Continuing last week’s discussion, about programming music only tangentially related to the Advent/Christmas season: we will sing The Deer’s Cry by Arvo Pärt on our coming concerts. Of all the modern composers whose output is included under the rubric “Holy Minimalism,” he intrigues me the most. Chorale has sung many of his pieces, from throughout his career, and I have wanted to add this one (composed in 2007) since I first became aware of it. It looks straightforward when first encountered; but Pärt orders his materials in a transformative way that eludes description. The more we work on the piece, the more profound, and difficult, it becomes.
Pärt begins with the familiar “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” prayer of protection, or “lorica,” thought to have originated in the early eighth century, and traditionally attributed to St. Patrick. The original prayer has ten verses; Pärt sets only two of them. In modern English, they read:
8. Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
9. Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks to me,
Christ in the eye of every man that sees me,
Christ in the ear of every man that hears me.
The prayer's title is given as Faeth Fiada in the 11th-century Liber Hymnorum that records the text. This has been translated as “The Deer's Cry" by Middle Irish popular etymology, but it is more likely a term for a "spell of concealment." A later version of the Liber Hymnorum (1898) describes the prayer like this:
Saint Patrick sang this when an ambush was laid against his coming by Loegaire, that he might not go to Tara to sow the faith. And then it appeared before those lying in ambush that they (Saint Patrick and his monks) were wild deer with a fawn following them.
I imagine Pärt banking on the familiarity of the text in its well-known Anglican version, when he composed his setting of the text (in English). His listeners would expect the upbeat, uncomplicated melody to which they were accustomed. What a surprise, instead, to hear a dark, foreboding exposition of the text, with many moments of silence and a furtive, secretive, endangered quality, eerily mirroring the Liber’s description. This setting pictures the endangered Christ of the flight to Egypt, rather than a triumphant king—and by extension, a frightening, threatening world, in which it is an act of profound faith to trust in the words of the prayer.
Most of the composers on our program picture the savior of the world as small, weak, and vulnerable. Pärt succeeds through his setting in suggesting that the subjects of the prayer, the ones doing the praying, embody that vulnerability. Like Bach, he is both composer and theologian.