Good Friday

Good afternoon.

It's Good Friday so I went to church.  Sat with three other hens.  Made a lunch date with one of them.

The service was a wonderful one. It's odd that though I don't really 'like' Good Friday, I am always glad I went. The music was beautiful and the service, though it lasted for almost an hour and a half, simply sailed by in the lovely sounds of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ.

There was a choir of four and an orchestra of four. The singers were soprano, alto, tenor and baritone. The instruments were 2 violins, a viola, and a cello. Altogether they were a beautifully blended mixture of rich sound. All singers are excellent.

There were prayers, with enough standing and sitting to satisfy even my range-of-motion demands. And the Bishop gave four (or was it three) fine meditations at intervals.

The Seven Last Words of Christ by Haydn, though fraught with the stark tragedy of the worst day of the Christian year, is a beautiful piece of music to listen to.  It is never lugubrious.  And before you smile, believe me. It's possible for the finest intentions to become lugubrious.  I have received many communications on the Internet regarding the nature of dogs, that were quite lugubrious.  And if it is awful to be lugubrious about dogs and such, it is worse to be so about our Creator.  And I get those too.  I just don't send them on to other misfortunate readers with the threat of grave bodily harm if people don't send them on.

The Seven Last Words are quite brief, even as augmented by the librettist. I wonder if it was Haydn.  The music--flows.  That is the only word for it.  It is just beautiful and the flow is not stopped by the glottals (if that is the word I want) of German.  That is all imagined anyway, the glottal part.  German is a beautiful language, and this piece couldn't have been written in a lovelier.

That is all I wanted to say.  It isn't a requiem, so it is okay that I went to it. Yes. YAZZYBEL