The singular appeal of many voices

Michael Steinberg’s new “Choral Masterworks: A Listener’s Guide” may be the most personal of the three guides he’s written for Oxford University Press (the others are “The Symphony” and “The Concerto”).

“My experience with all this sacred and liturgical music goes back close to 60 years,” says Steinberg, formerly the music critic of the Boston Globe and a onetime program annotator for the New York Philharmonic, among other orchestras. “When I was at Princeton, they had compulsory chapel. One of the ways of escaping that was if you were in the choir, you could fulfill the attendance requirement and also get paid for going -- and have all this musical experience too.

“I was a voiceless baritone but always welcome in the chorus because I had good rhythm and good pitch.”

Steinberg was also, as he calls himself, “a religion-loving atheist,” which raises another personal matter that he addresses in an introductory essay titled “Sacred Texts in a Secular World: A Word to Nonbelievers -- and Believers.”

“It’s come up literally in the form of questions from other people,” he says. “ ‘You’re not a Christian. Can you describe or define your relationship to this music?’

“Even now, I’ve had people expressing surprise that I’ve done a book on choral music, of which a large percent would be liturgical or sacred, or semi-sacred. I thought it would help me clear up my thoughts if I made myself sit down and get them in order.”

Steinberg is the first to admit that no guidebook can address everything. (“Choral Masterworks” covers about four dozen works.)

“I got a fax from Alfred Brendel in London asking, ‘Where are the Schubert Masses?’ ” he says. “Where are a lot of things I wish were there? One thing is, Oxford wanted a relatively short book, not more than 300 pages. It was a marketing issue.

“There were certain things you can’t not have -- Bach’s B-minor Mass, Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ Beethoven’s ‘Missa Solemnis’ and so on. But I also wanted to do a little propaganda on behalf of works I think are beautiful and valuable and not enough known.”

Those include pieces by Luigi Dallapiccola (“Canti di prigonia”), Roger Sessions (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”), Ralph Vaughan Williams (“Sancta Civitas”) and Franz Schmidt (“Das Buch mit Sieben Siegeln”).

“Schmidt’s proved a real revelation, a tremendously new experience for me,” Steinberg says.

Excerpt

“My questions were the special preoccupations of a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, but I soon saw that larger issues were involved. Works of art and the works of artists did not exist in a protected vacuum; they were part of the fabric of life, and life is a mixed-up mess that gives us incredible richness and beauty and lovingkindness, but also Dachau and Golgotha. And having been pulled so powerfully, even violently, into the world of the ‘Saint Matthew Passion,’ I suddenly felt pushed out again: an outsider, a non-Christian, a person who had been expelled from German life, culture, and language, face to face with a work that had been composed solely to ‘incite listeners to devotion’ (in the words of Bach’s contract with the city of Leipzig).

“About the same time, I had the wonderful experience of learning the ‘Saint John Passion’ by singing in the chorus -- and there is no better way of possessing a piece of music than singing or playing it. Then I knew again that Bach’s Passions were addressed to me as well as to the parishioners of Saint Nicholas’s and Saint Thomas’s.”

-- Chris Pasles