The Music of Fear

Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham

Readings: Isaiah 28:9-22 and 2 Corinthians 8:1-9

Sunday 17 August 2025 – 4:30pm

Due to technical issues, unfortunately there is no video of this Sermon.

On an unfortunate night in January 1936, Joseph Stalin went for a night out at the new Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.  The Soviet dictator often attended opera and ballet, and his choice, the opera Lady Macbeth, by the famous young star of Soviet composition, Dmitri Shostakovich, had been a smash hit, with 83 performances in the composer’s home city of Leningrad and 94 in Moscow to date, not to mention foreign productions.  Shostakovich was there in the audience that evening too, having been officially ordered to attend.  He couldn’t see Stalin from where he was sitting, but he could see his two companions, members of the Politburo, who flanked him in his steel-armoured box.  He watched them shudder when the brass played fortissimo, laughing as they turned to Stalin, and hid in the depths of his own box, covering his face with his hands.

Shostakovich’s opera was not to Stalin’s tastes, and the vitriolic article that was subsequently printed in Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, under the title “Muddle instead of Music”, though presumably not written by Stalin himself, was a direct expression of his views. Under Stalin, genuine, simple art was demanded.  “From the first moment of the opera,” the anonymous author wrote, “the listener is flabbergasted by the deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds.”  Shostakovich, the review concluded ominously, was playing a game that “may end very badly”.

This year marks 50 years since Shostakovich’s death in 1975, and his Fifth Symphony, which was performed last night in London at the Proms by the Aurora orchestra, was Shostakovich’s response to Stalin and his attempt, after being so publicly discredited, and his reputation destroyed, to regain official approval.  The symphony is full of military heroism, pandering seemingly to the demands of the regime, but, in the slow movement, the Largo, at its heart, it also expresses fear.  Sounds like sobs, lonely cries in the night, calls for help, even a kind of insistent begging for mercy- four loud, repeated notes high on the violins- fill the air.    Added to this is a musical allusion to Mussorgsky’s setting of the words “Flow, flow, bitter tears, weep, O soul of the Orthodox faithful”.   These are heard again at the end of the movement, and the two final chords, as the music critic Alex Ross points out, are a kind of “Amen”- “a significant gesture from an atheist composer” (The Rest is Noise, 2008, p.256).

In Church, in the context of Choral Evensong, we often speak of music as being the language of heaven, that lifts our prayer up to God.  We tend to assume that music full of inherent spiritual goodness.  Music soothes us, we say, and gives us spiritual peace.  But the Shostakovich anniversary and performance this weekend reminds us that it can be more complicated than that.  It’s unclear, in the Fifth Symphony, whether Shostakovich was writing it to rehabilitate his reputation and curry favour with the regime, or whether it was a cleverly veiled act of dissent.  Music can be used for less than uplifting purposes, seemingly to defend evil regimes, as well as uplifting ones, and in music, as in any other area of human endeavour, loyalties can be divided or compromised.  By the same token, music is not a form of escapism from the harsh realities of life.  It can express the depths of human suffering as well as the heights of divine harmony and perfection.  In lifting up our hearts to heaven, in beautiful surroundings such as these and being filled with awe, we bring our whole selves, with all our fears and insecurities, into God’s presence.  We come with our mixed motivations, our hopes and our fears, the complexities of our lives and situations, the discords and dissonances as well as the consonances.

In Choral Evensong, we’re never far from the language of lament.  At the heart of the service is the Psalms, the great prayer book of the Bible.  In today’s psalm, part of Psalm 119 sung by the choir, the psalmist writes, “I am a stranger upon earth”.  He begs for God’s mercy, for God’s life-giving word that isn’t just a set of rules, but is the mode of God’s life-giving presence.  The psalmist looks to others, to the proud who prosper, but he himself feels only “shame and rebuke”.  Instead of experiencing peace, he’s faced only with his own human fears and weaknesses, his own particular spiritual demons that taunt him perhaps.  In desperation, he turns to God for comfort.

In the canticles, we experience this same mixture of desolation and consolation.  There’s the apprehension yet resoluteness of Mary in the Magnificat; the bleakness of waiting and fulfilment of longing of the Nunc dimittis.   The words and music of today’ service, not least in the psalms, express human fallenness, sorrow for sin, anger, remorse, jealousy, envy, and pride, as well as rejoicing in God as the source of light, life, joy and delight. They reflect the same mixture of emotions and human motivations that we bring to prayer today.

For St Paul, writing to the Corinthians, affliction is part of our human experience.  The Corinthian Christians he’s writing to seem to think, as we might as well, that great Christian leaders should be impressive, forceful, strong personalities, high-powered, eloquent and confident.  Yet Paul’s own near-death experience convinces him that suffering and death are integral parts of the ongoing process of salvation.  Death, he believes passionately, is at work in the believer as well as life.  The fact that weaker, more afflicted Christians from Macedonia so far have contributed more to the collection of money to support the weaker Christian communities that Paul has instigated, than the supposedly stronger, more Spirit-filled Corinthian Christians perfectly demonstrates this point. God’s power is displayed, not by obliterating or leaving behind human weakness, but precisely in human weakness.  To embrace weakness and potentially make ourselves vulnerable by reaching out to others in an even more parlous state is a risk, but it connects us with Christ who, in the words of today’s reading, “though he was rich, but for your sakes he became poor”.

“Fear was all around,” Shostakovich later recalled of the time that followed the Pravda review, that destroyed the career he’d built up to that point.  1936, the year of the review, marked the beginning of Stalin’s great terror, in which members of Shostakovich’s own family were imprisoned or killed.  Former friends and colleagues deserted him.  The sense of isolation and fear, in parts of his Fifth Symphony, reflects the torment that, throughout the decades to come, never fully left the composer.   Yet, despite its seeming contradictions, and multiple levels of meaning, and the mixed reactions its first performance provoked, some of its first hearers sensed a strength in the music that had the effect, at least for a little while, of taking away their own fear.  To them, the music communicated vulnerability and determination.

As a young person, Shostakovich was very ill, an experience he found overwhelming.  “Darkness surrounds me”, he wrote, “Sometimes I just want to shout, to cry out in terror.  Doubts and problems, all this darkness suffocates me.  From sheer misery, I have started to compose…”  The music of fear, be it from the atheist composer Shostakovich, or the impassioned pleading with God of the psalmist, or the faith-filled stricken yet not crushed writings of Paul, are of their time, yet they speak across the ages to us today.  To listen to the words and the music of grief inspires us, giving us hope that our lament- and that of others- will be heard.  In a world where the language of lament is often forgotten or suppressed, music and prayer reinvigorate us and challenge us too, making us face up to the forces of death that threaten to destroy us and our fellow human beings.