Batter My Heart 1 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

My across-the-street neighbor, violinist Pia Liptak, had to prepare and play Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 while her colleague and close friend—the young, internationally acclaimed Japanese koto player Ryuko Mizutani—was dying of cancer.

Listening to the CD of Pia’s performance, I hear in it the depth of heartbreak she was living through. Pia and Ryuko had performed often together as the Duo vio-LINK-oto. At their concerts, I loved the exotically delicate sounds that would come from this rare combination of instruments, this rare duo of resonant sensibilities. And now the duo’s sounds are “swept away like a dream,” as Psalm 90 poignantly puts it.

During the same time period of Ryuko’s final illness, Pia’s husband—the composer and Eastman School of Music Professor David Liptak—sent me an email about a new opera he’d seen. (Yes, we live across the street and usually have our conversations on one sidewalk or the other, but email can be handy, too.)

What struck David about this opera was its way of expressing suffering through art, and he emailed me his thoughts in response to an essay I’d written several years ago for Image (“Why We Need the Arts in Time of War” in Image #32, Fall, 2001). David had actually been one of my consultants for writing this essay, which was a response to 9/11; but something my husband had recently said in a sidewalk chat had returned David to the essay. With David’s permission, I’m going to quote from his email:

“When you wrote about your traveling to Los Alamos, I thought about John Adams’s new opera Doctor Atomic, which I saw in one of the Met HD live broadcasts at Tinseltown [local movie theater].... I think this opera is terrific in all ways—musical, dramatic, monumental, etc. The bomb is the star of the show (the story line recounts the two days leading up to and then testing the first atomic bomb in the desert), although the drama derives from the conflict and ambivalence that is the experience of the scientists, and especially Oppenheimer. The end of the first Act (there are two) is an aria on John Donne's "Batter My Heart":

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;

Oppenheimer, for his solace, read poetry during the time he knew he was handing over to humanity the fierce gift of the bomb, and among his favorites was John Donne. But

Yet dearely’I love you,’ and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee

points to art’s additional power to allow for experience of suffering (or guilt) in a transformative way.”

Pia playing Bruch’s concerto sounded battered: by life, by death, by the shattering mystery of it all. Yet through her performer’s art of getting deep inside Bruch’s art, the battering was transformed into beauty—without lessening the battering itself. She hadn’t sought out God’s battering as Donne does in this most famous of his Holy Sonnets. But art, as for Donne, gave her a container for the otherwise overwhelming flood of emotion. Art gave Pia, Bruch, David, Oppenheimer, and Donne all a medium for shaping and holding on to the blows that life (and death) brings.

Oppenheimer needed art while he was making an instrument of inconceivable mass death. Art expressed his profound and tragic ambivalence about what he was doing. Pia’s instrument (and how interesting that we use the same word, “instrument,” for the means of any production, including music) allowed her to express a tragic loss that she’d had no hand in bringing about. Yet art—God’s gift of creativity to the creatures He has created in his image—was where both turned in search of a healing sense of it all.