Toscanini, when backstage at the old Metropolitan Opera House, was said to have knocked off the hat of a stage hand. It has been a long time, perhaps since Bruno Walter, that a permanent resident conductor in New York seemed to be at one with this notion of the sublime and the spiritual in music. Its message, lying beyond words, is indeed holy, as the composer expressly believed and affirmed in letters and conversation.
or Hölderlin’s Holy Being! These words, revered for centuries, have lost much of their dignity, have become awkward in our time, partly through the use and abuse of televangelists and gurus of the self-help industry, but how can one talk of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony without such words? The Symphony is, indeed, sublime. For centuries Germanic poets, novelists, philosophers, and political figures used and celebrated the words “sublime,” and “holy,” and “spiritual.” One is reminded of Kant’s On the Sublime and Beautiful, for example, or Goethe’s Song of the Spirits over the Waters.
The same might be said of words, as they change their meaning with the passing of time, and are often susceptible to falling out of fashion, even out of respectability. “Women are fickle,” sings the Duke of Mantua.
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