I learned in 2006 that Michael had died, one of the first images to flash into my mind was of my hand reaching up with a shard of rock to inscribe MLV into the mist-covered cave wall.

I’ve written a thousand words now. This piece started as a tribute to Felix Mendelssohn on his birthday, and I’ve wandered far from that subject. One of the things that drew me to Ron when I first met him was his love of orchestral  music and his prodigious knowledge of it. Sometimes our evenings are filled with music on the stereo. I’m organizing household accounts or folding laundry or performing some other mundane task. He is sitting serenely, listening to the music.

I asked him once what he thinks about when he just listens like that. He said that he pictures the orchestra on the stage, and when, say, the cellos or the clarinets come in, he sees the musicians put their instruments in position and raise their eyes to the conductor to catch his cue. Regarding the question as rather foolish and the answer self-evident, he asked me what I think about when I listen. Oh my goodness, I think about where I was and who I was with the first time I heard the piece, what was going on in my life when I played it or went to a concert to hear it or even bought a recording of it.  . . .  But when do you actually hear it, he wanted to know.

All the time.

Thank you Felix, and Michael, and the winds that swirl in and out of Fingal’s cave, and the energy of memory and longing that carried me along as I wrote these words.

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say hi?
To comment or to be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the bracketed parts with @ and a period) OR
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/silkentent