SYMPHONY OF FATE
It was summer. Finishing a meal on the eve of Sunday, I happened to turn on the radio and that is when a well-known melody overwhelmed us. A colleague next to me threw in: ‘This is ‘the Schicksals symphonie’, L. Van Beethoven’s Symphony of Fate.’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and the first movement.’ We turned up the radio and none of the people around the table could tear themselves away from the melody. After some time, the colleague turned off the light, and in the glow of the evening coming in through the window, we completely surrendered to the captivating melody.
The powerful first movement, elaborated with the sounds of various instruments, touched our hearts, which had already relaxed on their annual vacation and longed to be bathed in the beauty of music and art.
When the first movement was finished, we were afraid that it was the end. But then the second one started, and we became one breath, turned into one ear, felt how melody after melody conquers us, how the instruments touch our hearts one after the other, that there are long longings and memories awakened in us, and we became new, washed, happy. I glanced at the people around the table and saw how relaxed they were. Some closed their eyes and enjoyed the source that emanated from the music of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
While I was sitting perfectly calm and relaxed like that, taking care not to make any movement to spoil the mood that was created in us listening to dramatic classical music, I began to remember what the melodies of this symphony were telling me. I remembered the professor from the Archbishop’s Classical High School in Zagreb who told us how Beethoven lived in poverty as a boy because his father was an alcoholic. He never married, although he loved deeply. He suffered from poverty, he had to move from one apartment to another, because people could not stand the blows of his fingers on the keys of the piano. He used to experience children throwing stones and bricks through his window to stop the flow of his melodies that he played on the piano. He did not notice it at all because he was so deeply immersed in inspiration and writing compositions. He realized that he was becoming deaf, experienced disappointments, fell into crises, depressions, torments and found himself on the edge of the abyss, wanting to kill himself. That is what our professor used to say. And then, he said, Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony and incorporated into it all the suffering he experienced. In that symphony, it was as if he left behind death and destruction and opened a small window and saw the light that entered through it and thus saved his life.
That is when we fell in love with Beethoven and his Fifth Symphony. Now it was inscribing itself even more deeply into my heart and feelings. As the melody of the second movement developed into an increasingly dramatic cry, I remembered Beethoven’s biography written by the French writer Romain Rolland. He described Beethoven as a strong person, as a genius whose light spread throughout the Western world, conquering, and saving people. He saw in him a Prometheus who was so attached to his deafness, loneliness, and desert, that he could fall into the abyss of suicide due to suffering, but he always found the strength to pour all of that into notes through inspiration.
Suffering purifies man. Sufferers get to the root of human life and know how to bring to light the most beautiful things that life and human history have to offer and be happy that they were able to give gifts to others with their hands full and leave behind lights and trails for others to follow.
Nothing relaxes like good music after a walk and rest. There is healing with music. Deliverance from solitude. It is enough to pick up a piece of classical music, start listening to it and you will already feel that the whole world is with you, that the brotherhood of all people has entered your room, that it is beautiful to be man and that you have the strength to live, to give yourself, to reveal yourself, to write, to think and to live like that. Because music touches those parts of man that would otherwise be left to depression, self-pity, hatred, and destructive passions. Music, especially classical music, heals, revives, calls you back from wrong paths, turns hatred into love and wants to embrace all people and create a new world.
Whoever knows how to listen to music, the one that came out of suffering, from the transformation of people – those who passed from death to life, who came from darkness to light, who managed to find the strength to rise from the suffering of hell to heaven, will never be unhappy, bored and will always find ways to endure attacks, pain, defeat, and disappointment.
Prayer and music go together. Whoever learns to listen to music well, will have to start praying. He who prays well will lack music to pray even better. It is no wonder that the most classical music was developed in the Church, that theaters and concert halls became temples of classical music, which means cultural transcendence. Music carries us on its wings into the boundless, and there a prayer is born that, embraced by music, enter the presence of God to bring us back with ennobled hearts, fertilized reason, with the strength for a new life. You need to pray to listen to music and you need to listen to music a lot to learn to pray well.
If we are too tired, we cannot neither listen to music nor pray.
Then we will feel that we are immortal.
For today’s meditation, we recommend listening to:
The book excerpt from: Remain Upright by Tomislav Ivančić
He was born in Davor in 1938. After studying philosophy and theology in Zagreb and Rome, he was ordained a priest of the Zagreb Archdiocese in 1966. After achieving a master’s degree in philosophy and a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, he returned to Zagreb in 1971, where he became a professor at the Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb. He is the head of the Chair of Fundamental Theology, and was one of the editors of the Theological Review. Areas of his scientific work are philosophy, theology and literature. He explores the relationship between philosophy and theology, faith and science, atheism and religiosity, revelation and faith, the Church and ecclesial communities, Christianity and religion, the phenomenon of sects and issues of theological epistemology. His special field of interest is the study of man’s existential-spiritual dimension, where he discovers the way of modern evangelization and the necessity of the development of spiritual medicine, which, along with somatic and psychological, is indispensable in the complete healing of man, especially in the healing of spiritual diseases and addictions. For this purpose, he developed the method of hagiotherapy and founded in 1990 in Zagreb the Center for Spiritual Help, of which he is the head. From 1971, in addition to working at the faculty, he was a student religious teacher in Zagreb, the initiator of the prayer movement within the Church of the Croats, the founder of a religious society called the Prayer and Word Community(MiR), and the leader of numerous seminars for spiritual renewal and evangelization at home and abroad. After completing his studies and scientific doctorate in fundamental theology at … (Read more at https://hagio.hr/tomislav-ivancic/).