This morning I listened to Andrea Bocelli sing The Lord's Prayer, accompanied by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It set me wondering about musical versions of the Lord's Prayer, and in particular any Renaissance compositions. Then thinking more widely, I wondered about other choral versions, black spirituals, jazz, and whether it might be interesting to gather as many as I could find and explore the recption of this text within musical forms. So that's what I will do as a small sideline interest for a while.
As a starting point I have tracked down a CD with 24 tracks, all from varied musical styles, historical contexts and with variations in the rendering of the text. It will be intriguing to listen to the same words and ideas, in different languages and compositions, offering the same prayer. This of course is a classical CD. Other musical styles will have their offerings – I have for example Elvis singing the Lord's Prayer accompanied by the London Philharmonic!
One of the more interesting pieces is by Verdi, to an Italian text, O Padre Nostro. You can hear it here The music is set to a text which has many resonances, indeed verbal parallels, with Canto 11 of Dante's Purgatorio. Verdi was a passionate nationalist, and the treatment of the Lord's Prayer in Italian, with unmistakable links to Italy's greatest poet, was neither accidental nor insignificant as an example of how a prayer is received, interpreted and its spiritual power exploited in a culture deeply Catholic and self-consciously protective of its new national identity. The piece was composed in 1880, only a decade after the unification of Italy.
One of major areas of interest in New Testament studies today is the way texts have been recieved, and then the impact of those texts on those whop read, heard, sang or visualised them through the creative arts. The Lord's Prayer is a central text in New Testament accounts of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, it is a text which along with the creed and the 10 commandments is seen as a pillar in dogmatic theology, often written as A Body of Divinity. I am not aware of work having been done on how the Pater Noster has been expresed, expounded, celebrated in music.
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