I so love Messiah. I have a new recording of it as staged opera. It is a personal story of suffering and redemption. By “Theater an der Wien.” It’s quite magnificent. I offer free library service for classic art & music on disc by the way.
Here is my new year reference as a New Year gift. It is from Beethoven’s 9th, Ode to Joy. Beautiful full HD via YouTube. I got the reference as a New Year gift from the Peoples World, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBaHPND2QJg
(if this is not a live link, just enter it in your browser. You’ll be glad you did.)
Robert, the valleys and mountains, and the rough places a plain or level place are so clearly metaphors for the coming of economic just. “And the rich he sent empty away,” but those of “low degree” are lifted up and the hungry are filled. The hearer or listener is transported into a vision and hope that can only be voice and heard in poetry. It is the day of the lion and the lamb, the end of violence and sorrow, the end of the disparities of the sated and the sorrowful. Josef Hromadka, Czech theologian and “father of Christian-Marxist Dialogue” during the Cold War, always said that the failure of the church to embrace this daunting calling was spawning ground for atheism. In Russia there were, on the one hand, the Tsar and the Church, and, on the other, the peasants, the poor, the suffering who were abandoned by both powers and authorities. Hromadka called for the church to confess its sin of abandoning the vision and hope of the kingdom, and saw in communism the re-awakening of the original grand hope for the coming of the Kingdom OF God. Hromadka was a guest professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary during the 30s and 40s. My father studied under this much beloved man on his way to ordination. When the USSR overtook his home country of Czechoslovakia in 1948, he disappointed and angered many of his friends and colleagues by returning home to engage in the dialogue to create a more humane and human society.
Thanks for the link. So interesting and rather mind-blowing that the newspaper of the Communist Party USA would choose Beethoven’s 9th as a New Year gift. I’ll listen with new ears.
Views from the Edge 
I so love Messiah. I have a new recording of it as staged opera. It is a personal story of suffering and redemption. By “Theater an der Wien.” It’s quite magnificent. I offer free library service for classic art & music on disc by the way.
Here is my new year reference as a New Year gift. It is from Beethoven’s 9th, Ode to Joy. Beautiful full HD via YouTube. I got the reference as a New Year gift from the Peoples World, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBaHPND2QJg
(if this is not a live link, just enter it in your browser. You’ll be glad you did.)
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Robert, the valleys and mountains, and the rough places a plain or level place are so clearly metaphors for the coming of economic just. “And the rich he sent empty away,” but those of “low degree” are lifted up and the hungry are filled. The hearer or listener is transported into a vision and hope that can only be voice and heard in poetry. It is the day of the lion and the lamb, the end of violence and sorrow, the end of the disparities of the sated and the sorrowful. Josef Hromadka, Czech theologian and “father of Christian-Marxist Dialogue” during the Cold War, always said that the failure of the church to embrace this daunting calling was spawning ground for atheism. In Russia there were, on the one hand, the Tsar and the Church, and, on the other, the peasants, the poor, the suffering who were abandoned by both powers and authorities. Hromadka called for the church to confess its sin of abandoning the vision and hope of the kingdom, and saw in communism the re-awakening of the original grand hope for the coming of the Kingdom OF God. Hromadka was a guest professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary during the 30s and 40s. My father studied under this much beloved man on his way to ordination. When the USSR overtook his home country of Czechoslovakia in 1948, he disappointed and angered many of his friends and colleagues by returning home to engage in the dialogue to create a more humane and human society.
Thanks for the link. So interesting and rather mind-blowing that the newspaper of the Communist Party USA would choose Beethoven’s 9th as a New Year gift. I’ll listen with new ears.
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May its metaphorical meaning come closer to fruition in 2013.
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