“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”
– Homer, Odyssey
GENESIS 2:21-25
21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
ST. FRANCIS’S PRAYER OF DESIRE
Therefore, let us desire nothing else, let us want nothing else, let nothing else please us and cause us delight except you our Creator, Redeemer and Savior, the only true God, Who is the fullness of good, all good, every good, the true and supreme good, Who alone is good, merciful, gentle, delightful, and sweet, Who alone is holy, just, true, holy, and upright, Who alone is kind, innocent, clean, from Whom, through Whom and in Whom is all pardon, all grace, all glory of all penitents and just ones, of all the blessed rejoicing together in heaven. Amen.
ART APPRECIATION
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Tiepolo painted this as an altarpiece for a church in Padua, Italy.
1
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) is considered one of the greatest painters in eighteenth-century Europe. His art celebrates the imagination by taking history, myths, and Scripture and transposing them into a grand, theatrical scene. His greatest works are considered to be the frescoed ceilings he painted for churches and palaces throughout Europe.
2
MUSIC APPRECIATION
| Requiem in D minor, Op. 48: IV. “Pie Jesu” |
At its simplest, ‘Pie Jesu’ is just two lines of text from the final couplet of the Latin hymn ‘Dies irae’: Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem (sempiternam). Which translates as: Merciful Jesus Grant them rest (everlasting).
When Gabriel Fauré fell in love with the couplet and used it in his Requiem (1887 – 1890), his friend Camille Saint-Saëns said: “Just as Mozart’s is the only ‘Ave verum corpus’, this is the only ‘Pie Jesu’”. Fauré might have composed one of the most famous settings of the couplet, but composers have been setting ‘Pie Jesu’ to music ever since.
3
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was a composer whose refined and gentle music influenced the course of modern French music. Although he had deep respect for the traditional forms of music, Fauré delighted in infusing those forms with a mélange of harmonic daring and a freshness of invention. One of the most striking features of his style was his fondness for daring harmonic progressions and sudden modulations, invariably carried out with supreme elegance and a deceptive air of simplicity. His quiet and unspectacular revolution prepared the way for more sensational innovations by the modern French school. 4
- Lange, Krista, and Leigh Lowe. First Grade Enrichment: Classical Core Curriculum. Teacher Guide. Memoria Press, 2017. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- “What Are the Lyrics to ‘Pie Jesu’?” Classic FM, Classic FM, 18 Sept. 2023, http://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/pie-jesu-lyrics-facts/.
↩︎ - “Gabriel Fauré.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., http://www.britannica.com/biography/Gabriel-Faure. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025. ↩︎
Providence School of Tifton 