Tradition is the extension of democracy through time. It is the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn. “Tradition may be defined as the extension of the franchise,” wrote Chesterton. “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” And he continues: “Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death…. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition.”
We could go further than this by insisting that tradition, the democracy of the dead, is always fully alive. This is evident once we realize that the phrase “living tradition” is a tautology. Tradition is always living because it can’t be anything else without ceasing to be itself. A tradition is something which has been done for a long time and is still being done. Those in the present who practise tradition are honouring the proxy of the dead but they are also enfranchising the unborn by passing on the living flame, the torch of tradition, to future generations. Tradition is, therefore, not about the past, except in the honouring of it, but about the present and the future. This is why the Great Books are not dead texts from the distant past but living voices in the Great Conversation which animates the present and empowers the future.
And what is true of the canon of Great Books is also true of the canon of Great Music. Gregorian chant continues to grace the sacred liturgy and man’s worship of God, as does polyphony. The great composers are a living presence in the ears of all except the deaf. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner. The very names of these giants are like music to the cultured and the civilized of all generations. They continue to sing and we continue to sing their praises. The halls are alive with the sound of their music!
The same cannot be said of those who have sought to abandon tradition in pursuit of iconoclastic novelty. Discordance and atonality have had their day. Who listens to the faddish and fashionable composers who were so “new” in their day and yet so old before their days had ended? Who listens to those whose works are dead because they were themselves never really alive?
In the wake of this transience and trivia, there remains the living tradition, not merely of the old masters who are still revered but of the new masters who are being revealed in new works that are alive and fresh in the present because they honour and respect the past. The most prominent of these living and fully alive composers is Michael Kurek, whose praises I have sung in the past and will continue to praise in the future. The magic and majesty of his second symphony, which was entitled “Tales from the Realm of Faerie”, was inspired by the secondary worlds of fairyland, including Middle-earth and Narnia. His new Third Symphony, or “English Symphony”, takes the primary world of England as its creative wellspring. Yet it follows inspirationally on the heels of its predecessor because there is something mystical and magical about the England that Kurek invokes, which is evident in the title of each of the four movements: “Upon a Walk in the English Countryside”, “Stonehenge”, “The Lady of Shalott”, and “The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest”. Each of these movements evokes the mystique of Merrie England; its timeless landscape; its ancient and mysterious past stretching beyond the very dawn of history; its Arthurian myths and its legendary heroes. Such an England is itself a fairyland, a mystic realm where history and fantasy meet. There is, therefore, a unity between the Second and Third Symphonies, which can be said to be one in wonder.
Michael Kurek is clearly at home in the realm of faerie. His ballet, Raffaella, which premiered last summer in South Bend, Indiana, evokes the tradition of classic fairytale ballets, such as Giselle and The Sleeping Beauty. Inspired by the life and tragic death of the young ballerina Raffaella Stroik, this full-length ballet follows the theme of life, death and resurrection and seeks to embody her motto, “Beauty will save the world”. The video of the premiere performance in South Bend was released earlier this month on YouTube and was viewed 21,000 times in only two weeks.
Although Michael Kurek might be the preeminent presence in a new tradition-oriented musical revival, he is not alone. In August 2023, at the Palace Theatre in Stamford, Connecticut, a tragic opera in three acts, Gracchus, by David Hughes (Composer) and Richard Munkelt (Librettist) received its world premiere. Set in ancient Rome in 121BC, and adapting the story of Gaius Gracchus, as told and immortalized by Plutarch, the opera serves as a thinly-veiled allegory that speaks to the crises of our own times. It is, according to Hughes and Munkelt, “both a political allegory and a religious commentary vis a vis western civilization as we find it today”. Explaining the use of pagan settings to convey Christian truths, they stress that they are following the example of literary classics, such as Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings, in employing pre-Christian means to profoundly orthodox Christian ends.
The “tragic strain” that Hughes and Munkelt describe as being their teacher and guide is, they say, “constitutive of various epic tales that have nourished the operatic imagination”. These include the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes and Shakespeare. As for their great musical forebears, they acknowledge Wagner, particularly his Parsifal, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for its pioneering place in the history of opera as political allegory, and “the remarkable Armide of Gluck, so admired by Wagner”.
Although excerpts from the premiere performance of Gracchus are available online, a full recording of the whole work does not appear to be presently available. Thankfully, however, the whole of Munkelt’s libretto has been published by Arouca Press. Unlike most operatic libretti, it stands alone in its own right as a good narrative poem, well worth reading even without the musical accompaniment for which it was written. In addition, the book’s preface by Hughes and Munkelt, from which I have been quoting, is itself a splendid apologia for the living tradition of western civilization and “for all the good things that our Christendom brings” (to quote Belloc). And to quote Hughes and Munkelt, “through the millennia, from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare, but not excluding the noteworthy achievements of the more recent past (think of Melville and Messiaen), the traditional arts have been incomparable for their vivid and penetrating exploration of the character of man and his odyssey”.
If true art is the offering of a true sacrifice, the giving back to the Giver of the gift the fruits of the gift given, we can say truly that the new traditional works of Kurek, Hughes and Munkelt are true votive offerings to the Giver of their gifts. Such votive offerings are to the living democracy of the dead what mere votes are to the dead democracy of the dying. In the presence of such offerings, which are the very breath of a living culture and a culture of life, we should offer our own humble offerings of prayerful gratitude.
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The featured image is “Ballet at the Paris Opéra” (1877) by Edgar Degas, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
